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Here is a list of P___'s peak experiences, and the patterns and learnings he's observed among them. A bright, thoughtful man, he's an accomplished artist and a successful high tech businessman, and a spiritually evolved and sensitive soul.

I'm thinking back to events in my past that now stand as high points or peak experiences resonating and showing me what matters. Whether it's the exhilaration of creative bursts or feelings of gratitude, these experiences taken together, interlace and provide new meaning. I want to share some of these with you as well as the themes that I can now extract and hopefully interpret.

The day I received the acceptance letter from graduate school was unforgettable.
I was informed that not only was I being accepted, but all of my financial needs
for the next two years would be covered as well. After eight years of night school,
working by day to support myself (as well as an art studio), the concept of being
free to work on ideas - to read and make art and talk to people and contemplate
was stunning. Imagine, I was going to be able to really pursue my ideas! Literally
jumping up and down for hours, I couldn't contain the rush of feeling. There was
the pure sense of accomplishment of years of hard work. There was the anticipation
of expanding my mind and the chance to jump-start a real art practice. And there was
a welling up of gratitude for what was happening.

While I was at graduate school there were many moments where I would step back from the work I was making in wonder, realizing where I was and what I was doing. In awe that in fact I was living a life of art making and study. There were other moments during this time where simply being in this beautiful (if strange) setting, with people who also cared deeply about their own practice, gave me an overwhelming sense that all was right with the world.

A year after leaving graduate school I had my first opening of a one-person show in
Santa Monica. I'd been living in Los Angeles. Constantly broke, spending all my time
and resources on projects, my life and energy was geared towards the night
of the opening. It was a triumph. The evening of the opening was like pulling back
a curtain and sharing my world of ideas, giving birth. The vast white open space
was filled with my work, every detail considered, every piece related to all the others.
My struggles for the past many months, the exhaustion, the hunger, the loneliness
and the fear were all lifted as I shared this body of work with the network of people
I'd come to know as well as the many strangers who had come to see the work.

I'd been studying Buddhism for several years before going to a retreat in California. This was a silent intensive meditation retreat with ten hours of zazen every day. After a week or so there was a period of heightened awareness lasting minutes or days I'm not sure.

Years later in New York, my wife and I would walk together home from work. Picking her up around six o'clock, I'd walk from my small design studio to her office and we'd continue on to our home in the west village. This was a time when the joys of being together were being born. I remember frequently feeling that our lives were in some kind of real balance. Beneath our happiness we were interpreting vast shapes of meaning during that period.

In the work stream, I was running my own design business as well as making art and this was happening in the richest of possible lives. In these moments I could feel the special depth of connection and the health and well being that was being created. Many times since then I've known that to love and be loved and to share a future was more than enough. This has been a revelation. There's a deep peace I've experienced many times of souls touching.

Around this time another event happened where I connected deeply with another soul. In dying, my father showed everyone who saw him during his last days that death can be a blossoming. My experience of his death was one of beauty and transcendence. Yes it was terribly sad and difficult and filled with regrets. Yes, I suffered realizing the precious moments of knowing him that had slipped by. All of that was true, and yet as he was dying, we all could see that really he was in the process of being born into something. Putting work aside, I spent as much time as I could with him in his last months and everyone who came to see him during this time was somehow touched and deeply moved.

Ideas were cascading as I worked in my Brooklyn studio. Right after finishing some post graduate work I set up the studio and experienced periods when ideas flowed so quickly that I couldn't use them all. At these times I was humbled by the experience of being the vehicle, the channel for these art ideas.

Years later when a new company I founded, got off the ground and was still healthy and growing, I experienced accomplishment of a different nature. At these peak moments I realized that the vision for what I wanted to create was coming into being. I found myself able to move from one group of people to another, leading and inspiring diverse groups of people and building what was almost a religion centered on bringing digital and beauty together in an organization based on shared meaning. At these moments I could see that not only were my dreams for a new kind of enterprise coming true, but that somehow I was transcending my own abilities in the area of interpersonal skills. I was providing vision and leadership and was being recognized for it.

Connecting with people in life has been the greatest joy. Whether it's being in love and developing the bravery to express it, sexual delight, or experiencing the mysteries and unfathomable nature of love or friendship, the opening of the heart and letting love emerge elevates. These are peak experiences. There's the deep peace I get from touching the souls of others. There's the sense of mastery through accomplishment that I experience in different ways; when I'm creating and I step back and am amazed and when I realize that it's not just mine, that this creation is interconnected with wider worlds. And there's the simple appreciation of the opportunity I have, along with the abilities that I've been granted.

I've found that connecting with people has taken many forms and some of the deepest bonds have formed with people who I know only through their writing. This has occurred at different times in my life. I've made friends with Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Heisenberg, Merton, Kazantzakis, Watts, Krishnamurti, Rilke, Rumi,and others. Revelation about a kinship with a writer strikes deep when it occurs. It's a relief to know that these minds understand me as I understand them. We're connected and sometimes I'm lifted right out of whatever bind I seem to be in, transcending and including the life I lived before the experience… In looking at these moments there are patterns with significance for how I intend to live my life in the future. I see that giving form to ideas has always been important to me. I grow from the exhilaration of the creative burst - giving birth to something - bringing a new creation into being.

Above it all is the potential for experiencing awe and gratitude. This is a trans-personal wonder that makes it all mean something and that as I live my life in the future I'll strive to live in such a way to deserve it's continued presence.

One of the important things self-actualizers' lives teach is that our lives feel best when we have some goals or a dream that matters to us and we see ourselves making progress toward it. That’s why one of the best ways to actualize our potential is to have dreams and strive to actualize them. Having goals taps new veins of energy, adds zest to all the parts of our lives, and energizes our minds and emotions the way vigorous activities do for our bodies. Like a magnet, as our goals draw us forward in new directions, they draw out new capacities in us that want to be used. And we feel better about ourselves and grow more able to play our life on ever-higher planes.

Life's more meaningful when you immerse yourself in a greater purpose than simply living day to day, when you have hopes for the future and are able to see yourself moving toward realizing them. Our dreams are what give us things to look forward to. It's the little steps forward in life that renew and excite us. Like a perpetually renewed fountain of youth in life, having goals infuses us with hope and enthusiasm. And the harder life is, the more we need goals and dreams to feel our lives are more than just our present circumstances. Our dreams and goals, and a vision of a better life for the future are what help us “get free” from feeling trapped today.

In addition to being intrinsically rewarding themselves, peak experiences are important motivators to our growth. They provide the fuel that powers a positive self-actualizing spiral for us because they energize and motivate us to live our lives so we can have more of them. The more we have rewarding, soul-satisfying experiences that make us glad to be alive, the more desire we have to continue to do the work on our growth to have still more of them and go after even more and higher goals in our lives.

Try to add to your list of your peak experiences more of those times when you felt happiest and most fulfilled and most grateful to be alive.

We get out of life what we settle for, what we invest ourselves in. Our lives are about what we spend our time doing. And our actions show what level of stakes we’re willing to settle for in our life. Self-actualizers don't just “settle” or accept less-than-satisfying situations or lives. They work to make their lives not just less bad, but go beyond that to make them positively good. They do the work to learn how to overcome their problems and grow past them in order to be able to live and play their lives on ever higher and higher levels. And if we want to enough, we can too.

I was the son and grandson of steelworkers in Gary Indiana, and myself started as a laborer in the steel mills. I got free from that and became a brand group manager for Procter & Gamble, then went on to become a Director for Gillette.

But as I reflected on what the patterns among my peak experiences were telling me, I realized they mostly took place in the country. I love pine forests where the pace of life is slow enough to savor the seasons and nature. I love being able to do work that really matters, and have time to reflect and have long conversations that involve connecting with other people on a personal and caring level of helping each other outgrow problems in our lives and grow to be our best. I love the times when we stay up late at night talking about things that matter to us or that we struggle with. And when we separate, it’s with a deep embrace.

But I was in business when I identified these were the elements I was most drawn to have in my life. The life I was living bore no resemblance to what was most satisfying to me. I loved a life of reflection and nature and helping people. But the life I was living involved working 12-15 hour days, marketing products to consumers. I was an ambitious workaholic, working late every night at the office with no time for much else. When I stopped and really thought about it, I realized that the only thing I was getting out of life was a resume.

So I decided to leave business – I had my retirement party from Gillette at 35 -- and see if I could do something more meaningful. A friend and I had started a small venture called “Magazines from Around the World” that provided subscribers with a different English-language publication from a different country each month – Walkabout from Australia came one month, then the Drum from Africa, Soviet Life from Russia, Punch from Britain, etc.

I had that plus some savings, so I decided take early retirement and get a Masters degree in psychology and later I got a Ph.D., and wrote my first book, a book of letters to my children called “Dear Kids,” about the things that were the most important to me in life. I started a counseling practice and then found some land and moved to New Hampshire, where I’ve lived in a pine forest on a dirt road for thirty years now, writing and working as a self-actualization counselor and coach, teaching people how to have more rewarding and fulfilling lives and living such a life myself, a life that I couldn’t have guessed would be possible for me when I was working as a laborer in the steel mills.

We can each follow our own path in climbing a mountain because as long as we keep going up, we’ll all still come out at the peak. But it can also help to have a map from people who’ve climbed the mountain before us.

You can use these tools to get free of old problems and channel the energy that went into them instead to move your life forward in ever-improving trajectories toward your goals. Your peak experiences and learnings can be the sign posts on a map that can help you progress from wherever you are now toward a more rewarding life.

After you do your list of peak experiences, go through it and look for the elements that are repeated. Reflect on what your peak experience patterns tell you regarding what you’d like your life to be like. What kinds of activities, environments, people and experiences have repeatedly fed your soul in the past? What do they tell you about what makes you fulfilled? Write them down as learnings about yourself.

V___ is a newly married professional medical practitioner in her early thirties. Exceptionally wise beyond her years, with levels of insight about what's true vs. false, developed by growing up in a family where no one ever had the courage to confront each other or tell the truth as they saw it. Growing up in her family not only didn't teach but punished children for having the courage to stand up for their convictions. But that not only didn't quell but honed her ability to tell true from false, a characteristic that stands her in good stead today.

Newly married to a dynamo of a man, she discovered she needed to strengthen her center and stay grounded in her deepest values in order to be able to stand up for herself and avoid being run over by the whirlwind that life with him can sometimes be.

She wanted to outgrow her impulsive and insecure emotions, and learn how to make good decisions and then to stick to them. So she turned to SAGE coaching to learn how to do that. The first thing we did was to begin identifying what she valued most. After reflecting on her peak experiences and the patterns in them, here are some things those lists clarified about herself:

I enjoy teaching people
I love connecting with people
I enjoy reading a good book
I love learning more
I love going out with friends
I feel alive when I go out dancing
I love laughing with (her husband)
I enjoy reading about spirituality
I love the beach, sitting near the water
I love swimming in water
I love watching the sunset
I love it when I have a good day with my mother
I love laughing with my father
I enjoy spending time with my sisters and cousins
I love barbeques with friends on warm summer nights
I love trying new foods
I like playing with dogs
I like laughing with children
I like seeing a great movie
I love seeing the leaves change colors
I have fun teaching eager minds
I enjoy seeing that spark in someone’s eyes when I’ve helped them feel better
I love the feeling after a good day of skiing or a good long day of work
I love feeling so exhilarated you can’t help but laugh – riding my bike down hill
I love getting together with a group of my girlfriends over a drink or brunch
I love connecting with a younger woman and helping inspire her
I love listening to gospel music
I love samba dancing

And here is what she identified as the elements she would most like to have in her ideal life:

My vision for my ideal life.

In my ideal world I live in a mostly warm climate near the beach. I have an old jeep where the top comes off, and a dog sitting in the front seat. I have a good relationship with my husband and we have many very close friends who we alternate having barbeques and social gatherings. My mornings start off with meditation and exercise, and I often take walks on the beach or swim in the ocean. I go to work in the early afternoon and have some flexibility in my hours. I work 3-4 days a week helping people where I connect with people and share my life experience with them.

I have a place to go for religious communion with others and I continue to take classes and grow spiritually. There are places not too far away where we can go for dinner and on occasion we go dancing for fun. I speak to my family often and I spend time with them, especially around the holidays. I have a trip each year that I plan with all my girlfriends so that we can catch up and reconnect. I have time to travel and we spend time visiting our friends and delving into other cultures. We make enough to live comfortably, and we own our own home with a lot of light. I am a teacher and I help people find a better way to live their lives. I assist them to live more fully and to find contentment.

Once we've identified some things we'd like to have in our life, we need to harness ourselves to go after them.

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CHAPTER 3:
CONVERT YOUR “PEAKS” INTO “GOALS” AND GOALS TO “ACTIONS”

Thoreau said he went to live in the woods to front the essential facts of life in order to learn how to live and not as, he said, come to the end of life only to find out that he hadn’t ever really lived.

Now that you've listed your peak experiences, go through them and reflect on what the patterns among them tell you about what things give you fulfillment. Then use that to make a list of all the things you would like to have in your ideal life. What would an “impossible dream” life be like for you? How would you earn your living, where would you live, what would your life look like, what would your days contain, what part would friends or family play, what adventures or perhaps business ventures have you ever thought you might like to try to go after. Include any dreams you’ve ever had that have intrigued you or that you have thought that you might want to explore or pursue some day.

Which of those elements in your impossible dream life might be possible if you were to go after them as goals? Write those down in your journal. Then reflect on which of those you’d be willing to put in some effort to pursue and try to “actualize”. Put them in a list of “GOALS” (Getting Objectives Achieved Logically & Swiftly).

Don’t worry about whether the lists are complete or perfect right now. You’ll add to, refine and fine tune them later. For now, just see them as stars to navigate by, reminders to keep yourself aware of what you’d like to be moving toward in your life. The first step is to identify some things you’d at least like to check out to see if you might possibly be able to actualize them if you tried. Whether it's to make a major change in your life, work or relationships, or to pursue a dream or break a bad habit isn't as important as that you identify some things you'd be willing to commit to give your best effort to go after that you think could make some part of your life be better

Remember, self-actualizing people are not perfect human beings who have perfect lives. It's just that they have learned to reinforce the attitudes and habits that contribute the most to their growth and fulfillment, like having and going after goals in their life. And they've reinforced the elements that lead to that happening and filling their lives with magic. One of the best ways to energize our lives is to put our heart and souls into going after goals that matter to us.

HARNESS YOUR DAYS TO YOUR GOALS

After you have some goals, the next step is to connect your efforts toward “actualizing” them by integrating the goals into your daily activities to keep reminding yourself to take steps toward those objectives.

One thing that keeps people from reaching their goals is getting diverted and forgetting to stay focused on them. Thoreau once said that “If you've built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” Self-actualizers are masters at actualizing their dreams by continually taking some next steps to keep moving forward toward them. And you can do that too.

Another thing that blocks people from achieving their goals is clinging to the notion that we can expect to get things just because we want them but without doing the work needed to earn them. Wanting to have things both ways -- to reap rewards but not do the work in order to earn them – is one of the major obstacles that keeps a lot of people from achieving their goals.

While it’s true that some people are fortunate in that things come easily for them in some areas of their life, it’s almost never true in all areas (e.g., think of the disastrous personal lives of many celebrities). And it’s certainly not true for most people. For most of us, most things that we want to have in our lives simply won’t come our way just by good luck. We can only get them by putting in the time and effort to build the skills and to take the risks to have a chance at reaching them. A better life, income, career, relationship generally require that we work over time to achieve or acquire them – that we do the work necessary to learn and add the skills that can help us get them, and to overcome and outgrow our self-limiting behaviors that block or undermine us from the things we want for our life. That requires that you learn to harness yourself and your actions to your goals and priorities and to stick to them over time.

If you want different results or things to be different in your life, you have to be willing to do some things differently. Since the things we want to happen rarely drop into our lap, if we want to change or achieve things in our life, we need to harness ourselves so that we can sustain our efforts to keep after them on a day-to-day basis over time.

You’ve probably had the experience that when you have a lot to get done, it helps to make a list. And since you can’t change your life unless you change your days, you have to focus on your days if you want to improve your life.

To get started, commit to work with To Do lists each day for awhile to see how your life progresses and feels using some tools vs. how it feels when you’re not using them. If you aren’t used to working with a To Do list, try working with one for a few days in order to get used to harnessing yourself and to get comfortable with managing your time and directing your efforts more intentionally by putting things on your list and checking them off as you do them. Each day put down anything you want to get done on a “To Do Today” list. That includes any work you have to do that day, plus any personal, family or home responsibilities, chores, errands or reminders of things that you need to do.

INTEGRATE YOUR GOALS ON YOUR DAILY TO DO LIST

Once you’re working with daily To Do lists, the next thing is to break down your goals and priorities each day into manageable steps that you can take. Here's a way to start:

Incorporate on your ’To Do’ lists each day your long-term goals and the areas where you want to improve. See this as a way to remind yourself to keep taking next steps toward your goals. Carry two sections on your To Do list: (1) GOALS, i.e., longer term objectives you'd like to achieve and (2) ACTIONS (Accelerated Commitment To Initiate One Next Step) i.e., any Next Steps that day toward those goals that you would like to move forward or focus on. Also include all your regular day-to-day work, personal or home life actions that you need to do or to take care of that day.

Start each day by reviewing your GOALS and setting some ACTIONS that you commit to try to take that day to keep going toward your goals, no matter how small, in order to keep you moving forward.

Think of this as a starter list to get yourself going. You’ll adjust the list as you reach some goals, drop or add others, or raise the bar on yourself. The important thing is to get started and keep moving forward on your priorities day by day. And while it may seem cumbersome at the start, it's easy to copy and paste the goals if you work on a computer, and it will soon become routine.

