Precision Change

Almost everyone writing, speaking, or participating in personal development is trying too hard. Our culture is infused with an ethic of being the best, raising the bar, endlessly achieving more. What ever happened to good enough?

I just read a short book called The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great by Ray Bennett, M.D. It’s appropriately very short–you can read it in 30 minutes, after which you feel you accomplished something…something very small. …

You ever play chess? I prefer to play chess against people who can whoop my butt, because I’ll have to play at my edge, and I’ll be sure to pick up some really good moves. Are you the kind of person who only plays chess against children because you want to think of yourself as [...]

The Transformation Try-Out is inspired by the notion of the 30-day trial, which Steve Pavlina made so popular. The basic idea is to take a new action, or habit that you want to establish and commit to doing regularly for 30 days (much like a software trial). At the end of the 30 [...]

photo credit: Via Flickr
You’re not crazy. Trust me.
We all have voices inside of us speaking their minds about our life - our projects, hopes, dreams, problems, and challenges. The good news is that having voices is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s through giving them a microphone front-and-center, one at a time, and hearing [...]

In Part 1 I described the difference between victimhood and full responsibility, and how one can move toward full responsibility. In this post I wanted to push the envelope a little, and describe territory that I believe most self-development literature is unaware of (or even worse confuses with victimhood). This is the living understanding of integrated responsibility or what one could call cosmic responsibility.

What I’ve observed is that there appears to be three main ways that individuals can relate to the world, and that is either as victims, with full responsibility, or with integrated responsibility. The other thing I’ve observed is that this is largely a developmental process, where we move through these levels and at each new level there is a greater experience of freedom, flexibility, and happiness. In this series I’ll take you through a guided tour of each of these levels and also give you specific tips on how you move from one level to the next.

Last year I finally did it. I got myself to exercise nearly every day. And instead of being a chore, it was a wonderful thing I looked forward to!

How did I pull this off?

Well, I wasn’t born loving exercise. I’m a skinny intellectual who in the past would have loved to download his mind into the matrix rather than care for and feed “human body 1.0.”

I was speaking with a friend this morning, who is a committed martial artist and a meditation practitioner. She was sharing a recent event in which she was sparing with a beginning student and she found herself laughing every time either of them made a mistake. She apologized for laughing, as she noticed that the guy she was sparing with was getting more and more frustrated with each mistake. Wondering why she would laugh at something like that, we reflected together on the process of mastery and how with any skill or discipline there is a move toward greater and great lightness, acceptance, and humor. I mean come on, if you do something all the time, and have for years and years, you better damn well be able to have fun while doing it! But I think what she was really getting at is a heightened sense of acceptance that comes with mastery, in which having seen so many mistakes, fuck ups, and less-than-perfect scenarios we start to soften up to the inevitability of the dark with the light, and in the end we may even begin to see the inseparability of these polarities.