Living well is a form of sailing, not rowing.
So many successful people succeed in spite of themselves.
They struggled mightily to accomplish the things that they did. Because they knew no other way.
Being a writer myself, I can tell you that so many writers sacrificed so much in their lives to create the work that they did.
Similarly, we are also led to believe that entrepreneurs, CEOs, successful and famous people have to sacrifice some aspect of their life, such as their family, in order to have professional success. Look at Tom Brady as an example, his wife left him because she thought he was too obsessed with football.
Now let’s go back to the metaphor of sailing vs rowing. Both are different ways to get yourself to the destination that you want to reach. One method requires a tremendous amount of effort and energy, while the second requires no energy and is essentially effortless. Both methods take where you want, but one is much more difficult than the other.
And I believe that this is the way that life should be as well. It doesn’t have to be a struggle. We should be able to happily achieve rather than needing to achieve in order to be happy. We shouldn’t have to struggle and to sacrifice and to force ourselves to get to work and accomplish things.
We should be able to flow, rather than row. I believe that everything works better this way. And this is what I hope you will achieve for yourself after you finish this course; that you will be able to take all of your energy, creativity, and knowledge and let it flow rather than forcing it.
Similarly, let’s imagine that you are sailing across the ocean. You may be headed to a destination that’s so far away that you can’t actually see it. You can only, on this day, and at this moment, see to the horizon.
You cannot yet see your ultimate destination.
And this is exactly how it works when it comes to life and our goals, and what we need to do.
The destination that we cannot see, is our expectation. And if we focus on how we cannot see it, and how it seems so far away, we will never reach it. It just seems too unrealistic and as a result, we get stuck in our little boat in the middle sea, victim to the currents and storms and neve really getting closer to our destination.
Many of my friends have confided in me that they are disappointed with themselves because of expectations that they have set for themselves that they feel like they are not living up to.
And I think that the solution is very simple. There’s something that’s better than expectations. What’s better than expectations is intuition. It always knows what you have to do. It always knows the next thing that you have to do.
Another way to think of it is like going up a dark staircase.
You can’t really see 10 or 20 steps ahead of you, yet that is what everyone tries to do. You can only see maybe the first step, the next step, maybe the next two steps, maybe the next three steps and those are exactly the steps that you need to take.
If you listen to your intuition it’s much easier than trying to meet these expectations which you don’t even know how to get to in the first place, and trying to jump 20 steps ahead when you have no clue.
You just end up falling on your face, and of course you are going to be disappointed.
This begs the question: how do we better develop our intuition?
As we can see, it’s very important to listen to your intuition and know how to follow it in life. So how can we better develop our intuitions and listen to our inner voices and use them for creative problem solving?
Carl Jung says that, “until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you’ll call it fate.” Most of our lives are actually directed by deeper states of consciousness, and very few of us realize it.
I believe that the doorways to our subconscious minds are available to us in the twenty or so minutes before and after we fall asleep at night.
The human brain has five brainwave states, these are: beta, alpha, theta, delta, and gamma. We spend most of our waking lives in the first state, which is the beta state.
When we wake up from sleep, for the first 20 minutes, our brains are in an alpha state. This is when we are exiting the “the doorway to the subconscious.”
I’ve always found the most fascinating insights immediately after waking up. My mind is suddenly full of all kinds of thoughts that I would never have consciously ever imagined during waking hours.
And so one of the ways that you build up the muscles in your alpha brain state is to use what’s called the alpha countdown exercise. Basically, within the first 20 minutes of waking you just count down backwards from 100 to 1.
And what this does, is it trains you to operate within your alpha brain state. If you practice this everyday for a few months, you will start to gain a greater awareness and understanding of your subconscious.
A couple of other techniques which I like to use involve journaling and guided meditation.
I use guided meditation to program my subconscious mind with the thoughts and direction that I want it to have, before I go to bed at night. I also do everything I can to relax my mind and visualize my ideal life so that my subconscious can go to work while I sleep.
And I think that this is one of the simplest and most effective ways to develop your intuition and to really understand it and shape it.
That’s it for this lesson. And here’s your homework: if you really feel like you are struggling in life, like you have to push too hard against too much internal resistance, ask yourself “why?” Why does life feel like such a struggle?
Sometimes it’s as simple as asking these questions and looking deep inside to discover how you want to live and shape your life that way.
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