Here’s what my current year’s GOALS look like and an example of how I integrate them into a typical daily ACTIONS To Do list:

TOP GOALS This Year:
Bring My Book Alive
Help Clients Thrive
Open SAGE Wide
Weigh Under 185
Savor My Life

ACTIONS To Do Today:
Evaluate Yesterdays Work
Meditate on What I Learned
Recalibrate Today’s Work
Enter Learnings in Journal
Do an AM Aerobic Workout
Stick to Reducing Regimen
12 Hours Writing Time this Week
Revise and Edit 20 Pages today
Read Client Work & Prepare for Sessions
PM Aerobic Workout and Back Exercises
Free Reading in the Evening if Earned

B___ is a talented artist and woodworker, whose successful professional parents placed extreme emphasis on public success that masked the personal private failures and substance abuse patterns that he observed in them as he grew up. This created such a confused and conflicted relationship to "success" for him that much of his adult life he's been caught in a self-sabotaging vicious circle of seeing himself as a kind of "lone rider" artist and craftsman living in "noble poverty." Eventually he realized that doing that was a prescription to just live in poverty. And so he sought SAGE Coaching to help him complement his good artistic gifts and talents by learning the skills to be able to make a good living and a good life.

Here is an example of his list of goals for the year:

TOP GOALS:
A - ADVANCEMENT -- Include long-term objectives in planning each day’s work
B - BASIC -- Day's work planned beforehand to take care of basics
C - CHERISHING– Slow down to savor life’s precious moments
D - DISCIPLINES – Stick to and use the self-harnessing tools
E - EXPENSES – Keep Finances in Line

PROFESSIONAL: MAKING A LIVING
>Stay on schedule - meet deadlines for all gallery orders
>Jury into new wholesale/retail markets
>Research ways to approach markets beyond galleries:

FINANCIAL: CLOSING THE GAP
>Define new priorities/goals/adjustments
>Stick to disciplined financial budget

CREATIVE: KEEPING PERSPECTIVE
>Stay in touch with Impossible Dream life path

FAMILY: CREATING MEMORIES
>Stay Connected
>Take turns planning mystery trips

PHYSICAL: HEALTH DEDICATION
>Raise the bar on exercise/diet - based on endurance training
>Schedule/complete mid-life medical check-ups

HARNESS: STICKING TO MY DISCIPLINES DAILY
>Raise the Evaluation/Meditation/Escalation bar - Update GOALS list
>Work to maintain minimum B/B+ average weeks
>Raise the Earned Rewards bar to reach highest levels of Balancing out yet

Here’s an example of what his GOALS list looks like translated onto his daily To Do list of ACTIONS.

TO DO TODAY: GOALS into ACTIONS:

PROFESSIONAL
Current Business – Fill and send orders
New Business – Look for new markets:
Contact 3 new galleries

FINANCIAL
Daily: Fill in income/expenditures chart
Institute budget disciplines/cost-saving steps
Track budget: based on Income/Expense chart

CREATIVE -
Work on personal music/video
Complete a project you've started

FAMILY -
Stay connected - participate in – (daughter’s) journey picking a college
Do some things together - outside of sports/college-related activities
Work with (wife) on our diet/exercise/nutrition commitments

PHYSICAL -
Stick to daily exercise
Breakfast/Vitamins
Lunch - Fruit/Vegetables/Protein
Dinner – Eat Moderately
No Food After 8:00pm

HARNESS -
Grade previous days progress
Meditate – on the day’s learnings
Escalate –wherever it’s needed

BREAKING GOALS DOWN TO ACTIONS

So far, we’ve looked at the importance of being growth-motivated in living our life – i.e., of always trying to learn and grow from everything that happens. We’ve identified the value of using your peak experiences and dreams to identify goals to help you keep yourself motivated and doing the work needed to keep moving forward in life. And we’ve underscored the necessity of harnessing your goals to your day-to-day efforts in order to achieve them.

A technique for connecting the dots between a long term goal and short term actions is to brainstorm and use "RIOT" (Random Ideas Or Thoughts). Just write down every step, large or small, that comes to mind that you might need to do between now and the completion, execution or launch of any objective. If it’s too long or complicated an undertaking to try to consider in entirety, just identify some key mile markers along the way. Don’t hold anything back or worry about whether a step or action will actually end up getting taken or how you’ll handle it. For right now, just see this as a brain-dump and put down everything that comes to mind on your Master list of things you might need to do.

Take this master list and reflect on how long you think it might take you to get these steps accomplished if you push yourself and treat it as a serious goal. Take into account the reality of your life and its demands on your time.

Next break the master list items roughly into categories of Early, Middle and Later periods and put some timeframes around how long you think it would take you to accomplish them.

Then set aside the Middle and Later parts and just focus on the Early list and estimate how long you think it would take you to accomplish these early steps. Put these steps onto a calendar so you have an idea when you could aim to complete them by. Don’t agonize over the placement of these steps on your calendar; a rough cut is sufficient for right now as you will adjust, add to and fine-tune your lists of steps as you go along and get more information.

Next take this list and identify any steps you could take toward your goal during this calendar quarter, and from that list, make a smaller list of the steps you’d need to take by the end of this month to be on target for your quarter’s objectives.

Then make a Week’s Work list of what you’d need to do this week to be on target for your end of the month goals. After you’ve done that, disregard everything except this list; focus on this week’s goals and each day, re-check it and ask yourself, “What do I need to do today to be on target to get my week’s work done on time? Put those steps on your “To Do Today” list and each day take a moment to evaluate your progress during the previous day toward each goal .

At the end of the week, use the same method to evaluate your progress that week toward your month’s objectives. And make your list for the next week.

Keep repeating this process day-by-day and week-to-week until you get to the end of the month. Then evaluate your progress this month toward your quarter’s objectives and make any adjustments you feel you need to make in order to be on target at the end of next month for your quarter’s goals.

Another method you can use to get started toward a goal is the "WIN THAT" Constant Question dialogue where you take some dream or goal you'd like to go after and repeatedly ask yourself, “What I’d Need To Help Accomplish That?” over and over until you get to something you can do right now. Put that step
on your To Do Today list and do it.

Pretty much commonsense stuff – but if we apply it to the occasional ideas that come our way, it can have surprising results. Here's how doing something similar to that helped me get out of my home town of Gary, Indiana:

When I was twenty I was married, the father of a baby girl, living in a 3-room furnished apartment and working the midnight shift in the steel mills. I knew that I wanted to get out of that life. I had seen signs that I was creative and good with words. So I thought I might be able to succeed in advertising. I saw an ad that said Procter & Gamble was the country’s largest advertiser and was hiring in that area, so I decided to try to get a job there.

--Asking how I could do that, I knew I’d have to get an interview and convince them I could give some value.
--Asking how I could do that with no experience or credentials, the answer was to try to dazzle them.
--Asking how I might do that, I thought I might be able to do it if could show that I knew a lot about them.
--And if I could surprise them with a lot of good ideas about their products and ads.
--Asking how I could do that, I'd need to do some research on their products and ads.

So after getting off work at the mills each morning I’d go to the library and pore over P&G’s ads in the magazines, and then I would come home and watch soap operas looking at their commercials and trying to figure out what they were trying to accomplish in each ad and then would critique it and try to think of what I might do differently to try to make it even better. I spent several weeks doing that research and preparing my letter and resume and sent it in.

When I got invited to come for an interview, I went loaded for bear. P&G had over 100 brands, and I was ready with my thoughts and ideas on almost every one I could find. I let loose with both barrels and they offered me a job in advertising on a brand group, where I became the youngest brand manager in the company and spent 10 years there.

That’s also how I started the little business that helped me get free from corporate life:
One time I was coming home from a skiing trip with a friend who was a reporter for the Associated Press. This was during the Viet Nam war, and he mentioned reading an article in the Saigon Post. So I said to him, ”I’d like to see what the war looks like to people who are living in it. But how do you read it; you don’t know Vietnamese?”

He replied “It’s in English,” and said that almost all countries had at least one English-language newspaper because it's the universal language. I said "I'd like to see those, and I bet other people would too. Why don't we do that as a business? We could call it something like “Newspapers from Around the World."

My friend liked the idea and so we began considering how to do it. To figure out how to start it, I took a sheet of paper and used the Constant Question dialogue technique:

What would I need to do to do that? -I’d have to get hold of the publications so that I can offer them.

What would I need to do to do that? -I’d have to contact them and find out if I could import them here.

What would I need to do to do that? -I’d have to locate their source so I could get in touch with them.

What would I need to do to do that? -I could see if there's a directory listing publications overseas.

What would I need to do to do that? -I guess I could go to the library and ask if there is a directory.

So the next day I went to my local library and found Uhlrich's Guide to International Publications, which lists every English-language periodical in the world, with the publisher's name, address and telephone number. Having the phone number, we decided to call instead of write. We were a bit nervous before making the calls, but we figured the worst that was likely would be that they would tell us they weren't interested or that their prices would be too high for us to pay. But we wouldn’t know unless we checked it out. So we calculated the time zone differences and at four in the morning, we called the China Mail in Hong Kong. We said we were calling from the U.S. and asked to talk to the publisher and said to him, "If we wanted to provide a sample of your newspaper to our subscribers here in the U.S., that you could promote to your advertisers as a special edition that was going to America, what would you charge us?" He said to call him back in a few days and he’d give us a price. When we called back he informed us that if we provided the address labels, that the cost of the publication including postage and handling, sent direct to our customers here in the States, would be six cents. Next we phoned the Times of India in Calcutta, and they said it would cost a nickel.

After we’d contacted a handful of publications and learned that the most costly one would be sixteen cents, we figured that we were on to something. So we decided to give it a try and run a test ad at Christmas to answer the next critical question of whether or not people would like the idea enough to want a subscription.

We decided to run an ad in the Sunday New York Times Book Section. I called and asked what an ad would cost to run in the book section. We wanted our test to have its best chance of succeeding, as it would only be running one time, so we sweated over every element, every word, until we had it just right.

We agreed if we didn't get very many orders, we'd return the checks that were sent in and say, "We're sorry, something's come up and we can’t deliver.” But if enough people ordered subscriptions to warrant doing it as a business, then we'd have the first paper airmailed out and put the business together on horseback during the rest of the year as we went along. So in essence, all we were was risking was the cost of an ad.

Earlier that year I’d spotted a car that stirred my blood: a sleek Buick Riviera. I didn’t really need a new car and I couldn’t justify spending the amount of money it would cost But I decided that if I earned enough extra money from the newspaper venture to buy it, it would be a great reward to give myself for doing the work to try to get free. So I told myself I’d only buy the car if the first ad for our Newspapers from Around the World business earned enough money for me to get it.

When that first ad ran, thousands of orders came in, and we went off to ski in the Laurentians to celebrate. And I bought my Riviera. Over the next several years we added “Magazines from Around the World,” and the sideline business earned me enough extra income to take early retirement from business in my mid-thirties and be able to get free and go in a new direction in my life – counseling and writing and living in the woods, which is what I’ve been doing for over a quarter century.

It began with the glimmer of an idea and figuring out some of the steps I'd need to take to actualize it by breaking the job down into do-able tasks and just focusing on next steps and following through on those daily goals. It could have been easy to feel overwhelmed by self doubts at the thought of starting up a new venture. But I was able to overcome those feelings and my doubts which said "you can't do that" by getting them to engage in a dialogue. Another thing that helped was rewarding myself along the way for just making efforts toward my goals rather than waiting until I had a success.

All these elements are integral to a successful, self-actualized life. In this next chapter, we'll look at how to do them.

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CHAPTER 4:

BECOMING MORE resilienT HELPS YOU BE SELF-ACTUALIZING

One of the more important and valuable realizations to emerge recently from psychology’s study of the
characteristics of healthy, successful and fulfilled lives is the presence of a strong “resiliency tendency”
– a determination to bounce back, learn from and grow stronger than anything that happens to us.

Being more resilient means getting our learnings out of any experience and using them to grow from it.
It's an important facet of becoming self-actualizing because it overcomes the common denominator of
most failure to actualize our potential: arrested development. It's only when we give up our determination or forget to keep growing and mastering the obstacles in our life that our move toward self-actualizing and our growth ceases. That's why a resiliency tendency is so important if we truly want a fulfilling life.

If we reinforce that attitude in ourselves, it strengthens our will-muscle which in turn is what can pull us
out of the holes that life’s events sometimes tumble us into. Instead of letting our lives get stuck in holes,
we focus on moving forward toward some goals that can give us a greater sense of hope in our life.

Gina O’Connell Higgins, who has studied and written about Resilient Adults, says that the traits associated with resiliency can be learned. Let’s look at those traits to see what you can learn that might help you become more resilient as a way to grow toward self-actualization.

Highly resilient people teach us that you can have a better life, no matter where you start from. They
frequently began their lives in difficult childhoods, often ones of extreme abuse. But they used them to
steel their resolve to create a better life. As horrible as their early experiences sometimes were, they
became determined to use their experiences to create something positive with their lives. They are
examples of tenaciously doing the work to create something better than they were handed in life.

“Solving problems flexibly, they make positive meanings out of their experiences, actively constructing
a positive vision despite emotional disappointments…and they demonstrate a strong capacity to form and
then nurture a vision of an interpersonal world that is more satisfying than the one from which they emerged.”

Resilient individuals remain “committed to reflection, new perspectives.” They get “unusually good
emotional mileage out of virtually any experience they encounter. In therapy they grapple actively,
with close personal accountability and tight self-scrutiny. They absorb information well and take most
reasonable suggestions readily, although not indiscriminately.”

”Self-propelled, they operate with a firm belief that knowledge is power and that their futures will advance
if they are active change-agents in their own lives…Whether they are learning formally or informally,
they seize the day.”

“They have become highly skilled at conflict resolution and dedicate themselves to maintain emotional clarity
with others…They move with optimism and energy, faithfully expecting competence and tenacity to work…”

They “believe that they deserve to be loved, and feel that their trials made them far more than they might have been otherwise.”

This is not a false mask they wear to manipulate the world. It’s a fundamental belief in being fair to others – and demanding others be fair to us. “In fact, the resilient are probably kinder and more decent than others.”

However it's important to avoid “portraying these subjects as near saints. They are certainly not… they are marked…by the same human foibles that characterize any healthy person...they have all stepped on toes unwittingly, let a child down, missed appointments, or left an unfinished fight to crust over…but these shortcomings are still well within normal limits, and the resilient are more trouble to themselves than they are to anyone else.”

How do you become more resilient? What can help you? Let’s examine some of these factors more closely
to draw a bead on what can help you become more resilient and thus self-actualizing by giving you something more accessible and concrete that you can focus on to help you move toward a more fulfilling life.

The first thing that helps is to use your intentionality as a tool and commit to “bouncing back” after any slips
or setbacks occur in your life. Be willing to be an “active change-agent” for the improvement of your life.

The next important thing is carving out and clinging to a “vision of a better life” for yourself than you’ve had, to give you the added energy and dedication to keep you at the work needed to go after and achieve that life. If you want a better life, you need to have a vision, however dimly at first, of what that better life might be like to inspire and empower you to move beyond where you are. You have to believe – or resolve to believe – that you “deserve a better life.”

You must engage in “self scrutiny”. You can do that by committing to learning and growing wiser and stronger
from everything that happens in your life. And to actively seek out ideas and suggestions to help you improve.

This means being “committed to reflection” and learning how to see things from new perspectives and find ways to improve them. This is what keeps opening new avenues to help you get around any obstacles and be able to see new opportunities and directions you could take to solve your problems.

Then seek out resources and tool s and recruit positive support people to help you keep moving toward your goals and “take any reasonable suggestions” you get from them readily and try them out as experiments.

You also need to resolve to do your best to “not to repeat mistakes.” A “business-as-usual” approach will get
you the same results; it won’t get you anywhere new. You won’t get much higher than you aim for in life.

It’s also very important to keep your eye on your goals and be tenacious about creating something better
than you were handed in life. Stay determined to use your life’s experiences to “create something positive”
with your life, to get your learnings out of any experience, no matter how difficult or painful it might be. And
be willing to do the work to earn your rewards.

You have to be willing to “make commitments” to yourself and do your best to keep them -- both for far-off
objectives you’d like to achieve, and to actions you commit to take today to help you move forward toward
them. And be willing to hold yourself “accountable” for giving your best effort for anything you make a
commitment to do, improve or try to pursue. And if you slip up, just pick yourself up and keep going.

This work is not for the weak of will – you must be willing and ready to do the work to grow your will muscle,
in other words, to be growth-motivated and go to the level of getting your learnings no matter what happens.

If you’re willing to commit to try to develop these resiliency-fostering elements, write that down

as a commitment to yourself in your journal and refer to it from time to time in order to remind

yourself of this and reinforce its importance to you. The more you do this, the more you’ll begin
to redefine your image of yourself as becoming a more and more resilient, self-actualizing person.

The course of our lives results from the things that happen to us and the choices we make in response
to them. One of the most valuable responses we can make to anything is to learn what it has to teach us.

Self-actualizing means learning how to make better decisions and grow stronger so we stick to them.
As you learn, you’ll grow smarter. And if you’ll do the work to learn how to use tools, you’ll grow more able
to reach your goals and the priorities that are most meaningful and important to you. That’s what this work
is all about: learning to be sage enough to make the right choices no matter what happens to you, and
strong enough to be able to achieve your goals -- by building your will-muscle and becoming more resilient
-- to have the life you'd like, no matter how high the goals or the obstacles you face in trying to reach them.

Becoming more resilient means becoming more centered, grounded, clear and confident in ourself,

no matter what happens to us. Can you imagine what it felt like when 20 years after Harvard turned me
down for admission to graduate school, the university hired me to study the commonalities among life’s
most fulfilled individuals and teach them about how to make a life more successful?

Make a commitment to yourself in your learnings journal to choose to strengthen your bounce-back
and will-muscles. Whenever you are faced with a choice between comfort and safety on one hand,
or growing to become smarter and stronger, choose to go toward growth. Maslow said that to make the growth choice a dozen times a day is to move twelve times toward self-actualizing.

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CHAPTER 5:
UNDERSTANDING MENTAL & EMOTIONAL GROOVES
AND OUR “SOS” SIGNS OF SABOTAGE

THE PART REINFORCEMENT & "GROOVES" PLAY IN OUR LIVES

Because we're contained in a single body, we think of ourselves as a "self" -- as a single personality. But in fact, each of us contains a whole family of different parts - our emotions, impulses, appetites, ideals, values, insecurities, etc. These aspects are all related because they are all part of us. But they also each have their own desires independent of us. The can cause seemingly contradictory behavior because the part that is running the show many not always be the part we think of as our "in charge" self. If we let ourselves give in to any one of our parts for too long, it can grow to become so strong that it can start to push us around. For example:

Do you sometimes find yourself doing things you know at your deepest levels you don’t want to do --
like giving in to some impulse or emotion or doing something to excess and then later regretting it?

Do you see yourself letting some things get worse and worse even though you know you shouldn't –
like procrastinating, avoiding confrontations or staying in situations that you know are bad for you?

Do you see some behavior, thought or feeling that once it gets started, it seems to feed on itself –
that once you do it, you can’t seem to stop, or have some bad habit that you wish you didn't have?

Do you ever see some emotion or urge push you around despite your best intentions not to let it --
or see yourself acting exactly opposite what you promised yourself you would or wouldn’t do?

We are all creatures and captives of habit. The more we do of anything, the more that we tend to do it – until eventually the habits that we indulge can start to take over our lives. Henry Thoreau once wrote, "Our possessions possess us." And that’s as true of the attitudes, behaviors, emotions and appetites we possess as it is of our material possessions. And the longer we live, the more our habits take over our lives. As Horace Mann said, "Habit is a cable that we weave a thread a day, until at last it grows so strong we just can’t break away."

Each time we experience something, it causes a synapse connection in our brain that forms a cause-and-effect learning link which in effect concludes that, "If this happens, then that is like to happen next." Those linkages "program" -- i.e., teach -- our mind's computer what to expect and how to react to that kind of stimulus any time it happens again.

This is a way the brain stores memories and learnings without having to process each incident in our lives as if it were happening for the first time. Without this process we could never learn from all our experiences which help us improve in our life. At the same time, if we do not consistently exercise our abilities to observe, assess what works and make changes, these synapses can also ingrain habitual patters that may not continue to serve us as conditions change.

Because we are all a part of nature, we’re also all subject to its laws. And one of those laws is that nothing is ever static in nature; everything is always either ebbing or flowing, diminishing or growing. For good or for bad, whatever we reinforce will increase; the more we repeat something, the more it will grow. And that's as true for the parts of our personalities as it is for anything else, which is why it’s important to pay attention to the habits we allow to develop in us.

Bad habits develop when we focus on or indulge in a few areas or aspects of our life (such as giving in to some emotion or impulse or appetite’s desires) and ignore possible side-effects or consequences that can accompany or result from those actions on other levels. But just because we ignore something doesn’t stop it from occurring; it just flies under the radar of our consciousness.

Because our minds are malleable, each time we repeat any activity, feeling or thought, it cuts a "groove" in our nervous system. The more we repeat that action, the deeper the groove becomes. And the deeper a groove grows, the wider apart the edges become at the top, thus causing more things to fall into that groove which cuts it even deeper. As that behavior groove gets deeper, we see ourselves keep doing those things even when we know we don't want to or know that we shouldn't do them. In time, with enough repetitions, the groove becomes a gorge and then a chasm and a canyon that gets so deep and wide that almost all our thoughts and actions can begin to fall into it, and it starts to dominate our life.

The difference between our brains grooves and a rut in a road is that the strength that a neural connection has is based on the emotional "load" or intensity of the experience, and the number of times it's repeated and reinforced, sending electricity down its path and thus cutting a deeper groove. In childhood, before our reasoning has developed, our emotions are predominant and our neural pathways are cleaner, less cluttered and thus more impressionable. So our earliest, strongest or most-repeated emotional experiences cut deep grooves or channels among our neural pathways and grow more and more like hard-wired programs in our brain that become hard to break or change.

When we keep repeating any behaviors that are undermining what we know we want for our lives, yet we see ourselves continue to do them, it's often because we are caught in a groove.

Just like that wheel will naturally fall into the rut, so our thoughts and emotions will naturarlly tend toward the grooves already cut out by our emotional experiences and "hard wiring". The trick is learning to distinguish between the wiring that is useful to us from patterns that were once useful but are no longer so or have come to be harmful.

Often, our grooves are often just over-learned lessons. At some point in the past, giving in to these actions has worked to some degree to help us cope with some fearful, painful or negative situations. So whenever we're again feeling threatened, we're drawn to repeat whatever has worked before. And the more threatened we feel, the greater our tendency to revert to the behavior that seemed to work for us in the past. The faster life goes, the harder we hold onto our old habits for security, like a kid on a carousel clinging to its horse. So we keep doing and reinforcing these behaviors and grooves, even after they’ve stopped helping and may even be hurting us.

For example, a thing may provide pleasure or relief from discomfort on some levels in the immediate short term but create problems for us in other areas or in the long run. This can be true for anything, from the comfort of food that becomes an eating disorder, to an avoidance of conflict which begins to paralyze and make us fearful. If we just focus on gratifying our in-the-moment feelings, we're likely to keep doing what feels the easiest at the time, but at the price of adding to our problems long term or seeing our life go downhill.

The psychologist Carl Jung once pointed out that anything, whether it’s good or bad in and of itself, if pursued or allowed to go to extreme, will inevitably lead to breakdowns and problems, because it creates an imbalance. The more any part gets reinforced, the stronger it grows, until that part comes to dominate our other parts, resulting in our lives getting stuck in negative self-perpetuating grooves.

As we get caught in our grooves of over-indulgence, it scares our parts that are insecure or don't trust us to make wise decisions because they see the imbalance growing. So they act up to get us to pay attention. And if we don’t pay attention to them, they act up even worse. Then our indulgences, ignored parts and insecurities all start to act up. And caught in their crossfire, we start to feel like our parts are sabotaging us.

We don't understand why we can't just carry through with our intentions without conflict or confusion. This can feel overwhelming or be mostly unconscious. But either way, we experience a disconnect between what we say we want to do and what we see ourselves do. We all have seen a friend who says he or she wants one thing and then does the exact opposit. We shake our heads and wonder at this behavior. It looks like they're willfully sabotaging their own intentions in order not to succeed. It is easy to spot this kind of self-sabotage when it's in another person. But most of us experience it in ourselves, but we tend to ignore it.

As we see this self-sabotaging spiral increase, it makes us feel even worse and we become more desirous for something to make us feel better. So we go back to the indulgences we’ve used before to make us feel good in the past, thus deepening that groove and scaring our insecurities even more, and ignoring our needs for a healthy, balanced life. So the vicious cycle goes faster and gets deeper.

These grooves not only take over more and more of our life, but the indulgences can lull us and the insecurities can scare us into taking our eye off of our other priorities. And to add to the problem, when we’ve let ourselves stay in any grooves for too long and they get too deep, we start to feel anxious about leaving them. So they not only limit our lives, but weaken us as well by getting us to avoid things we’re needing to confront. We may not notice that what's happening is that these grooves are exacting a price of weakening us at the same time that they feel like they are comforting us.

Whenever we see signs that some part of us seems to be able to get us to act in ways we know are not good for us, yet we don't seem to stop, if we listen more deeply, we find something that seems paradoxical at first -- it’s not really trying to get us to do the thing that it seems on the surface to be pushing us to do. Instead, it’s raising the stakes to point out an area where we need to be stronger.

Any self-sabotaging impulse or doing anything to excess – whether it’s giving in to others or our own emotions, urges or bad habits – is never saying what it seems to be on the surface. While it seems to be urging you to give in to its impulse, in reality, it’s saying that you need to control it.

Any self-sabotaging is trying to tell us we’re in danger of having let some situation or parts of us grow to where they are in danger of getting out of hand. And they are warning us of problems that can cause. They’re telling us that because they've learned how to feed and grow on their own, we need to grow stronger in order to limit those parts or risk them messing up our lives and keeping us from being able to have the kind of life we want.

Freud first discovered the Pleasure principle which says that our feelings always want more of whatever is pleasurable. Emotions tend to desire more of anything that gives pleasure and want to avoid anything that’s painful or uncomfortable.

But indulging that tendency can be dangerous for several reasons. Because indulgence gives pleasure or reduces discomfort in the short term, we tend to keep doing it. As our indulgence in it increases, we tend to focus more and more attention on this source of good feeling.

Any time we focus just on feeling good or avoiding feeling bad, we start to lose awareness of the other different needs going on inside and around us that are also needing our attention in order for us to have a healthy, balanced life. We start to pay more attention to things that give us immediate pleasure or reduce our discomfort, and we ignore or pay too little attention to the other needs we have, which may well be much more important for achieving a successful and fulfilled life. As this tendency begins to block our awareness of those other needs inside us, the ignored parts start to rise up to remind us about them. They tell us that "feeling good" is not the same as "feeling good about ourself."

Indulging certain parts and avoiding or ignoring others diminishes our self-discipline and seduces us into being lazy, and so we grow weaker. That’s why the path of least resistance is almost always downhill -- because it leads to weakening our will-muscle, which we inevitably will need when hard times return. Self-indulgence can lull us into forgetting that life has dangers. We need self-discipline to stay alert and strong enough to handle the problems life invariably hands us. We forget our priorities and get seduced by things that are easy or sweet. In effect, we become so advantaged that we become disadvantaged. Whenever anything diverts us from our growth, it robs us of getting the learnings from our experiences that keep us alert and strong and that carry the lessons life presents to us in order to teach us how to make our life more fulfilling.

The problem is compounded because repeatedly giving in to some impulse or an emotion provides only fleeting satisfaction. There's never any lasting fulfillment or contentment to be found down that path, only the temporary pleasure and appeasement of our growing desire to "feel good." Afterwards, this quick-fix pattern leaves us with our discomfort again, which leads to more needs to relieve that feeling. In this self-perpetuating spiral, the things we naturally turn to are the things we know best – our old habits, impulses or appetites. But, as before, they still only satisfy temporarily, and then the sense of feeling worse about ourselves for having been weak and giving in to those self indulgent parts returns. That makes us feel even worse and thus even more desirous for relief again afterwards. And so the vicious spiral continues on and on, getting worse over time, turning more and more to the indulged behavior.

Self-sabotage comes from our indulged parts becoming greedy, our ignored parts becoming needy and our insecure parts telling us that they’re afraid. They are all showing us the degree to which some behaviors are slipping out of control and causing some unintended negative consequences. This problem gets magnified because the more you feed an appetite, the more it takes to satisfy it. So over time, those indulged parts or appetites become greedier and want to be fed even more. And the ignored parts become needier and demand even more to be heard.

Another difficulty is that these behaviors often operate under our radar. So they are able to go on for long periods of time without us paying much attention to them, until they’ve become deeply-rooted habits which by then have developed a will of their own. Then it starts to feel scary to face and fight them. The grooves we have created start to feel too deep to get out of.

Our insecurities are like children. They're good problem sensors, but poor problem solvers. They get scared and act up in order to get us to fix what is making them scared. Unfortunately that can make things worse because they act in ways that scare or discomfort us which can cause us to want to soothe ourselves with the very behaviors that scare them. If we're indulgent or negligent in parenting our emotions, they act like little children who need to be taught the importance of balance and limits. If we indulge or spoil a part of ourselves, it will come not only to want, but to expect and feel entitled to always get its way. Any emotion, appetite or tendency, if it gets indulged enough and if not checked, can grow to become a spoiled, overgrown part in us that starts to push us around to get its own way.

Like spoiled children, our overindulged impulses or emotions just want to be satisfied. So they push on us to make us do things that are not in our best interests just to get their own appetite satisfied. Anyone who's ever struggled with overeating, drinking, smoking, procrastinating, ducking confrontations, getting angry, engaging in risky behaviors, etc., knows that our personality parts can develop wills of their own that don't care about us and try to push us around to get their own way. Such a part just wants what it wants when it wants it, and doesn't care at all about the consequence. And eventually, this pattern can reach a critical mass threshold where it gains enough momentum to perpetuate itself.

What happens is that when we indulge these "spoiled children emotions," we really do temporarily "forget" what our other priorities are. As we focus on one area, we forget to consider what we may be needing on other levels in our lives. We get diverted and forget what our priorities are, especially when we are feeling strong emotions or get going too fast, or are focused on our pleasure or just plain get lazy.

At the same time, our impulses and appetites will dangle in front of us whatever rationalizations they see us be vulnerable to. If we just look at the levels they point to and we don't stay alert and aware of their tricks, we can always find rationalizations to con us into giving into whatever impulse they're proposing to us.

But our insecurities aren't fooled. So they keep confronting us with their fears. Once it gets to the point where your indulgences, ignored parts and insecurities are at war with each other and become able to push you around, from that point on, there is no middle ground. Once a part of you can perpetuate itself whether you want it to or not, that is when things start to slip out of control. From then on, you either fight it or feed it. Either you control it or it'll control you.

These seemingly self-sabotaging behaviors may have started out as harmless or even appropriate responses to some problem that we experience, but then over time can begin to do more harm than good when we don't heed the signals and get the real messages they’re trying to send us about what we need to do differently to fix the deeper problem it’s trying to warn us about.

The underlying dynamics are the same, whether it's a person who keeps eating or drinking when they know they shouldn't, or succumbing to some emotion that they know is wrong. A person who does a bad thing isn't necessarily a bad person. Often, they've just indulged or allowed some impulse to grow that has consequences they didn't give enough consideration to or think about deeply enough.

We all have to manage our emotions, impulses and appetites. The only difference is in our strength and the length of time we've allowed them to go unchecked, and in the behaviors that we struggle with.

I struggle with my appetite for sugar and caffeine-laden soft drinks and teas. But there's no essential difference between me and the drunk in a doorway with his bottle in a bag or the addict in an alley seeking a fix. It's just that I became addicted to Pepsi and tea instead of rum or coke. But the dynamic is still the same.

Self-sabotage is the flip side of self-actualization. When we go in one direction, we can’t go in the other. So when we go in a positive direction, it puts ever more distance between us and our self-defeating behaviors. The energy behind self-sabotaging behavior, when properly understood and channeled, can help us reach our hopes, goals and dreams and achieve a greater level of fulfillment in our life. If we allow the appetites and insecurities to be heard and then choose a path that takes them into account but doesn't indulge or reinforce our old grooves, we can learn to climb out of those old ruts and build new, better roads to our best lives.

To change our responses to the stimuli that trigger them requires consistent attention and training to create new habit-grooves that give us new and better ways of responding. So to steer your life right, you need to rein in your bad habits and learn how trade up and replace them with better ones.

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CHAPTER 6:

MONITORING "SOS" SIGNS OF SABOTAGING BEHAVIORS

Now let's look at how to reverse the dynamic of a self-sabotaging pattern in our life.

Often, when we can’t seem to stop some self-defeating action, it’s not that we don't want to--it's that we don't know how. It is not a lack of "want to" but rather a lack of "how to" that keeps us from overcoming it.

The key to outgrowing self-sabotaging habits is learning how to "trade up" to better ones by learning how to slow down, become more aware, look at potential consequences before we take action, and to grow stronger so that we can counter the force of habit, emotions or appetites that have built so much momentum that they’ve begun to push us around. Once we do that, we can re-channel that energy in a more beneficial or healthy direction.

But in order to learn to do that, we first need to resist giving in to the impulse and instead, look to see where it’s telling us we need to be stronger. Take the example of a person who senses they may have a drinking problem yet feels the urge to drink. If the person really listens to that urge, they typically find that it is not really saying it wants them to take the drink. It's in fact often telling us the opposite -- that they’ve over-indulged in or grown weak in that area.

Unfortunately, many people won’t make this change until the cycle has developed to a more self-destructive place, or until they “bottom out.” Once they hit this point, they are able to listen to the messages their self-sabotaging behaviors have been trying to tell them—but it is often at an enormous cost to their well-being and heath. If we don't get the deeper message of a self-sabotaging behavior and make the change it's telling us to do, that part keeps growing stronger, saying that it's going to push us farther and farther until we wake up, wise up and begin to limit it. So, while it seems like it’s trying to sabotage us, it’s actually trying to get us to grow stronger. We want to learn to be sensitive to this voice so we don’t get pushed all the way to the edge.

It’s important to be honest with yourself in this work. To help you do that, it helps to not get stuck on the level of seeing a bad behavior or a slip as a judgment of you or something to beat yourself up over. Rather than getting stuck in self-judgment, shift your perspective and just see it as a wake-up call to improve your efforts in order to do better in that area. Instead of seeing it as a condemnation and letting it de-motivate you, see it as a signal that's showing you where you need to re-motivate to be more dedicated in your efforts in some area.

The steps you need to take to trade up from self-sabotaging to self-actualizing are relatively simple but profoundly powerful.

Start by making a list of your self-sabotaging areas. Write down any AEIOUs (Appetites, Emotions, Insecurities, Overreactions or Urges) that reach the point where they can push you around. Call this list your “SOS” or Signs Of Sabotage.

Then decide which of these you would like to learn to outgrow at this point and carry these as your TOP (Top Order Priority) SOS areas you want to improve. These can include any areas of self-sabotaging or self-defeating attitudes, behaviors, bad habits, indulgences or weaknesses that you sense hold you back or cause pain for you or others. Or it could be things you wish that you could handle better, or that may hold you back from achieving your goals and having a more fulfilling and satisfying life. Carry these as a checklist along with the GOALS and ACTIONS on your daily To Do lists.

Here’s one person’s list of self-sabotaging behaviors he wants to rein in:

Here’s one person’s list of self-sabotaging behaviors he wants to rein in:
AVOIDING SELF-SABOTAGING BEHAVIORS -
>being short-tempered -
>being rigid, unbending -
>letting old responses rule when a crisis arises -
>letting the old voices control your thoughts or actions -
> getting diverted, letting things cause you to lose focus -
> letting someone else do the hard work -
>getting lost in the fog of generalities -
>procrastinating -
>edgy nervousness about things -
> dropping the ball on things -
> racing, getting ahead of yourself -
> muting positive action/gains with weak behavior -
> taking rewards you haven’t earned the right to do -

Start to harness yourself each day by working with ‘Integrated To Do' lists, where, along with the GOALS you want to achieve, you also include SOS areas you want to improve. Connect these to your ACTIONS on your To Do list to help keep you focused on doing those things that are most important.

We're only as strong as the things that we overcome.  If we never try to tackle tough problems, we never learn how to solve them. Thus they become the limits of our strength and our ability to achieve a good life.   But everything we tackle and overcome stretches our limits and raises our horizon of things we can handle. Doing that gives us a new and stronger base of competence and sense of resilience and self confidence to be able to handle any challenges that come our way.

We can't run away from a weakness, because it always travels with us. That's why it's important to learn from our problems. The only way to overcome problems inside us is to learn how to outgrow them because they are nature's way of alerting us that there’s an area we need to improve. They won't go away on their own because repeating problems are signs pointing out where we need to grow. We need some tools to help us listen to all our parts and learn from them and life how to make our life better.

To begin improving things and achieving goals in your life, you need to work in small enough steps and timeframes to really be able to connect the effort you put in to the results you want to achieve so you can learn from it something you can do differently today than you did yesterday to improve your progress. The way to start doing that is by using your daily To Do list as part of your tool kit.

To harness or rein in any behaviors that block you from reaching your goals, it helps to stay clear on your priorities and what you most want to achieve or improve in your life. It also helps to cascade your priorities down to short term next steps you can take, and to get tools and support to help you to be resilient rather than stay stymied or stuck when you aren't sure what to do, and learn to hear and heed your inner wisdom to overcome any obstacles or problems you encounter.

Each day take one or more of your GOALS or SOS areas to improve and focus on it on your ACTIONS list that day. Put at least one next step you could take to improve or move forward in that area. Make it a step that you could take that day toward the goal, even if it’s “make a phone call,” “get information” or “decide what to do next.” Just keep moving forward by continually taking some step.

Our problems grow when we try to ignore or push them out of our consciousness by not paying enough attention to their warning signs. Because many problems are caused by our insecurities, ignoring them doesn’t work.   That only makes them more scared, and so they act up even worse. That makes us even more reluctant to face them, and thus we tend to push them even farther out of our consciousness and down into our subconscious, where they tend to get even worse. It becomes a vicious circle where the more they act up to try to get our attention, the more we want to ignore them; so they act even worse. When we listen to our problems, we grow; when we don't, they grow.

In order to keep moving forward on your priorities, each day grade your effort on each of your TOP GOALS and SOS areas on your To Do list ACTIONS by asking,   "How well did I do since my last review" on each thing you’d planned to do. Put down a grade in each area that reflects the efforts you made there. Don’t grade yourself on the results you get yet; just focus on grading your effort.

What grading does is point out where there's a gap between what you thought was your goal in some area that you would like to achieve or how you would like to behave, vs. how you've actually done. If you use that to rededicate yourself to do better today, it can help you grow stronger and wiser. If you don’t ever do that, how can you ever believe that you’ll improve in that area?

Knowing that you will have to grade yourself on something helps you stay more aware of how you’re doing.   And temporarily forgetting about our priorities is a major contributor to our failing to make progress toward them. The most important thing is to keep learning and applying what you learn to keep moving forward toward your goals.

A key step to improving anything is to increase our awareness and understanding of what it's trying to teach us. That means acknowledging when our efforts fall short of our aim so we can learn from it and make a correction. As Abe Lincoln liked to say, "To say that I made a mistake is to say that I'm smarter today than I was yesterday."

A good definition of the word “FAIL” is to “Forget About Important Levels.”   It doesn’t mean we’re “failures”. It just means that if we let ourselves be overly focused on some things, we may fail to pay attention to others, and they may turn out to be more important in the long run.

A failure is not a failure when you learn from it; it’s feedback on how to succeed. Our problems and failures are trying to teach us things. If we learn to listen to a problem, it will tell us what we need to know or to do in order to solve or surmount it. By learning from a failure, we can convert its pains to growing pains and increase our chance of succeeding in that area as we go forward.

And the way to do that is to reflect on what our experiences are trying to teach us. This helps us increase our awareness, understanding, determination and self-discipline. And sticking with this kind of daily harnessing over a period of time will help us build the habits we need to be able to achieve our longer term objectives.

As we grow wiser and stronger, we go for longer and longer periods where our old problems don’t push us around. We learn to use our problems to become our own counselor and coach. And we learn from them how to outgrow and get free of those problems and be able to keep moving ever closer to our goals.

Here's an example of how one person uses his daily harness list grades to stick to his priorities by grading himself on his efforts in one of his priority areas:

TOP Personal GOALS
Health:
Work towards losing weight      B
No coffee       C
No sugar        A
No refined bread        A
Cardio exercise         A
Back stretches            A
Take herbs        A
Take vitamins    A

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CHAPTER 7
USING MEDITATION & DIALOGUING TO LEARN FROM YOUR EXPERIENCES

THE BICAMERAL BRAIN
We’ve all had the experience of trying to recall something but not being able to, then finding that by stopping our attempt to consciously try to recall it, that it will float up later "out of the blue". That's because of the bi-cameral way our brain functions.

One of Freud’s helpful contributions was the insight that our minds are divided into two different functional areas – the conscious, rational, analytical level that can look ahead and anticipate consequences and weigh things out and make considered decisions -- and the subconscious, emotional, intuitive level that stores all our experiences, memories and emotions, and powers our actions and reactions to the things that happen to us.

Freud's insight about the architecture of our brains was later confirmed by medical science. Neurological research has shown that the brain is divided into two main sectors, which operate independently and in very different ways from each other. Scientists use the word "bicameral" to describe the side by side functioning which allow part of the brain to store information and another part to process and use the information.

The neo-cortex governs thinking and reasoning, while the limbic system houses our emotions and impulses. The conscious mind is like our brain's operating system; it can process and evaluate information and come out with decisions, but it has a very limited memory capacity. The subconscious is our hard drive that contains all our memory information but lacks the processing ability to analyze and prioritize it.

The neural pathways or synapse connections between these reasoning and feeling sections of our brain exist separately from each other and don't readily communicate with one another on their own. Like waking and sleeping or channels on a radio or television, when we are listening to one of these parts, it tends to block our ability to hear the other. So, any intentional or rational activity such as analyzing, weighing or consciously “thinking,” pulls you up out of contact with the more emotion-driven, non-volitional subconscious and its contents of experiences, memories and feelings.

We're mostly aware of the conscious mental state where we spend most of our waking lives. We are used to labeling this conscious, rational aspect, this part that analyzes and makes decisions as being the whole of ourself. We often have little awareness of our more intuitive, subconscious level (although our dreams give us a glimpse into the subconscious level). The conscious operating system part of our brain makes decisions and operates under the intentional willing of the intellect, but it can only make use of what it’s conscious of from the storehouse of our experiences. That excludes most of our past experiences as well as the intuitive understanding gained by a lifetime of trial-and-error, or understood on a more emotional, intuitive level. These aspects are stored in the subconscious hard drive part of the mind which files and recalls those experiences, insights and memories by association and emotion rather than logic or will.

Typically the brain’s operating system conscious mind has difficulty communicating with the subconscious contents of the hard drive, and vice versa. So either one or the other is running at any time, without access to the benefits of the other. It’s a bit like riding in a car with one part in control of steering but another operating the gas and breaks. You, as the driver of the car, can have control over the steering but not the gas and breaks or vice versa, but rarely both at the same time. Imagine what traveling would be like in such a car, having to switch systems every time you wanted to start, steer or stop. Yet this is how much of our lives takes place -- constantly bouncing between the parts of us that work in a rational, logical, and the parts that are more intuitive end emotive. That's why it's so difficult when we try to do things that are new and have no habits to rely on, or try to break old patterns. We experience this stop-start phenomenon of things not going in a smooth, easy to execute arc. That's because we're not synthesizing the information at the same rate in both parts of our bicameral brain with its dual system of working with information. We go back and forth between these parts of ourselves instead of coordinating them into a smooth interlocking system that can drive us forward. In order to make good decisions what we need is a tool or method for accessing and using both at the same time.

The subconscious acts somewhat like a child. It can sometimes seem capricious and resistant to the demands of the conscious part of the mind. But that's only because it responds and operates to different laws and rules than intentionality and will. It runs by emotion, and has its own agenda. Like a child, it can be coaxed but it can't be ordered about. It's a good problem sensor but a poor problem solver because it's short-sighted and can't see beyond the end of its nose. It lacks the ability to project and logically predict the outcomes of its actions. It only knows what it feels or has felt. It operates on a principle of balance; that is, it senses surfeits and deficits but doesn't know how to achieve balance. It knows what it wants but lacks the intentionality and decision-making ability to go after it. So while it will alert you to something being wrong, it's often not a good source of solutions. Thus it has to depend on the will of the conscious part and its ability to set and go after goals to correct for the imbalances it dislikes. The rational, will-driven, goal-directed conscious mind is better at solving problems and devising and executing plans to achieve things, but its solutions are only as good as what it takes into account which is why it needs the subconscious. We need both aspects to make good decisions and live a balanced life.

FREE ASSOCIATION AND MEDITATION

Perhaps Freud’s greatest invention was a tool which permits us to open the locks and allow communication between these two areas. The method, which he called “free association,” allows us to listen inwardly so we can consciously hear what's going on in the subconscious. Freud posited that we need to listen to both parts of our mind in order to help us make better choices and to solve our problems and improve our life. The method involves simply closing our eyes and relaxing while listening to and reporting whatever floats up into our consciousness. As we relax, the opening between the conscious and subconscious begins to relax so that the conscious mind can hear what's happening in the unconscious mind. This listening to the unconscious helps us make better choices and decisions in our conscious lives.

The problem with free association is that it's very time-consuming. Because by its non-directed nature it can take months and even years of patient, attentive listening for the most helpful material to float up to the surface where we can make use of it to improve things in our lives.

Meditating is another good tool to help us be able to relax and access our subconscious, to hear what the quieter, deeper levels of our inner voice or wisdom, is trying to say to us. Thoreau said that if we never slow down, we never give the important things a chance to catch up to us. Meditating is a method for slowing ourselves down and giving our mind a chance to reflect on what our experiences are trying to teach us. It helps us to get beneath the surface chatter in our minds in order to hear the quieter, deeper levels of our subconscious, much as free association does.

While there are various methods for doing meditation (Zen, yoga, focusing on an object, sound, image, etc.), the word "meditate" simply means "to dwell upon" or to concentrate the conscious mind on something so that we can hear what’s below the surface. Because the conscious mind can only work on one thing at a time, when we occupy that part of our mind by setting it to the task of dwelling or meditating on something, we block it from falling into its old grooves and thinking patterns. This "quieting of the mind" lets us listen to our subconscious repository of all our past experiences, thoughts, feelings and wisdom, and most of our deepest, truest intuitions.

Try this simple meditation method: sit quietly with your eyes closed, pay attention to your breathing and begin saying the word "slower" during each exhale. Breathe slowly and deeply, repeating the word "slower" in a soft, barely audible whisper to yourself. As you continue meditating, make each breath become longer and deeper, and stretch the word out for the entire length of each exhale, so it comes out as "slooower," then "sloooooower," etc. Relax further with each breath. Practice doing that for 10-15 minutes each day.

DIALECTIC MEDITATION
Lawrence Kohlberg, a Harvard psychologist, discovered that we grow best when we engage in a “dialogue” with some influence that is a small, achievable step beyond or above where we are in our development. Connecting Kohlberg’s work with Freud’s, I discovered that when we combine meditation, which is simply a method for relaxing ourselves and lulling our conscious mind so that we can hear our subconscious, together with dialoguing or asking questions, we can more intentionally and efficiently obtain the help of our subconscious. Meditational dialoguing involves asking "directing" or "deepening" questions while meditating to help us make better decisions by drawing up the experiences, learnings, memories and emotions stored in the subconscious in certain areas or topics, so we can use them in combination with the rational decision-making abilities of the conscious mind. Thus the conscious mind, by posing these deepening and directing questions, engages the subconscious mind in a dialogue aimed at solving a problem or reaching a goal.

Normally any attempt at rational, conscious activity breaks our contact with the subconscious. Think of how easy it is to lose touch with a dream upon awakening. As our mind leaves that dream state on awakening, those images which just a moment ago felt so "real" start to drift away like an image of fog swirling in the breeze. In meditational dialoguing we've found a way wound this disconnect between the two parts of the brain and to enable the conscious mind to be able to retrieve useful information from the subconscious. In my work, I've found that it is possible to use the conscious mind to give simple programming instructions to the subconscious in the form of questions that experience has shown to be helpful. Just as a question mark is shaped like a hook, it can be used to reach in and extract information from the subconscious. The simpler and more direct the question, the more smoothly it can slip into the waters of the subconscious without causing too much disturbance.

In order to distill the most meaning into the simplest format, I teach my clients to use acronyms to super-saturate a single question with a load of content without having to "think" about it. Like compacting data into a zip-file format by putting a question into an easily remembered form such as an acronym, you can direct your subconscious while meditating without breaking contact with it or pulling yourself into the conscious part of your mind. For example, a common acronym question I start my clients with is WAFTS -- which stands for What All Floats To the Surface. This acronym reminds the person meditating to let thought arise without judgment or pause for analysis. Simply note every thought that comes up and write it down as it floats or wafts to the surface. By creating a simple memorable acronym to represent this concept, we can easily place this suggestion into the subconscious mind in a way that allows us to remain in a slower, meditative state and which bypasses conscious thought.

Generally what happens is that if you try to recall some experience, translate it into a thought that you can use, and form the thought into a question, it causes you to lose contact with the tenuous, easily-broken connection to the subconscious. Putting the thought or question into an acronym, compacts it into a small, easily-recallable form so you can get the benefit of using the conscious mind to direct your subconscious without disrupting the connection between them.

I direct clients to write down the thoughts that float up from the subconscious while meditating. The act of writing down what floats up allows you to not have to hold onto the thought and keep it held in your short-term memory, which also pulls you up into the conscious band in your mind. You can let go of it because it’s written down so you can relax and drop down more deeply into listening for other, deeper answers and messages from your subconscious in response to your question. This keeps you more present with the acronym question you are using to stay focused and to direct your subconscious rather than being sidetracked by things as they come up.

Doing this lets you harness your meditation and use it to hear your quieter and deeper subconscious voices. As you do this writing down and returning to meditating with each breath, you'll find you move from a conscious, spoken level of activity onto deeper, subtler levels where your conscious mind becomes quieter and your intuitive antenna are more receptive to the messages from the deeper levels of your subconscious.

To try dialoguing, practice your "slooowwer" meditation to ease into a relaxed and open state. After you have reached this relaxed meditation, focus on an issue or a period of time such as the previous day and ask yourself the question, “WAFTS” (What All Floats To Surface?) and listen for whatever floats up from your subconscious while your conscious mind is lulled and occupied with repeating the word ‘slower’. Every time a thought rises up, write it down. Once you’ve written it down, return to meditating by closing your eyes again and saying "slower" as you exhale. Don’t censor, edit or leave out anything that comes to mind; just write it and return to meditating and listen for what floats up next. Keep doing it for 10-15 minutes, or more if you want.

When V___, the medical practitioner found herself feeling irritated and overloaded with teaching a course used those questions while meditating, here is what floated up for her:

WAFTS?

· I’m not liking teaching as much as I thought I would. It is too much on top of my practice.

· I am finding it very hard to get my lesson plans done. The whole week is based on the upcoming class.

· I would rather put that effort into my practice and a more balanced life.

· I feel proud of myself for doing my open house at the office. I faced a fear and I succeeded.

· I have worked very hard in recent times and it is good to know that if I have a goal I can achieve it.

· I need to force myself to meditate at least 10 minutes each day, even if my mind wanders.

· This way I do not get hung up on how hard it is; I just sit there quietly and write whatever floats up.

· I am so ready to have kids and nest.

· I want to have more time to take care of a home and to have a better home environment.

· Our life here is too hectic and is just not nourishing me.

· I am proud that I started exercising again and am less afraid because it did not seem that hard to do.

· I need to work harder on controlling my budget so that we can afford a nicer home if we want.

· I am enjoying my relationship with my mother so much more these days.

· It is much nicer to have this relaxed relationship with her.

· I need to work harder on keeping my balance during stressful or chaotic time periods.

· I have to keep life in perspective and remember what is important so that I don’t forget about my goals.

Following are excerpts from some meditations that M__ had toward the end of a vacation, using WAFTS to reflect on how he was doing on some of his different goals and priorities:

FRIDAY -- WAFTS

HARNESS: Continued commitment to Harness Basics First/ maintain A- or better
*Yesterday I fell short on this a bit
*This seems to be a pattern I have - as the trip goes on I lose my harness momentum
*Yesterday I didn't complete the work
*This is a clear sign of SSS (self-sabotaging side) at work, not so much because I fell off on one day
but because losing the thread sets a very dangerous precedent
*SSS wants me to drop the ball just as I get to the finish line so I break the trend that I am on
*But my commitment to higher performance on the harness is firm

SPIRITUALITY: Take meditations deeper - get to the right levels and don't leave the work partially done
*Struggled with this yesterday
*I guess I really unwound in these last days of the vacation and that got me off my primary mission
*So if I use yesterday’s incomplete work as a warning, then it will be a positive
*I was having a hard time meditating; what I should have done is ask sss what he was trying to say to me

by having me draw blank and lose interest

RELATIONSHIPS: Continue to look at levels and important learning's regarding my relationship with ___
*Trip has gone well - we have been connecting and enjoying one another's company
*She has become more nurturing and concerned with my welfare
*Confessed that she wasn't like that before because she thought that I wouldn’t want it
*That I was so independent I wouldn't like it if she acted in that way
*This wasn't something that had occurred to me

REWARDS: Proactively use the FREE Tool to take earned rewards that are healthy and earned
*Let this get away from me a bit
*Dropped off using it in the middle of the vacation
*Tells me I didn't make this a high enough priority here
*Looking back, I could have done more with this tool to have wrung a bit more magic out of the trip

FINANCIAL: Develop and Pursue List of Financial Goals for the Year
*Had many thoughts about ways to create greater wealth on this trip
*Realizing what is going to be needed if I am going to take things to the next level
*Coming to terms with what I am going to have to do in order to get where I am trying to go
*Up for this challenge

SATURDAY -- WAFTS

HARNESS: Continued commitment to Harness Basics First/ maintain A- or better
*Yesterday I went above and beyond my own expectations on the harness effort
*I have found in the past the more levels that I look at the deeper I get and the more momentum I develop
*In that spirit I am going get down as many valid levels as I can to build the fabric of my harness process
*This supports my sense that the harness is a cumulative process that pays deferred dividends
*The key to playing for higher stakes is to keep the momentum going so you are in a constant state of openness
to matching grants and peak experiences

SPIRITUALITY: Take meditations deeper - get to the right levels and don't leave the work partially done
*The reminder to slow down, close my eyes and say slower just happened without even thinking about it
*This seems to be a part of the self actualization process
*This has been going well but there is a key area that I need to break through to get to the sunny side:
*When I see a flash in the course of work - and avoid the topic or glaze over it because I am afraid of the outcome
*For example, I was afraid to look at my career situation when I first started working here because I feared the deeper level
would be that I wanted to write
*This isn't much of an issue anymore but those types of things come up - smaller things and I dodge them
*If a level comes to the surface it’s trying to tell me something, and what I guess might be the outcome might not be at all
*That is the beauty of the tool and when it is used properly I always come out with a sense of clarity

RELATIONSHIPS: Continue to look at levels and important learning's regarding my relationship with ___
*Vacation has been going well
*We have been connected and enjoying one another's company
*Sitting on the beach now enjoying the sun
*Read a daily meditation from her meditation book this morning. Nice
*Right now I am listening to the sound of the ocean which is assisting with my meditation
*Planned a lobster dinner by the sea this evening
*Reading our books and relaxing which had been my goal
*Getting the matching grant of good weather which is nice

REWARDS: Proactively use the tools to take rewards that are healthy and earned
*Enjoying an earned reward as I write this
*I am looking to go beyond the base level I have and move into a higher state of being
*through more reflective review of what Feels Rewarding Enticing & Enjoyable (FREE)
*As I resumed my effort on the harness work I got a flash that I haven't been doing enough reading
*That is something I want to take hold of during the trip
*___ to her credit took the initiative to get a deck of cards so that we could play gin
*Something that is starting to take hold is that I trust myself more to be able to take more rewards
*that in the past I have avoided because they tended to result in slides
*For example, I have been allowing myself to indulge a bit on the food here because I know I will rein this in
*when I get back and keep myself balanced in that area
*I sense I’m getting strong enough to be able to take earned rewards in areas like that where I’ve had problems in the past -
*This in itself gives me a greater and stronger harness platform as a result

FINANCIAL: Develop and Pursue List of Financial Goals for the Year
*Noticed some signs of attitude and my old pattern of allowing my frustrations with legal get me out of sorts
*So thinking of ways to overcome this problem both at the practical level and the emotional drain
*On another level - in terms of my wealth building strategy I have had some thoughts
*One of these is that in the past the way that I have built is in a slow - steady careful way
*Some people do well making big risky bets
*That doesn't seem to go so well for me
*That is why my current plan is to make several solid bets
*I have the vision - now it is simply a matter of executing what I have laid out

USE ACRONYM-QUESTIONS AS TOOLS TO COMBINE MEDITATION WITH DIALOGUING

It’s the questions we ask ourselves that determine much of the course of our lives. When I was in business as a manager and later as a consultant, I observed that in meetings, the person who asked the best questions generally controlled the agenda of what got addressed by the group. The questions posed to the group tended to lead or direct what it focused its attention on. Unexpressed questions, even though they might be more valuable or important to address, played no part in either the course the meeting took or its outcome.

The same is true in the ongoing meeting of our different interests, ideals, concerns and personality parts inside our minds. The questions control the agenda of what gets addressed and thus pursued in our lives. Being intentional about the questions we ask ourselves can channel and direct what we pay attention to and put our energy into and thus influence the course our lives go. So if for whatever reason we give in repeatedly to a part that asks, “What’s in it for me,” we will tend to become self-centered. Or if we typically ask, “What would make me feel good right now” we’ll go in directions that lead to becoming self-indulgent. And we’ll focus on and go in very different directions than if we continually point ourselves to address questions such as, “Where do I need to grow stronger” or “What haven’t I been paying enough attention to” or "How could I be of help?"

In counseling and coaching people we've observed that time and again certain deepening and directing questions seem to help people focus on and go in directions that lead to them getting better results and feeling good about themselves and their lives. Combining these questions with meditating magnifies the effect they have for us because that technique encourages us to listen below the surface for the deeper, truer levels of answers that we might tend to skate past in the course of normal daily activities in our lives. Asking directing questions points us in better, more helpful directions, and meditation pulls us toward deeper, more valuable answers to those questions than we would otherwise go to. In essence, what this creates is a power tool for accessing the recesses in our mind.

Reflective dialoguing, or asking questions of ourselves while meditating, causes us to reflect and tap our deeper levels of wisdom and clarity about what’s most important to us in our lives. And then harnessing ourselves to pursue and stick to the answers and paths they point to, takes our lives in better, more satisfying directions. And that leads to feeling more centered, clear and grounded as opposed to uncertain, self-doubting or drifting in unsatisfying directions.

SAGE acronyms are consciously crafted to carry multiple levels of meaning in order both to make them more helpful and more memorable and readily recallable when we need them. Because they don’t require “thinking” they can be used to coax the subconscious to perform its "file searching" tasks without involving so much conscious activity that it breaks the connection with the subconscious.

That's important because in meditational dialoguing we attempt to consciously draw information from the subconscious part of our mind which is a somewhat tenuous process, akin to trying to capture a dream's message. That part of the mind is diaphanous and ephemeral and thus contact with it is easily broken. We need to move slowly and sensitively to draw out and engage the feelings, thoughts and images that reside there, the same way that staying very still works to hold onto the wisps and traces of a dream upon awakening. If we want to draw out its contents, we need to slow down and sensitively encourage it to help us. Meditational dialoguing is a good tool to help us do that.

In order to intentionally use meditation to do that and not just be a restful respite from the world, in order to probe certain experiences, memories, thoughts or feelings, we need a method to steer the process in the direction we'd like to explore. Using questions in the more memorable and recallable form of an acronym helps us be able to draw out and use that content from our subconscious without trying to consciously “think,” about it which breaks our contact between the two. And because the subconscious seems to respond to things that pique its interest, much the way that a child can be diverted or directed with interesting questions, it can be coaxed with questions.

Acronym questions represent learnings that can help us navigate life better than we would without them. They can be used without meditating; they have stand-alone value whether we meditate or not. But because meditating relaxes the gates and lifts the lids off our subconscious wealth of experiences and thus learned wisdom from our deeper levels and wells within us, combining the acronyms with meditating magnifies the result we can get by tapping a much greater portion of our experience.

If you keep working with the acronyms to remind and ask yourself the important things they represent, after awhile they’ll engrave more and more permanent grooves in your psyche. And you’ll find they become tools that are permanently available to you.

And if you use the meditating tool daily, you’ll find it becomes one of the most comforting and comfortable grooves you have. So, for example, if for some reason your routine of meditating gets disrupted for awhile, if you return to meditating, you’ll notice if you pay attention as you begin to do it again, a feeling inside you that heaves a sigh of relief that says, “Ahh, it’s good to be back doing this.”

But conversely, if you don’t return to it, after awhile you will see signs of your old racing or indulgence parts or insecurity or self-doubting parts rising up again to sabotage and cause you problems in order to tell you that they’re getting scared that you are losing touch again with them and your deeper levels of wisdom.

And while your self-indulgent and sabotaging parts may resist and act up for awhile because they won’t trust you to stay at it, if you keep up the meditating, you’ll see those parts start to subside as you slow down and begin to listen to them again. They’ll start to trust that you’re handling things in a more multi-leveled and thoughtful manner, so they don’t have to keep trying to get your attention by acting up.

ACRONYM TOOL KIT

Here are 50 acronym reminders and questions that can be used as tools, organized by the purposes they
can be used for. Naturally, it's not necessary to use all the questions; just use this list to find ones you sense
might be of help. These questions are best used when meditating to get their maximum value, but can also
be used alone.

To help you identify the experiences you’ve valued most in the past and are still likely to:

PEAKS – Peak Experiences And Knowledge Surges – What are your most treasured experiences?
ISLE – Ideal Style of Life Elements – Which of those elements would you most want in your ideal life?

To help you reflect in greater depth about some incident that occurred:

WHAT -- What Happened And Transpired - i.e., What occurred or took place in the time you're focusing on?
GOAL – Going On All Levels – i.e., What all was going on in addition to what was apparent on the surface?

To use to encourage free-associating or brainstorming without judging your ideas:
WAFTS - What All Floats To the Surface - i.e., What are all the thoughts and feelings you have on a subject?
RIOT - Random Ideas Or Thoughts – i.e., What all thoughts come to mind regarding the subject in question?

To push yourself to consider all aspects or levels in a situation:

WELL -- What Extra Levels Loom - A question to ask yourself to help you listen for deeper levels on a topic.
AOL/NBC – Any Other Levels that Need Be Considered - A way of asking if there’s anything we’re missing.

To anticipate where you might fail and take action in advance to protect against it:

FLOP -- Fatal Levels or Overlooked Pitfalls – A question to ask to make sure you aren’t overlooking anything.

MAP – Management Action Plan – Handling your efforts toward a personal goal in a professional manner.

To help you reflect on what your priorities are in a situation:
TOP – Top Order Priorities – i.e., A reminder to ask and take into consideration what your long-term priorities are.
WHIP -- What's Higher In Priority - i.e., A question to ask to help you in evaluating between two courses of action.

To help translate a long-term goal down to actions you can take to stay on track toward it:

WIN THAT - What I'd Need To Help Accomplish That - A question to ask help concretize goals into next steps.
ZONE - Zeroed On Needed Efforts - i.e., What efforts would help move you closer to your target zone objectives?

To connect the dots from longer term goals into short term concrete steps and actions:

START – Short Term Action-Related Targets – Break goals down to quarter, month and week’s work.

WHEN - What Happens Executionally Next - To focus you on taking next steps toward your goals.

To help you identify areas where you haven’t paid enough attention or need to do more:

GREAT - Give Raised, Extra Attention To - What needs more attention in order to help make it better or great?
WARNS - What Areas Really Need Strengthening - i.e., A reminder to watch out for areas that need attention.

To help you recognize when you are starting to lose sight of your priorities or get in trouble:
SLIP - Slight Lapse In Progress - i.e., A temporary indication of a failure to pay enough attention to something.
SLIDE - Sustained Lapse In Discipline Efforts - i.e., an extended failure to perform up to your own standards.

To identify a next step or tool you could try that might help you resolve a situation:

WHY - What'd Help You - A question to use in meditation to try to engage a resistant part into finding solutions.
WATCH - What Action or Tool Could Help - i.e., What could you do differently that might help improve things?

To convert an insight or goal into some action or course correction you could take:

ACTIONS - Accelerated Commitment To Initiate One Next Step - i.e., A reminder to take some next step.

WAIT - What Action I'll Take - i.e., What you will do differently today to help you better move toward a goal.

To help you hold onto your goals and motivate you to keep moving toward them:

GOALS – Getting Objectives Achieved Logically & Swiftly -- A reminder to keep taking steps toward your goals.
FREE - Frequent Replenishing Earned Enjoyments – To remind you to take time for activities that rejuvenate you:

To remind you to dialogue with and listen for messages or signals from your higher self:

VOW - Voice Of Wisdom – i.e., The voice of our intuition beyond our emotions, insecurities or appetite parts.

AIMS - Areas for Improvement, Mastery & Strengthening - To remind us about our self-improvement goals.

To listen to a behavior or part of you or a situation and learn what it’s trying to tell you:

WISE - What's It Saying or Explaining - i.e., Asking what something is trying to teach you by happening.
WAYS - What Are You Saying - i.e., Asking some part directly what it’s trying to teach you by occurring.

To reduce mistakes by anticipating where they’re likely to occur so you can avoid them:

WAIL FAIL - Where Am I Likely to Forget About Important Levels - A reminder to help defend against forgetting.
SOS - Signs Of Sabotage - i.e., A reminder to look for indications that a self-sabotaging part of you is acting up.

To help you be able to identify and watch out for the parts of you that can undermine you:

AEIOU - Appetites, Emotions, Insecurities, Overreactions & Urges - i.e., The primary sources of self-sabotaging.

FEARS - Failure, Expectations, Additional Responsibilities and Succeeding - i.e., The fears that most block us.

Questions you can use to remind you and help you stick to your top goals and priorities:

AIRS – Am I Really Serious - i.e., A question to ask yourself to help remind you not to stray from your priorities.

STAIRS – Show Through Actions I’m Really Serious - Our actions are the only thing that show our seriousness.

Self-harnessing methods for staying focused on your priorities and staying on track toward them:

DHARMA – Daily Harness: Acting, Reflecting, Meditating & Adjusting – A daily regimen for a self-actualizing life.

THEME – Temporary Harness Evaluating, Meditating & Escalating - i.e., Short-term, focused use of harnessing.

To stack the deck and hold yourself accountable to stick to something that you want to do:

CROP -- Consequence, Reward Or Penalty - i.e., Setting course-corrective consequences to protect against failing.
THEME – Temporary Harnessing, Evaluating, Meditating & Escalating – A short-term, targeted use of harnessing.

To remind you to give yourself and others positive motivation to keep going in a desired direction:

PRAISE -- Positive Recognition And Improvement Support & Encouragement - A reminder to reward effort.
BEST – Best Effort or Step to Take – A question to keep focused on what seems best to do.

To continually reflect on how you're doing and recalibrate your efforts toward your goals:
REPEAT – Renewed Emphasis or Paying Extra Attention To – Rededicating and escalating your effort.

FORWARD -- Forget One Recent Weakness And Redouble Determination – To keep yourself moving forward.

To remind you to watch for and take actions that can impact your probability of succeeding:

LUCK -- Levels of Unexpected Consequences or Knowledge - To watch out for and take steps that affect your luck.

CROP -- Consequence, Reward Or Penalty – Stack the deck by setting consequences to protect against failing.

To remind you to slow down and keep your eye on the ball and connected to your priorities:

WHILE – What Have I Learned by Experience – To consider what you’ve learned before taking action.

SPOIL – Speed Past or Overlook Important Levels – A reminder to slow down and consider all aspects.

To accelerate your growth trajectory, keep a list of “what works” in a learnings tool kit.:

WOW – Words Of Wisdom – Keep a collection or list of the wisest advice that you give to yourself.

TOOLS – Techniques Or Other Learning Shortcuts – Keep a tool kit of all the strategies that work.

M___ has grown up in a very prominent and successful family. In addition to coming with advantages, it also has the seldom-seen-from-the-outside disadvantages of being much harder to follow a great act that a weak one because you are constantly comparing yourself and reminded of how successful they were at their peak. You feel defeated before you even begin, and often you don't know how to begin because no one teaches you the skills to be successful because people assume you must somehow already have them because of the family you grew up in. So M___ decided to seek out SAGE Coaching to build the skills to be able to succeed in his own eyes. Here is how he uses some of the tool-questions while meditating to review how he has been doing:

TOP TOOLS – How did I do since my last week’s review?

WAFTS - What All Floats To the Surface -
*I am feeling very excited right now - I feel that everything that I have been working towards is coming together
*This is what all the struggle - hardships - tough sessions-tough dialogues -training has been for
*Now I am ready to start living at this higher level-
*Oddly I was able to get to this point while I have been fighting the flu
*Generally when I am sick it is hard for me to stay in harness at all let alone make any breakthroughs
*I am curious what life will be like when I slow down even more
* And take the learnings I’ve gathered and see what is possible
*I thinkI am going to like it - it really seems like a way of life that I could really enjoy
*I know it isn't going to be easy but I am going to take a stab at getting free and playing life on the highest levels

FEARS - Failure, Expectations, Additional Responsibilities & Succeeding -
*Transitions are always hard for me
*That is why I am going to take baby steps and if I fall down I am just going to get right back up
*The chipping away process is what seems to get me where I need to go
*Fear of success is always going to be an issue for me
*Part of me isn't comfortable with the idea of me being a success - that I don't deserve it
*I need to get past that and say why not ? If I do the work then why shouldn't I reap the rewards ?
*The trick is to keep going - just keep doing the work - stay humble and it will all come together
*This is my time and if I don't take advantage of it then I will regret that forever

SLIP - Slight Lapse In Progress -
*This past week I started to get this under control and the basic shape of a fully integrated harness came into play
*I started to feel more comfortable using the tools and I started to make some solid progress
*I allowed the distraction of buying to distract me a bit but I think that I have gotten that under control
*I would make more money just doing my job and putting the deals together rather than all this bargain hunting
*I think that I have defeated the most recent buying obsession
*Now I feel ready to put my attention to really raising the bar on the harness basics

SLIDE - Sustained Lapse In Discipline Efforts -
*I have been letting some fears hold me back up until this week - and even still this week
*For some reason I have been afraid of conflict and dealing with some difficult situations
*Instead things have turned out better than I thought once I let go of the strain and started addressing the issues
*One by one as they came up it hasn't been so bad. In fact it has opened up all kinds of possibilities for the future
*I feel that I am in a unique situation and if I stay focused I have an opportunity to break out into a new level
*I got this vision of getting my financial goals into a better working list that I push forward
*This is the best offense in fighting against SLIDES and really taking control from my self sabotaging side

WHIP - What's Higher In Priority -
*What is higher in priority is that I carry out this vision that I have
*That I push myself to get deeper - being fully honest and breaking past my blocks/fears
*That I take my financial goals to the next level using the tools asking myself WHAT IS HIGHER IN PRIORITY
*And using the FREE tool to stay balanced and live in the moment
*This will require a proactive effort of thinking in terms of taking it to SSS(self-sabotaging side)
*I have the sense that I can put SSS on defense a bit and really take some ground from him
*I am going to ask myself what is going to kick SSS ass for that day or period and take those actions to get on track

WAIT - What Actions I’ll Take - & ACTIONS - Accelerated Commitment To Initiate One Next Step -
*My first plan is to set the stakes at A- or better performance to earn a tropical long weekend
*I want to revise my harness structure goals for the week to set the bar higher now that I have broken a barrier
*I want to take a more proactive approach towards pre-defending and see where sss might trip me up
*Then intend to take that a step further and talk about things that would really take some ground from sss

WAIL FAIL - Where Am I Likely to Forget About Important Levels -
*If I get distracted by busy work and let go of my basics
*Fall back into the distractions of apartment-hunting, etc.
*If I don't stay committed to my goal of higher level play through solid and consistent efforts on the harness basics

WIN THAT - What I'd Need To Help Accomplish That -
*I need to use COP to keep myself honest in shorter term, mid and longer term punishments

COP - Consequence Or Penalty -
*I have been thinking about ways that I can set punishments and rewards for solid performance
*One idea is to do this on a daily basis or a shorter timeframe if needed and give myself rewards for good effort
*So for example, I feel that I am on the start of a good run and going to Argentina could spin me off.

*I feel that more solid work with the reward of a shorter trip to an island might be a better way to go
*It is things like this that get me close to self actualizing, not just going through the motions

FREE - Frequent Replenishing Enjoyable Experiences -
*Last weekend things were very balanced
*I did some work on Saturday Morning and got my head balanced
*Then I went to the Frick which is something that I have been wanting to do for some time
*It was great going there - experiencing the art and the magnificent home
*Then I did a light workout and broke that ground - had a steam
*Then I got a nice lunch at eat - chicken soup and grilled cheese
*Then I got __ a Valentines Day present
*Then relaxed at home for a bit
*Then had sushi dinner with __
*We saw a movie that I have been wanting to checkout
*Spent some time with my friends Sunday

PRAISE - Positive Recognition And Improvement Support Encouragement -
*It was nice to meet Frank - seemed to have an appreciation for my work
*Nice to connect with someone else who is working the Harness system and understands the challenges involved
*At this point it would be pretty hard for me to turn back
*It will be nice to have some folks to connect with about working the process
*I have been trying to get more balanced and to experiment with what works
*I feel that I have gotten to know myself better in this work - what works and what doesn't
*I can normally make predictions now about how things are going to play out

WATCH - What Action Taken Could Help-
*The best idea I have had recently is to ask what is going to really put a full press on SSS
*That could be getting deeper in a meditation
*Could be working in tight timeframes for a long period of time rotating on financial
*Could be planning a mystery trip
*Just looking at where he is asking me if I am serious - breaking the block/fear and then getting to the next level

ZONE - Zeroing On Needed Efforts -
*Keep taking one step at a time – in 10 min timelines on specific goals

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CHAPTER 8:
MASTERING YOUR SELF-SABOTAGING BEHAVIORS
AND CONVERTING THEM TO ALLIES

In order to have a more fulfilling life, we need to overcome the self-limiting behaviors that block or undermine us from the things we want for our life.

One of the most valuable uses of meditational dialoguing is to confront and grow stronger than our self-limiting, self-indulgent, i.e., self-sabotaging sides which always seem to be watching for signs that we are weakening in our commitment or not keeping our eye on them.

Those parts are opportunistic; it doesn’t matter what the reason is for us to not be paying attention to them. We may be going through a difficult time, experiencing some strong emotions such as fear, you, excitement, feeling tired, lazy or being preoccupied or engaged in something else. All they need is to sense they that can get away with acting up and we won’t do anything to stop them because we’re focusing elsewhere. That’s when they act up.

In order to get free from our self-sabotaging patterns, we need to learn what they’re saying we are doing that perpetuates those problems. Since self-sabotaging behaviors at their deepest levels are messages from our subconscious telling us we need to listen to them if we're serious about making our life go better, the first thing we have to do is to slow down and listen to any problem or lack of progress so we can learn from it where we need to grow smarter or stronger.

When we have indulged or insecure parts to our personality that are undermining our goals, it helps to have some tools to listen below the surface for what they’re trying to say to us, especially when they're pushing us to act in self-defeating ways. That’s where meditating and dialoguing can help when used in conjunction with daily harnessing.

In order to get free from our self-sabotaging patterns, it helps to learn how to "trade up" to better ways of reacting to the needs those parts are acting on that will really solve them. One way is to have goals to pull us out of our holes. We need to learn to trade up from a fear of failure, and replace it with a psychology of success that can empower and strengthen and imbue us with hope.

You can use meditational dialoguing as a tool to probe your different levels or areas by using the acronymed deepening or directing questions and then listening for the answers that float up from your subconscious in response. Asking directing and deepening questions while meditating helps us uncover the deeper levels going on below the surface. And quite often it takes us in directions very different from what we might expect.

Most mistakes we make are because we don’t slow down to ask ourselves the right questions in order to steer ourselves to make the right choices or do the right things. We get whispers of what we should do or be asking ourselves or paying attention to, but we often skate past them because it will require some extra work or discomfort. And feelings prefer the easy path. So we can become accustomed to doing what’s easier in the short term. But that cumulates into weakening us long term and eventually can result in making it hard for us to stick to doing the right things (i.e., the things we know we need to do) in order to be strong enough to make our life go well.

What we need to learn to do before we act on a feeling is to slow down and look at the situation from different perspectives to sense if there are some aspects we might be missing or need to give more attention to.

The first step to the best solution to most problems is to learn how to look below the surface and to take into account more than just the feelings that call the loudest or are ones we’re most accustomed to hearing. When we've considered all the levels, then we can identify which are deepest and weigh them with the messages life seems to be sending us in order to decide what's most important to base our actions on. It's like with little kids: you wouldn't just go along with whichever one yelled the loudest or was used to getting its own way. That would just make it a spoiled tyrant. The same thing is true with our emotions, urges and appetites. What's best is to listen to our feelings but decide with our mind.

Doing this gives us strength to stand firm yet be fair, reacting appropriately vs. over- or under-reacting emotionally. So we can escalate the pressure, not our emotions. So when you hear or see signs of a self-sabotaging voice inside you, try to really listen to it and say “Okay, what all are you trying to say to me?” Meditate to slow yourself down direct your meditation to listening both to that point of view and everything it has to say and to your other parts as well, so you can really examine its arguments for the parts that are true and deserve to be given attention and those that don't.

One insight that can help us to manage our emotions instead of be at their mercy is learning to shift our perspective and look at things from a different point-of-view. That changes our feelings about them because feelings follow behavior, and thus we can use our will to change our feelings about something by shifting the angle or level that we choose to look at it from. Doing that will influence how we feel about it.

For example, with a behavior in ourselves that we dislike, instead of hating it, we can look at it as a wake up call giving us a warning that we need to grow stronger in that area. If we do that, instead of thinking of the behavior as an enemy, we can see it as a healthy opponent that's helping us to stay strong. And that may well cause us to start to feel differently about it because our perspective on the situation will have changed. If we listen to its message and make the course correction it is telling us to, we are much less likely to hate the symptom. And may even come to appreciate it.

Once you’ve learned to harness yourself by integrating your goals and improvement priorities on your To Do lists and are evaluating your progress toward them each day, the next step is to grade your progress (or lack of it) and learn from it. We have to learn from our experiences if we don't want to repeat them.

We can only respond to what we are aware of and we can’t ever solve what we never acknowledge. So a key step toward improving anything is to increase our awareness and understanding of what it's trying to teach us. And that means facing up to and learning from our poor grades.   We can do that by meditating and dialoguing with the part that caused us to do poorly so we can learn from it how we can do better today.

Self-sabotaging behaviors are messages from our subconscious telling us we need to pay attention. Our problems can teach us instead of just hurt us. If we really listen to a problem, it can tell us what we need to know or do in order to solve or surmount it. By learning the lesson, we can convert life's pains to growing pains. One way of doing that is to reflect on what our experiences seem to be trying to teach us.

The steps needed to trade up from self-sabotaging to self-actualizing are to increase our awareness, understanding, determination and discipline. And the tools to help us do that are to harness ourselves with a daily regimen of:

1. Evaluating our progress on our GOALS and SOS areas in order to stay alert and aware,
2. Meditating on what we learn from our efforts about what works and what doesn't work,

3. Rededicating to our priorities in order to stay focused on what's most important to us,

4. Escalating our efforts wherever needed to keep moving toward our goals and priorities.

After you have a list of your priority GOALS, and have created a list of your SOS areas to improve (any actions, thoughts or emotions that are self-defeating you want to improve), the next step is use a daily harness to build the habits to achieve them. To do that, take a period of time, say, two weeks, that you'd be willing to experiment with doing your best and commit to harness and grade yourself each day on how well you did in the last 24 hours on each goal and area to improve on your list. So the first thing to do is work with a checklist each day of the things you think are important for you to focus on and to do that day.

Each day, along with things you need to do that day, harness yourself to create a checklist of ACTIONS you could take toward your GOALS plus the SOS areas or behaviors you would like to handle better. Then use that checklist and grade your effort or progress toward your goal in each item or area on it. It makes us more aware and alert if we know we will have to write down our grade.

Then each day after you've graded your ACTIONS on your GOALS and SOS areas as part of your daily harness work, try doing 10-15 minutes of Meditating using the word "Slower" to reflect on any poor grades you sense may be self-sabotaging and ask, “WHAT” (What Happened And Transpired?) and then “WISE” (What's It Saying or Explaining?) or “WAYS” (What Are You Saying?) by making that happen. Write down whatever you hear float up. Don’t edit, censor or leave anything out.

These steps and tools help us outgrow our self-sabotaging tendencies and trade up to more helpful, self-actualizing habits. As we do this, we grow stronger and go for longer and longer periods without our negative parts pushing us around. We learn from our problems how to be our own counselor and coach; we learn how to outgrow them and we finally get free of them.

Use meditation to also listen to your other levels and voices as well as the dominant one. Listen to what you hear from the other parts inside you. Ask, “What All Floats To Surface” (i.e., what WAFTS up) from other parts. Write them down as well. When we've listened to them all, then we can identify our deepest levels and hear life's signals to decide what's most important to base our actions on.

The solution to most problems is to learn to stop and look below the surface and listen to our whole mixed bag of feelings instead of just whichever ones happen to yell the loudest or are the ones we are most accustomed to hearing. Listen to all sides and then decide which view seems fairest or best. This is the start of a growing dialogue between your SOS and your VOW (Voice of Wisdom).

We're given that voice of wisdom and desire to do what's right. It is in each of us. And learning how to distinguish and follow that voice is the only way to reach any lasting contentment in life.   But in order for that to happen, we first have to learn to slow down and listen for what it's trying to tell us.

Because the parts of our personality that we don't parent properly often sabotage us to get our attention, what we need to do is engage them in a dialogue and ask what they're trying to say by acting up.

Meditation is a good way to get beyond our surface emotions and hear our deeper levels and what our quieter, inner voice is trying to say to us. Meditational dialoguing helps us get free of the grooves we normally think in and go beneath the surface clamor in our minds and to be able to hear our subconscious. It is a method for relaxing and giving our mind a chance to reflect on our experiences and learn what they're trying to teach us.

What we're doing is "Dialectic Meditation" which is just a back-and-forth dialogue with our parts. We can direct our meditation into a "dialogue" with the parts of us that reside in our subconscious -- i.e., that we aren't normally conscious of -- by writing down a question before we start or while we are meditating and listening for the responses that float up while our conscious mind is occupied during meditation.

If you have several poor grades in a day, pick the worst ones or bunch them together and ask WAYS (What Are You Saying?) by cropping up at this time. Sink down into meditating and listen for and write down whatever floats up in answer. Don't stop at or settle for the first or second or third thing that crops up; keep writing them down and listening for what floats up from deeper levels inside you.

If you notice your mind start to drift away or resist responding to the the question, write down whatever floats up and return to meditating by saying the word "Slower" a bit louder and more forcefully, and patiently return to addressing the question. If you need to, escalate to whatever loudness you need in order to regain control over your thoughts. Then when you're back in control, start to say it more softly and quietly. Keep your eyes closed (except when you're writing).   And try to relax more and more deeply with each breath by consciously relaxing your face, neck and shoulders and arm, chest and abdomen muscles.

When you feel you're ready to stop meditating, open your eyes and give an arm-reaching, back-arching, cat-like stretch in order to release the energy that's been unleashed while you were meditating.

After you finish grading and meditating on what any poor grades are trying to say, read back over what you've written and ask yourself what ACTIONS (Accelerated Commitments To Improve On Next Steps) you will commit to do today to show the part that's trying to get your attention that you really are hearing and heeding what it's trying to tell you.

Then put any course corrections or commitments that come out of your meditation on your To Do Today ACTIONS list for that day and grade how well you did on each of these when you grade yourself the next day. Then decide whether to leave it on your list for awhile, recalibrate or change it or take it off, depending on how you did and whether you feel you need to keep monitoring and improving in that particular area.

We're only as strong as the things that we overcome.   If we never try to tackle tough problems, we never learn how to solve them. Thus they become the limits of our strength and our ability to have a good life. But everything we tackle and overcome stretches our limits and raises our horizon of things we can handle. Doing that gives us a new and broader perspective for viewing any new challenges that come our way in life. And the only security in life is being able to handle whatever life hands us.

An old Irish tale says that if you run away from a ghost, it will chase you even faster, but if you turn around and go toward it, the ghost will show itself to be your shadow. You can’t learn how to overcome problems that are inside you by running away from them because they go with you. Running away leaves us feeling worse about ourselves afterward and thus even less able to fight back against it.

Generally our self-created problems are simply ghosts from our past, signs of unfinished business from times when we didn’t adequately deal with or learn from some difficult or threatening situation. However, it takes determination, motivation and courage to face, fight and overcome things in ourselves. That's why we didn't deal with them in the first place. But it’s also why we need to harness ourselves to do so now while when we're not we're feeling strong emotions or are in the grips of strong impulses because if we don't, they're likely to come back in a crisis or when we can least afford for them to do so. And it's much harder to make a trustworthy decision about something then.

The stronger, more insistent or impatient an emotion or impulse is, the more likely it is to prove untrustworthy if we let it block out or ignore our other, also valid and perhaps contradictory or tempering feelings. If we let it have its way, it leaves us feeling worse about ourselves afterwards.

When we start to become curious about our self-sabotaging behaviors and begin to ask them what they’re trying to say to us, we hear the deeper insights of our higher self or inner voice of wisdom and to understand what’s going on that keeps us stuck in repeating self-defeating patterns of behavior.

When we stop and face our self-sabotaging parts, we find that the facts are always friendly because they are trying to make us smarter and stronger. It's not our house that they are trying to bring down; it's our house of cards. They're trying to help us grow wiser and healthier. And if we listen and heed them, the struggle will get easier.

When you have a SLIP (Slight Lapse In Progress) which will happen from time to time, the best next step is to meditate and listen to them and make the adjustments those slips are trying to alert you to by getting off track and making the recalibrations or course corrections they telling you are needed in your efforts for the current day.

When a slip occurs, after meditating on WHAT and WISE, continue on to ask yourself the question “WATCH” (What Action or Tool Could Help), i.e., what recalibrating or course correcting changes you could try out as an experiment to do better today than you did yesterday in that area or action where you didn’t do as well as you wanted to do to stay on track toward your goals and priorities.

Just see this meditating and asking WATCH as a form of brainstorming for possible steps or options you might take or pursue in order to improve your efforts in that area. And write down whatever steps you hear float up in response to that question.

After you’ve meditated on WATCH, the next directing question that can help you is to ask yourself “WAIT” (What Action I’ll Take) and choose one action you will commit to try to do that day. Then put that step on your To Do list for that day as a way of rededicating yourself to your priorities. Then take that action to show the part of you that slipped up that you really are serious about taking the step or making the improvement it’s trying to tell you to take toward achieving a better life.

Remember, whenever any part of you diverts or derails you from your goals and the path toward them, on some level it’s challenging and asking you how serious you are about sticking to the task and paying the prices necessary to achieve them. And because actions are all that count in life, your behavior is the way you show your answers in the dialogue between you and your parts or the fates that’s taking place on the subject of what level you want to play your life on.

Here is the checklist that an artist uses to keep her self-sabotaging voices in check. It is from the day of a major showing of her work. She only grades and reflects on the things that are calling attention to themselves. It was a wonderful experience which taught her that putting her work out in the world is much less scary than her voices had built it up to be and has many rich rewards! It told her that her work is successful and is clearly articulating what she wants it to say- not to mention that it's vital and can be a success!

Sabotage list

· Racing on to the next thing
· Not finishing things; Procrastinating C I did procrastinate on hanging one piece which left me up to the last minute and somewhat frazzled right before the visit, however I took some time out to do a meditation to get my thoughts on my work clear and that really helped to calm my nerves
· Feeling bored
· Wanting to move away from boredom
· Diverting my attention by believing there's something better down the road
· Feeling like I'll be acting out of desperation
· Speaking disrespectfully to myself A Such a nice achievement on this one today- in general I was talking so supportively to myself.
· Using extreme or overstated words or phrases
· Feeling I'm losing control or things are slipping out of control
· Using honesty as justification for belittling or condemnation of my self
· Being judgmental towards myself A I learned by the positive response to my work that this voice that I call "the art world" in my head to which I am constantly trying to justify my work and place in the art world is so much harder on me than, at least in this case, I need to be prepared for. Basically, I should be proud of my work and stand behind it, not always pick it apart mercilessly
· Not being realistic with how much I can accomplish/schedule
· Am I savoring my days? Have I slowed down to enjoy things? A I really took some time during and after the studio visit to soak up what a nice experience it was
· Impatience
· Hibernating- hiding from the world
· Fear of success
· Fear of failure B right before the visit these voices were operating in terms of fearing that the response wouldn't be positive, but I was able to get centered with a meditation
· Playing the martyr
· Overwhelming myself
· Inappropriate guilt
· Undermining my success B it's going ok so far, but I'm watching my tendency to move quickly away from celebrating a success in order to go right into what's next get stirred up a bit. It's so easy for me to skip acknowledging a success, whereas if it had been a failure, you can bet I would spend every moment thinking about it
·  Putting others on a pedestal
· Telling myself I'm unworthy

That helped her that day. But the following day her voices came back and started undermining her again. Here is how she addressed them in a meditation:

Why the anxiety and depression since the opening?

i feel lost

how so?

i just had this big thing and now what?

for starters, you have an even bigger thing on Monday and you also have a really clear idea of where you want to go with your work, so what's going on on all levels?

i'm just scared this is a lot of big stuff for me. it's making me want to hide in bed all day

why? what are you afraid of?

that i'm rising to the challenge only to be defeated

well, the first critique went very well

did it?

yes, you have to believe that when people tell you they like your work that they're being genuine

why?

because what cause would they have for not being genuine?

keeping the peace in our relationship

do you honestly think that's what went on?

no, but part of me feels like i want more. like i need to be told it's the best thing happening

why?

I'm insecure and could use an ego boost

do you have faith in your own work as valuable?

yes

then let's return to the fear that you're rising to the challenge only to be defeated.
what would "defeated” mean?

to be honest, if my work gets trashed at the open call next week, i'll feel defeated

do you think that's possible

i think absolutely anything's possible

so what can you do to prepare yourself for the possibility of being let down or defeated

i can get really clear on what I think the value of my work is so that if they don't respond well
it doesn't define my work as good or bad for me

why the anxiety attack and racing thoughts at 4 am?

i just felt like such a train wreck

what do you mean?

like there are all these tasks that've been piling up while i focus on my artwork- like i'll never be able to stay on top of everything. one thing ends and i'm immediately buried under new tasks

these are things you have been working on alongside preparing for this show

but none of it's complete. i feel like i can never rest, there's always more to be done

do you genuinely feel like these things have not been addressed as fully as they could be while preparing for the visit?

i do feel like i've pushed off addressing these things more fully

so you've completed the visit and you're feeling the need for more balance in your weekly goals?

yes- i feel like art making can't always be pushed to the front of the line

what can i do to provide more balance?

accomplish some of your other goals this week and following the open call next week

what's going on on all levels?

i'm afraid that if you take time to rest you'll lose your progress- you'll backslide

do you think this is true?

no, i value rest and regeneration

what about acknowledging successes and rewarding yourself

there's this need to put off rewarding myself until it's something really worth it- something big. these small successes don't deserve much

then you're always chasing something, always deciding that the next thing will be more deserving

do you think this is a small success that doesn't deserve much?

no, i worked really hard and was really focused and putting myself out there is a big step,

especially when i've done it in such a conscientious way

i guess i'm feeling the need, after next week, to evaluate where i go from here. what ideas will i continue or begin to investigate in my work, what's next on the horizon for promoting my work, etc.

i will commit to you that after Monday we will make a list of what's next and decide what gets addressed

ok.

-------------

When V__ was suddenly faced with moving (selling a country home at the same time as unexpectedly moving out of an apartment and into a house), she found it unleashing old self-doubting, self-condemning perfectionist voices inside her head.

Here are some excerpts from her meditative dialogues between her rational and emotional sides during that time:

WHAT – What’s Happening And Transpiring?
I had an extremely emotionally unbalanced reaction today. I felt angry and I started crying. This is the second emotional outburst I have had this week. I am very anxious this morning. I feel nervous because I have so much stuff to do, but getting nervous makes the day more difficult to deal with.

WISE – What’s It Saying or Explaining

I may have to set a better sleeping schedule that I follow to get my tasks done. The last two nights I have not been able to sleep so I slept in late. This is part of what leaves me so little time in the morning.

I feel like I am getting too emotional about moving.

This is a confusing feeling to me because I am not sure if it is my demons trying to distract me.

I am not clear if it is coming from a good space. I don’t want my demons too get far if it’s a distraction.

WATCH What Action or Tool Could Help?

Let’s let the Rational and Emotional sides talk and try to resolve this conflict that keeps rising. But whatever I do I will stay aware that any time we have an overreaction, it is generally coming from something in my subconscious from the past. I must balance the Rational vs. the Emotional impetus.

R: What is going on that you are having such an emotional reaction here. What is going on with that?

E: Thinking about moving makes me panic.
R: What is the panic all about?
E: I feel embarrassed.
R: What is it that you feel embarrassed about?
E: I am a loser, a failure, a person void of interests and self knowledge. I am so empty I latch on to any-thing I can get my hands on and then I think it is my saving grace and what I have been missing all my life. I am so lost and deficient that I am not smart or clear enough to recognize a distraction or a feint.

I have always felt uninteresting. I do not have many strong convictions or beliefs. I have nothing I am fighting for or working towards. I just feel that I am drifting and clutching at straws for help. Each new idea seems like the perfect place to grab on but then it disintegrates and I am left with nothing again.

R: Wow you are melancholy today aren’t you? So what you are saying is that at the ripe age of 30 you are already clear that you are a loser, because you do not have your life all figured out? That is some standard to set. So I guess the fact that you got a masters degree because you had a strong conviction that you wanted to help people now adds up to nothing. I suppose the fact that you are in a committed relationship with someone you love is not important. I guess it is not representative of your beliefs in love, in loyalty, in family and in commitment? I guess the fact that you want to stay near your family does not exemplify the idea that you hold family as very important in one’s life?

E: I am a loser because I do not even know my own self. I search for answers outside because I cannot find any within and I am so unsure of my own mind that I cannot tell what is illusion from reality.

R: You have plenty of beliefs and plenty of values. You have ideas of where you are interested. You just have not figured everything out yet. You got out of your parents house and school at 26 years old. That is when you really started questioning life. I can see where you are very disappointed in yourself for not having all of the answers in four or five years.
R: How can you know who you are and what you truly want out of life unless you experiment and open yourself to new possibilities?
R: Do not forget that you have a habit of letting your emotions get out of the box. You seize on some-thing and run with it. This is the pattern you are referring to as embarrassing. If you were not so emotional and spontaneous you would think through your ideas for awhile before announcing them and deciding to pursue them. When your emotions get heightened you feel an immediacy for everything. You act as if everything needs to be solved immediately.

E: Sometimes I just feel like I am hopeless and I will never find contentment in who I am or what I do.

R: You do not need to be embarrassed about being excited by things. You just need to slow down and see your patterns.

R: When you reviewed the things you would like out of life and we went through the things that you have you saw that you already had so much of what you wanted already. Hopefully you are less than 50% through the span of your life and you already have about 60-70% of what you want.

R: You felt hopeless about having a relationship with your mother not too long ago and now you get along great. There were points when you were feeling hopeless about having a significant relationship and now you are married and very much in love. Life still has a lot to reveal to us and if we can let go of the preconceived notion that we should be born knowing everything it will be a lot easier. We just need to remember to slow down when something strikes us as exciting, sit with the idea and see if it remains through the quiet. Then we know that it might be worth exploring.

Here is how one woman used meditation to learn what had been making her feel out of sorts:

Meditation: WHAT & WISE
What Happened And Transpired that I woke up feeling so negative, and What’s It Saying or Explaining?
- I am regressing

- I am just at a rough patch. Nothing can always be good and happy

- I was frustrated that I did not do well last week.

- My self sabotaging voices are starting to act up to convince me that I cannot change.

- My other levels are trying to show me I cannot give up the tools or I will slide backwards into my old habits

- I am tired and I do not feel like doing work

- I am being lazy and self indulgent

- I am getting to a point where I have to deal with bigger issues and I am fighting the process.

- I am just doing the minimum work possible to keep my head above water.

- I gave up sugar and alcohol and bread this week and I always feel self loathing when I do that.

- The voices in my head this morning were worse than they have been in a while.

- I am teetering on a precipice and I am about to tumble down if I am not careful.

- I have been sleeping a lot and have not had enough fun interactions this week.

- I am just acting up like a child to avoid doing the work I need to do.
- I feel like a two year old throwing a temper tantrum inside.

What seems best to do?

- I do not even want to ask this question. It is frustrating to me. - I am feeling overwhelmed right now.

- I do not know what to do and even asking this question makes me feel like I am going to cry.

What can we do to make you feel better?

- I think I need some relaxation time. - I will recover from this negativity with a little down time.

Is that all you think you need to do?

- I guess I need to start to deal with some issues. I have been avoiding or dancing around exercising.
- I know that I need to start. It is very important to my health and my personal well being
- And I am not sure what is so deep that I am avoiding it so strongly.
- I want to lose 10 lbs and be healthier and I have to stop ignoring those goals.

What else?

- I think this is an important stage where I can recognize my own bullshit
- And know the parts that set up the distractions are starting to get scared.
- I need to let those parts know that I’m serious about getting better and that it’s worth it to me to change and grow.
- I have to decide how much I want to change and what it is worth to me. I think it will help to refocus on my goals.
- I just need to keep working so my parts know that I am serious about wanting to change and grow.

Here is a meditation she had another day:

I’ve been miserable and negative for most of the day today. I feel like I want to self destruct. I feel restless inside.
I wanted to go out and get drunk and just forget everything, only I did not even have the energy to do it.

What are you saying, part that’s been is making me so miserable the last few days?

I have been bored this week.
I had no social interactions. I do not usually do well with this.
I feel like I have not had some of the kind of fun that I appreciate in a while.

I would like to be more active.

This is a big stumbling block in my life. I am having a very difficult time trying to get myself to exercise.
But it is even more than that (although that alone is a lot.)
I do not think we are active enough in life.
It is not fun or invigorating to walk on a treadmill, that you do simply for health,
But it can be fun to go kayaking or hiking or bike riding. I think those things can help to keep you young.

If I did not mind doing things alone I would go to the river or the public pool here
But I am social and I do not like to do those things on my own a lot.
I think the solution for now is to start to try and do them on my own.
It’s better than sitting around the house or going shopping at home depot.

I still am not taking good enough care of my health

As soon as I was feeling down my self sabotaging voices started to kick me.
I do not mind too much though because I’ve seen that if I consistently keep working, eventually the sound they make will be barely audible.
I know they are just trying to point out that I have been slipping.
But I know that each time I get through it I get stronger.
It is hard not to get pulled under when they are so forceful.

Here’s a meditation from that same person a couple days later:

I took some time off yesterday. It was perfect. I really utilized my free time and felt myself de-compress enormously. It was refreshing and I came back with the mental ability to start again.

I went to the pool. It just confirmed to me that I need to be in the water more, and that I need to be more active in general. It was so much more fun than just sitting around indoors.

I feel better after exercising. I feel empowered and like seeing my mood lifting.

I feel much less miserable and negative.
I am still slightly cranky and premenstrual but I am not restless and agitated inside.
The negative voices have calmed down and so have I.

One problem I have is that we are never active. I think it is bad for our health and not so good for our relationship. It would be fun to have an activity we could do together.

I have been working on not overeating and not eating the wrong foods. I have been doing pretty good.
But I would like to really focus on it as part of my priority list for the quarter.
I weighed myself today and I weighed 138 lbs. I think I would like to lose 8 lbs.
I think it would be important for my self confidence, for my health, and for my patients to have a strong role model.

What do I Want to Pay More Attention to?

I will pay more attention to being healthy.
I am doing exercise, and though I am eating better I could still probably improve that.
This week I will join the gym and see if J__ will go with me to help me stay motivated.

I am proud of the weight I have lost over the years, and the progress I have made in changing my habits.

But I think I still have a long way to go before I am really in control of my eating behavior.
I have been doing pretty good, but even though I am eating less than I usually do, I’m still stuffing myself sometimes

I need to learn just to stop when I am full. It will be better for my health to reduce my calories.

I have to stay alert to not sabotaging myself or preventing the realization of my goals with negativity or laziness.

I must not give in to self indulgence in sacrifice of contentment and self satisfaction.

I feel proud that I went to the gym and exercised. It was not as bad as I had made it out to be.
I noticed for me a lot of my resistance is always about fear of taking the first step.
Once I am moving it is much easier for me to keep moving. This is important for me to remember because I know my habit is that when I slow down it is hard to get started again.

Here is one man’s meditation on what happened and what it was saying to him when his wife needed to have some surgery and recovery time at home and he needed to carry more load around the house.

OVERALL GRADE FOR THE DAY: C+ for letting my mid-morning time-frames turn to mush.

WHAT -- What Happened And Transpired:
Overall, I had a strong day, both in the shop and the house. But it was a struggle to stay focused and harnessed.

I allowed myself to indulge in distractions that blew my focus and concentration. So, I loused up a couple of hours toying with unearned rewards, snapped my thinking back in line and eventually accomplished what I'd set out to do.

You passed – overall. As much of a grind as it was, you didn’t drop the ball; you picked it back up.

--

You've been ok – given the necessary slowdown as you've needed to absorb more household tasks for awhile.
---
Nice change of pace - you've also had more time to yourself - which is good on some levels -
but you don't want that to feel too good either.
---
Some days the hooky urge is on you like a rash.
---

You F’d exercise – but it was a minor offense – especially with your resolve to make up the time over the week.

---

More importantly, negative energy wanted to take command - it was picking away at you all day.
---
The head chatter - having to snap out of leaning in that direction for most of the day - it wasn't a day where you felt comfortable - in the good groove - motivated.

WISE -- What It’s Saying or Explaining:

Still some weak grades - some shady areas - you want to keep an eye on what you're shading.
---
What do those grades represent? What are they trying to say?
---
Comfort zone grades – you’ve been liking the simplified days a little too much.
---

What you're disappointed in - is that you didn't rein it in as quickly as you would have liked.
---
But you did rein it in - and got on to your tasks - completing your objectives.
---

That’s what’s interesting about the day – to see how you’ve raised the levels of discipline – not to be defeated by unruly forces.

---

As much of an energy sap as it was, you're still left with a positive feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day.
---
Even your C- for short temperedness - that had to do with the dialog you were having to do to stay harnessed.
---
It was never directed at another human being.
---
It probably ate up time – and efficiency – but you accomplished your intended tasks – you were able to keep the percentages on the positive side.

--

Your coach is getting stronger – the inner voice that keeps asking what the best choice is.
---

Yes - but still too much fussing and fighting - falling apart like that, even for awhile, isn’t what I want to do.

When a man saw he was slipping a bit, here is what he wrote in one day’s meditation and what course-corrective action he decided he would take:

WHAT - - What Happened And Transpired
I’ve been slipping recently. I took too long getting started working again this morning and had to take a C grade for that.

---
Tough day to grade - hard to grade a day that has a mixture of grades like that - based on improvement - getting past a rough spot – but saving the day in the end.
---

So - you're not in any serious trouble - you just know the seriousness of the risks – what they’ll lead to..
---
You're thinking you should've been strong enough to march through from beginning to end of the day without any funny business.
---

Right - the demons'll try the friendly approach - tell you everything's fine - you're doing great - no need to rush into things.
---
It's right about there - when you start doing well - that your demons always seem to try to speed things up – to try to hop the fence without paying.
---
So - good idea to find an antidote for that kind of sleeping pill.
---
So even though you rescued the day, you aren't pleased with your morning SLIP.
And you know that if you don't treat it seriously enough - you're setting yourself up for more trouble.
---
It works in the opposite direction the same way toward doing better. So stay A&A – Alert & Aware.
---

You're also confirming your commitment to higher levels of action – it’s becoming a time when you can't afford these types of lapses - they represent what you need to give up - in order to get ahead.
---
A kind of sloppiness that'll only serve to keep you from your goals.
---
Simply put - a bad habit - perhaps part of a collection of bad habits - you want to break.
---
Too much time spent flirting with your demon urges - settling for less - as a result.
---
So - it's not so much the urge you're upset with - that's the all-too-human stuff everybody deals with -
It’s nipping it in the bud - faster - more effectively - that's where you fell down on the job.

---

Is that C grade being dishonest regarding the rules of the tools?
---
No. “C” work means a legitimately passing – but not acceptable - grade.
---
WATCH - - What Action or Tool Could Help

Don't get hung up in the fog of semantics. Determine that C grades are unacceptable - and if you get one - just treat it as what it is: an unacceptable grade that you need to escalate your guard against..
---
It ought to help you pick up the pace - to get back on track – that’s the purpose of this work.
---
WAIT - - What Action I’ll Take
Build that into your daily grade program – in order to end the month at high grade levels - and begin next month with a bang.
---
OK - enough said - today looks good - plotted out and ready to go - your WAIT – What Action I’ll Take – is in place.
---
One other thing too - you're in better tune with various levels - you're doing a good job of ending this month strongly - getting yourself off the good start - seeing it be a better month than any so far.
---
That's what you're pushing for - the work seems to be paying off.

_______________________________________________________

CHAPTER 9:

USING THE TOOLS IN SPECIAL SITUATIONS

The Importance of Rededicating & Recalibrating your Daily Harness list When You SLIP away from Your TOP GOALS
Using Meditation and Dialoguing for Making Decisions

If you’ve ever tried to diet or stick to an exercise routine, you know that one of the problems you run into in going after goals is running out of steam, forgetting or losing touch with your determination to stick with it after the initial enthusiasm has worn off. It’s natural to get diverted or tired of doing something that involves work and commitment over time.

The same thing is true of this work. Think of it as “Harness Fatigue” – the tiredness that builds up with doing the same thing day after day. After awhile parts of our harness can start to feel rigid and remote, and we find that we’re doing it by rote or remote control and don’t feel really connected to the process. Then the sense of disconnectedness distracts or tempts us to stop doing the work and we see ourselves experience a slip or a slide.

But if you give into that feeling, you risk falling back into your old tendencies with their accompanying bad results as you start to see increased signs of your self-indulgent or sabotaging sides acting up to warn you that you are starting to slip or drift away from your priorities.

Any time this happens we need to see it as a critical turning point where we’re being challenged with deciding what really are our priorities: to grow toward a better life or go for comfort and ease in the moment. There are some forks in the road in our life that are more forked than others because they largely determine the trajectories our life takes – either up toward playing life on a higher level, or staying stuck where we are with our development arrested at the balance of rewards and prices we've experienced as the high water mark of our life. Any time you see yourself slipping back into old bad habits, remind yourself that you can’t have it both ways; to keep progressing toward a better life and to not do the work to earn it or keep it.

This work is about building new and better habits, trading up from bad habits to better ones and staying at things until they become habits or second nature to us. That takes intentionally willing ourselves to make an effort in a certain direction or behavior long enough and for enough cycles or repetitions for it to become habitual and start to feel more natural to do it than not to. Then it starts to feel unnatural, like something is missing if we don’t do it.

There is a paradoxical dynamic that it helps to be aware of in doing this work. It’s true that what we have to do is build up new habit patterns (and thus grooves in our brain’s pathways). And this requires repeating a behavior over and over. But it‘s also true that we have to make course corrections any time we slip, and to redouble our intention and effort to do it better today than we did yesterday. That by definition requires doing some aspect a little different or a bit better today to try to improve our aim or execution to get closer to our goal. That means we’re making a change, which seems to conflict or contradict deepening a habit. Yet it’s those adjustments that make the habit fit us better and better as time goes on. So it becomes more and more comfortable.

If we don’t keep refining and refitting it to fit us better, and simply indulge our path-of-least-resistance parts, they’ll give us rationalizations and false justifications for not bothering to return to the work: not enough time, it’s not working all that well, we’re doing well enough without it, we can do it later, etc. And the slip will extend into a slide. And while the benefits of the work we’ve been doing may continue for awhile, eventually they’ll dissipate without the repeated reinforcement, and the habit will fade away, and so will the benefits.

But we can use a slip if we return to the harnessing and make some adjustment that we try out as an experiment to rededicate and recalibrate our efforts to see if it works better for us than just quitting, which is a form of giving up on ourself.

What happens sometimes is that we genuinely forget our priorities for awhile. Then if we don’t rededicate ourselves to them, our desire to do right starts to slip and the level of our dedication to do whatever it takes to reach our goal or overcome the old habits diminishes to a lower and lower level. And as our commitment level goes down, it stirs up the old indulged and insecure parts that used to rule us. And because such parts have not weakened but are only corralled by our growing discipline and strength, if we stop doing our part, they break out of their cages with their old strength. That's why we need a harness.

If we don’t take the slips as warning signs or wake-up calls, and instead just ignore them or rationalize giving in to and indulging the old patterns that led and fed into our old problems, we will get caught in them again. If we do that, it will awaken the old self-sabotaging see-saw between the indulging and insecure sides, with each side battling for dominance and undermining the strong center of mutual trust that allows us to outgrow and maintain a healthy balance between the different sides.

When each side is dug in to their own point of view and position about what’s going on, if you really want to stop the self-destructive dynamic, the first thing you have to do is to stop contributing to it.

That’s why it’s important to use a tool like meditational dialoguing to look at all the levels, and then to decide which levels are most important for you to act on in this instance in order to get clear about what your priorities are and need to be going forward.

If you will write those down and translate them into goals, you will have better clarity and strength and chance of avoiding falling into the old self-destructive patterns.

There are critical thresholds that occur in fighting self-sabotage when we get diverted. If we aren’t alert to them, they can tip the battle against us and result in making the struggle even more difficult. They crop up in periods when, for whatever reason, we take our eye off the ball of staying alert and aware and committed to doing our best to overcome our self-limiting patterns.

Often this happens when we get discouraged or tired. Or when we’ve won some battles and see ourselves doing better. When some problem eases or we start to have some rewards, we begin to get caught up in enjoying the present moment and forget that what got us to this place was hard work and constant alertness. This is a dangerous stretch in the road. If we catch the tricks and slips that can sneak up on us during this time, and do the right things – i.e., use them to renew and redouble our dedication our efforts to continue to become our best – then the better, healthier habits will gain a greater momentum and a new wave will start to carry us forward to new and higher levels in life.

If you find that you losing altitude on your trajectory in some areas or are not getting something done that you want to do, in addition to meditating, try the technique of Multiple Mentions. The second time you don't get something done, write it down twice on your To Do list; then write it three times the third, four the fourth, and so on until you get to where you start to chuckle at yourself and figure it's easier to do the thing than have to write it down eight or ten times. This will increase your attention to it. And when you do it, you'll get to cross off all those lines from your list for just that one action.

You can also escalate your effort by harnessing yourself on shorter term timeframes by using a THEME a Temporary Harness of Escalating My Effort for a short time to commit to daily grading, meditating and escalating in that area until you turn it around and get back on target.

Growing Through the Four Stages of Competence

As you stick to this process of repeatedly reinforcing a helpful behavior or pattern to replace an old bad habit, you’ll see yourself move through the four stages of growth or competence. The first stage is “unconscious incompetence” where you aren’t even aware that you are doing something wrong. The second stage is “conscious incompetence” where you see and know you’re doing it wrong, but can’t seem to get it right. If you persevere and keep trying, you’ll see yourself move into the third stage, of “conscious competence” where by dint of intention, effort and exertion of your will, you start to do the thing competently and well. Then if you continue to stay at it, you’ll see yourself gravitating to the right or desired behavior automatically without even thinking about it, as your subconscious takes over and makes a habit of it. And you’ll have arrived at the level of “unconscious competence.” That's why repetition is so important.

Becoming aware that we’ve slipped away from something that had worked or been important to us is a valuable part of the process of learning to use these tools to become wiser and stronger. A SLIP or a SLIDE is a useful reminder that we can forget even things that are clearly helpful and valuable to us, and which we’ve seen can help make our life go better.

It's not so much the slip that's important as what we do when we become aware of it. There is a natural tendency in all of us to feel badly if we haven’t performed the way we’d like to in some area, and to want to turn away and not think about it because that would just seem to lengthen or magnify the amount of time we’d feel bad.

The problem with that is that it stops us from getting our learnings from the experience. If we don’t get our learnings and put them into practice, and the situation or conditions continue that caused it, then it’s likely that nothing will improve. So we’ll stay stuck in the attitude, behaviors or choices that prolong the situation. If you want something to be different, you have to do something different.

If we don’t face into and up to the challenge presented to us by the slip in our behavior, it gets even harder to fight the growing chorus of parts and habits that surround and reinforce that behavior and inhibit our ability to move forward. The result is we stop growing. And most of our problems come about as a result and manifestation of arrested development.

Any time a SLIP (Slight Lapse In Progress) goes unaddressed, it can cumulate with the others to become a SLIDE (Sustained Lapse In Discipline Effort) back down the slope into our old bad habits. Eventually, this pattern can reach a critical mass threshold where it gains enough momentum to be able to perpetuate itself. As that behavior groove gets deeper, the slips become slides and the slides become landslides, and we see ourselves keep doing those things even when we know we don't want to or know that we shouldn't do them.

But the story doesn’t end there because we are born with an innate energy and need to grow, and so allowing our development to be stopped causes psychological and emotional discomfort. Our healthy, growth-seeking parts combine with the insecure parts that are scared or the angry parts that are frustrated with us for being forgetful or lazy or self-indulgent and allowing ourselves to stay stuck in an unhappy or healthy situation. And together, they raise the stakes to make us still more uncomfortable in order to get us to really look at the consequences of what we’re doing. Paraphrasing the school sports team cheer, they yell out, “We’re all here inside you and no one could be prouder. And if you cannot hear us, we’ll yell a little louder.”

If you stop and pay attention to those voices and growing chorus, you find they’re challenging you to do the right thing and get serious about the things that you say are important to you. They’re saying, “Either you get better, or we’ll get worse” and things in your life will keep going downhill.

If we “get it” and see it for the warning it is, we can tap the ability of our intention and combine that with some strategies and tools to augment the power of our will and reinforce healthy habit pattern grooves and grow stronger. If we shift our perspective (which is always in our power to do) and look at our slips or signs that we’re sabotaging ourself as the warnings that they are, we can use them to wake up our will and stir our intention and strengthen ourself. Then those warning slips serve a good purpose. We can shake and break our lives out of the lull of arrested development, and resume a growth trajectory toward a better life. It’s the same as with the daily harnessing regimen: If we squarely face a poor grade and get its message on the right level and take course corrective actions to fix or improve what’s gotten stuck, we move forward in a positive and healthy way. And we tap new veins of energy to carry our trajectory higher.

That represents the problem and solution for what kind of life we’re likely to have going forward. The problem is that the tiredness, laziness or resistance to doing the work is self-perpetuating if we don't overcome them, and so the solution is to tap our second wind and grow past being stuck in the grips of those parts.

The key to being able to do that is first to acknowledge that there is that part of us that’s pushing on us to give up and take the path of least resistance. And then use the tools of meditating to relax, slow down and dialogue with that and with our other parts to decide what’s more important to us, by drawing both sides out to make their cases, and then to ask ourselves and them WHIP (What’s Highest In Priority). That helps us get back in touch with both sides of the issue, not just the parts that are pushing hardest. And to realize that there are prices both ways, not only with continuing on but also with giving up, and that our job is to decide which balance of rewards and prices feels best to us. And which way will be most likely lead to feeling best and most respecting of ourselves after the fact.

Then, if your decision is to take the short-term harder path toward a higher level life, use the tools of asking yourself the “WAIL/FAIL” questions to anticipate in advance where you’re likely to slip, and the “CROP“ question to help you pre-defend against that happening by setting up a scaffolding structure of rewards or punishments that we commit to stick to what you’ve just reminded yourself is most important to you. And “Go Public” and tell others (e.g., via emails) what you are committing to in order to hold yourself accountable to keeping your word.

If your higher priority is to move forward, make it a THEME (Temporary Harness of Escalating My Effort) to convert that re-dedication and determination into ACTIONS (Accelerated Commitment To Initiate One Next Step) into your Daily Harness to get yourself back into gear going toward your higher level goals again. Set a time period that you will stick to this commitment and then promise to review it at that time to decide whether you want to go on with it or not.

And reflect on when would be good times (e.g., every two weeks) during this experiment to take an earned reward activity or FREE day or two to stay balanced, replenished and strong against the impulsive parts to keep them from trying to get you to take rewards just because they feel like it rather than because they've been earned and deserved.

Try this to get yourself back on track any time you lose steam or clarity or your sense of commitment to your goals. It's a helpful way to return to learning and moving toward self-actualizing.

One benefit of meditational dialoguing is that it helps us listen to those parts of us that need to “vent” and have their hand held so they don’t feel they have to keep escalating in order to get heard. Here is what V___, heard float up while meditating when listening to some parts that were causing a bad mood:

WHAT What’s Happening And Transpiring?

I feel swarmed with too many thoughts and too much going on.
I am in a completely wretched mood right now.
I am in a terribly bad mood.

WAYS What Are You Saying & GOAL What’s Going On on All Levels?

There is just confusion and more chaos with the changes going on. I cannot take it.
You're letting your emotions get way out of control and need to pull this back into the rational world.

Another thing is that you cannot keep fearing change so much.
Every time something comes up in your life that represents an important decision, you go into a panic.
This is not effective and will not assist you in making the choices that can enrich your life.
We need to be clear on what is best for our lives and then take the risks to get there.
Let go of the fear of making mistakes.
Each time we have faced a change we have grown and got closer to knowing what it is we really like.
We have the tools, a coach and our own intuition’s inner counselor.
We will figure this all out; it just takes a little bit of work.
Last quarter I tried to see if teaching was my passion.
I learned that at least at that level it was not.
If we keep working we will find something.
Would you have ever gotten here if you did not do your harness work?
No. But I am scared.
Scared of what?
Scared of trying and failing.
Well if you want to avoid that so badly, then why are you hindering my harness work -
Since that is what we are striving towards figuring out.
But what if it is not enough for me?
How about we cross that bridge when we come to it.
The fear right now is preventing us from even getting closer to our goals.
I know it is scary but it is better to take the risk and go for a self actualizing life than to hold back and live with mediocre. Remember what you say to your patients: Just because you close your eyes to something does not mean that it is not there.
So isn’t it better to work hard and go for it?
Yes.
How are you feeling?

Better
Is there anything else we can do to help you?
Just hold my hand sometimes.
Okay.

USING REFLECTIVE DIALOGUING TO MAKE BETTER DECISIONS

We can only hold a limited number of points in our conscious mind before we start to get confused. In dealing with our indulgent and insecure parts, as well as in our relationships with other people, we need a tool to help us handle difficult and confusing situations and to make better decisions. Meditational Dialogue is such a tool. We learn and grow best by engaging in a dialogue, and we can dialogue among our parts in coming to decisions as to what's best to do in a giving situation.

To use the tools for making decisions, take some issue or decision you face and write it at the top of a piece of paper the question, "RIOT" (Random Ideas Or Thoughts) on What seems best to do about ___?" Then drop into meditation and let your thoughts float up like friends discussing or debating the the issue, with one side for, the other against or playing devil's advocate, questioning and challenging you to consider all the options and facts, the way good friends would do.

Writing down whatever floats up will help you look at aspects that you otherwise wouldn't stop to consider, and to go deeper in considering all the ramifications.

It helps if you ask three questions: "WHAT" (What's Happening And Transpiring?) regarding the subject, "WISE" (What's It Saying or Explaining?), i.e., what's it trying to teach or tell you by cropping up at this point in time, and "WATCH" (What Action Taken Could Help?). Don't try to "think" about it; just ask those questions and "listen" for whatever floats up into awareness.

It's only when we slow down to ask the right questions and and listen to what the subconscious has to say that it has a chance to give us its suggestions for how best to react

Rather than just a list of pros and cons, let the dialogue be a conversation, with one side making some point and then another responding by agreeing, disagreeing or introducing another point as perhaps being more important. After you write your different views on paper, you can ask "WHIP" (What's Higher In Priority) more readily see which side has the greater weight of reason. There are levels in us that are more important than our habits or emotions and Dialectic Meditation helps us hear those deeper levels. It's a method for asking questions to help us sort things out better. From there we can more accurately weigh the different courses of action.

Imagine the dialogue as being like an old-fashioned lawyers' scale on which we place the opposing points of view in order to sense which side has greater weight. Both Socrates and Ben Franklin used a method like this to reach good decisions. After you finish your meditation/dialogue, go back and re-read what you've written down and weigh the sides, like a judge weighing which side seems to have the
greater weight of reason. State it as a tentative "Go/No Go ratio" such as a 60/40, 90/10 or 51/49. (It's never 50/50 or 100/0 if you go deep enough).

After you weigh out the sides and estimate your percentage ratio, then ask, "AOL/NBC" (Any Other Levels Need Be Considered?), i.e., what else should I take into account or give more weight to in a decision? Then return to meditating and continue on in your dialogue, writing down whatever floats up, until you feel you've covered all of the important points.

Then review all of what you've written and estimate what your cumulative bottom line go/no go ratio or decision is. Once you feel you've looked at all levels and weighed the percentages, then just go with the odds and let that make your decision for you.

Meditating and dialoguing and coming to a bottom line ratio helps us recognize that there are valid arguments on different sides of any issue. When we have to make choices, it helps us get in rational control of our more emotional parts so that we can listen to our feelings but decide with our minds.

Because the parts of our personality that we don't parent properly just keep trying to tell us something, it helps to engage them in a dialogue and ask them what they're trying to say by acting up. When we listen to our self-sabotaging parts, we find the “facts are always friendly” if we use them to get smarter and stronger.

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CHAPTER 10:

SUMMARY OF THE SAGE GOALS
DAILY HARNESS STEPS

SAGE GOALS self coaching method helps help you identify the goals and priorities where you would most like to make progress. Then cascade those down to next step actions you put on each day’s To Do lists. Then harness yourself to be more accountable in taking those steps.

It also helps you develop your own inner resources to help you understand, identify, and anticipate areas where you are likely to slip, and to pre-defend against that happening. When you’re stymied or stuck, it provides you with options and tools to break the work down into do-able steps to keep a slip from becoming a slide that perpetuates itself into a deeper and deeper self-defeating groove. It also teaches you how to develop and strengthen your inner counselor and coach to help you pull out of a slip and keep moving forward in accomplishing next steps toward your goals and to get a positive self-reinforcing pattern of success going.

SAGE Coaching and GOALS Counseling can help you rein in bad habits, make better decisions, get better results and feel better about yourself. They can help you navigate your life more safely and enjoyably by providing you with a pilot’s checklist of things to check, watch out for and handle better in order to make your life’s flight go smoothly.

It can also help to have a coach because often we really do forget to look at important areas that need to be watched or improved. When life becomes complex, stressed or loaded with lots of diversions, concerns, temptations or risks, the emotionality is greatly increased and thus so is the chance to fail. The goal of SAGE GOALS Coaching is to help you develop your own inner counselor and strong internal coach.

Here’s a summary of the three main steps in an Integrated Daily Harness.

1. EVALUATE -- i.e., Grade your progress each day toward your goals and priorities.

Commit to work with daily 'To Do' lists on any things your want to achieve or improve.

Integrate on your lists any GOALS (Getting Objectives Achieved Logically & Swiftly),
you have, plus any SOS (Successfully Overcoming Self-Sabotage) areas or behaviors
that you think you would like to improve. Then each day identify one or more ACTIONS

(Accelerated Commitment To Initiate One Next Step) you could take toward your goals.

Each day, grade yourself on "How well did I do since my last review" on those ACTIONS

in order to keep yourself monitoring, managing and moving forward on your priorities.

2. EDUCATE -- Use meditational dialogue to learn from each day's efforts and results.

For any SLIP (Slight Lapse In Progress) or Slide (Sustained Loss In Discipline Effort)

where you failed to move forward on any of your GOALS or your priority SOS areas,

i.e., anywhere you failed to make progress on an objective, meditate and ask yourself:

WHAT (What Happened And Transpired?) -- Note what happened or caused the slip.

WISE (What's It Saying or Explaining?) -- Listen for what all it's trying to teach you.

As you meditate, listen for and write down whatever WAFTS (What All Floats To Surface).

3. RECALIBRATE -- Use that day's To Do list to make course corrective adjustments.
After reflecting on what happened on any slip and what it's trying to say to you, ask:
WATCH (What Action or Tool Could Help) -- What could help me improve here?
WAIT (What Actions I'll Take) -- What will I do to try to do better there today?

Then put those recalibrations on your To Do List for the present day and take those steps.

Then Evaluate and Meditate the following day on how well you did on each of those ACTIONS
and Recalibrate your To Do list that day to try to do better in any areas where you had a slip.
Pay extra attention to these areas in your next day's review. And just repeat the process.

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