Achieving everything you want and becoming fulfilled is often a long journey before it’s mastery. But if you can understand the principles and mechanics that underlie both, you’ve figured out the most profound secret to maximizing potential and achieving everything you could ever want, while finding fulfillment in the process.
This is something we often learn too late in life, or worse yet, until we’re on our deathbeds.
Avoid this fate.
Decide you’re committed to maximizing your potential and finding fulfillment, now.
Decide you’ll master the principles and mechanics that underlie both.
Because when you do, the experience of your life journey becomes the success itself.
This is when you know you’ve truly self actualized.
Every obstacle turns into opportunity.
Every challenge becomes growth not decay.
This is the state you need to be in to be so happy all that you’re high off life, and you have so much control and agency that you don’t desire much more and are able to derive so much gratitude and appreciation for all that’s around you.
You’re so excited for your future that you don’t even care if goals get achieved (but they will 10X).
You’re having so much fun on the journey and experience it’s creating in the meantime.
This will help you avoid the ultimate regret when this person said:
- “The definition of Hell is when on your last day of living, the person you were meets the person you could have been.”
I’m launching an immersive coaching bootcamp, and to light a fire under myself, I’m taking my own immersive coaching bootcamp that walks through kicking off.
As I get to the portion of the program that’s beginning to craft the marketing/messaging,we’ve been told to go ahead and hit the market to test, receive feedback, and discover what our pricing could be.
These are all iterative items that take some playing around with and honing to figure out. Now, I know very well with my skill level and experience what I could charge prospective clients, and could probably hit the ground running hitting the exact clients I want and charge my premium price, but why rush?
I’ll learn so much by offering early adopter offers and working with different profiles of people at different price points. This timing at the beginning of my business launch where I’m discovering and learning will never come back to me once I’m out of this phase.
The learning itself is a one time opportunity and I’m going to savor it!
Therefore, I’m taking the course slowly, really getting a deep understanding of how everything and everyone works, and allowing the launch process to flow with quality and plenty of creative fermentation.
This is because I have the efficacy and patience to properly be able to judge the time cost and thereby take that time.
So many people are in a state of what I’m calling the self-actualization misnomer, where the perception of “arriving” makes you satisfied with your life.
If you reach that state where you’re content and not growing, that’s the beginning of dying and the last thing you want to do.
So many people are striving toward what’s generally perceived as self-actualization where they’ve checked all the life boxes, but don’t appreciate that maximizing potential comes from remaining a student and remaining hungry always.
The happiness and maximizing comes from the quality of it’s pursuit.
True self-actualization is when you embrace the fact that the human being can’t stop growing and has no limits.
The human being who has the genius to make the pursuit itself the happiness.
No other species can do that and that is why the human being is able to create technology that would appear miraculous only a few decades ago.
As Jason Silva says, we’re becoming the gods:
This is the next level of potential, and so many people are on the one yard line.
- They’re right there on the cusp of breaking out.
- They’re an inch away from being their best and know how to get there, but don’t.
- They feel unfulfilled though they don’t know why.
- This may be a mid-life crisis or just realizing they haven’t known what they’ve wanted for so long but have been plenty busy a long the way doing what they were supposed to do.
It’s these people I want to reach. These people I want to transcend to be their best so the world can benefit.
Here are 4 mistakes you must avoid on your journey or before you start it.
1. You Don’t Know How to Know What To Want — And Therefore Aren’t Able To Be Effective
Knowing how to know is required to be effective in figuring out what desires will lead to our long term fulfillment.
- If you can’t visualize yourself having what you want, you don’t know how to know what you want.
- If you don’t know the mechanics of fulfillment, and the needs you’re striving to fulfill, you don’t know how to know what you want.
- If you don’t have the skills to observe your ego from a place of non-attachment, you haven’t done the inner work to effectively know what’s worthy of committing to vs. the simple “more” the ego wants.
These voids point to the hard fact that we humans can’t know what we want unless we have a proper understanding and possession of:
- How emotions work.
- How thoughts physically affect us.
- How much control we actually have in shaping our realities.
- How we can manufacture feelings whenever we want to.
- How we can manufacture states of mind.
- How feeling unhappy is a survival mechanism.
- How consciousness works.
The hard dirty first world fact is that we’re in control of all of this, and choose the opposite because of the way our brain and mind has evolved to cooperate in large groups.
- Thinking
- Planning
- Language
- Gossip
- Lying
All by-products of the sophisticated human mind that’s trying to survive today.
- People can control how they feel, they choose not to.
- People can create a high state and maintain it whenever they want, they choose not to.
- People can perceive the world the way they they’d like to see it, they choose not to.
The fact is, getting what you want isn’t the answer.
Knowing how to know is.
After you know, you’ll then realize you know how to be fulfilled, and will often find you’ll wake up to why you originally wanted what you wanted and why.
This is called consciousness evolution, and you’ll understand why and how to have everything you actually want and need, now.
2. If You Don’t Know How You’ll Expect To FeelAnd What Those Feelings Mean
How do you expect you’ll feel after achieving what you want?
Where do feelings play a role in the goal setting process?
Feelings are what most often cause our thoughts and should be thought of as physical things. This is why intuition works and feelings can be felt.
The six needs we all need to be fulfilled also create feelings.
This is why you’re literally able to be fulfilled, for free, right now.
Because feelings, fulfillment and expansion are all we’re all ultimately looking for.
If you can feel however you want whenever you want to, you’re able to be fulfilled each and every day and remain that way for the rest of your life.
Other events are just the things that happen to happen a long the way.
- At this point, you have the courage to begin making decisions that lead you toward personal expansiveness.
- At this point, you begin making decisions that lead you in the direction of being, not having.
- At this point, you perhaps may teach, rather than do.
You finally see the light, and realize, that you have and always had everything you need, and that things are only as meaningful as you make them, and lead to the feelings and fulfillment you can possess right now.
This is the point of abundance where you see everything around you as a blessing.
You won’t strive at this point, because you’ll have.
You won’t need money at this point, it will come to you and be there because you’re able to value things: the air, water, food, roof and relationships make you wealthy.
It’s losing sight of this abundance that causes so much pain and not understanding how to handle luxury that’s made people sick.
This isn’t to say you can’t have those things or their bad, because why not take a shortcut to fun when you can? I certainly do whether it’s my favorite Tom Ford sneakers or love for love for cool backpacks.
Again it’s simply understanding what they mean to you, now.
- What does that handbag stand for and mean to you?
- What does that big house or car mean to you?
Again, not bad, just know. Know you’re chasing feelings, always. And that feelings that come from the ego are always transient because the ego in all of us consumes insatiably and is never satisfied.
So choose how you want to feel, right now.
Feel good. Do it now, don’t wait. Do it always.
3. If You Don’t Know How To Continually Remain Fulfilled Before Knowing What You Want
What will sustain you for the rest of your life?
Hard question, no?
Most expect life to be an up and down journey of hard ship and struggle, and grand events and highs of happiness.
That’s whether they’re surviving in poverty or living in luxury. It’s simply different trials and events that are created by the mind and it’s reactions.
Trials and events that are created because of the same survivalist brain that’s wired to keep us unhappy and stressed to ensure our body pushes us to continue surviving.
In the first world context of being our best, living the best life we can and knowing what we want, how do we ensure we remain fulfilled?
What’s scary is how simple it can be if you wanted it to be. But you don’t.
Because in most moments, you identify with your ego and the ego is insatiably unhappy and sees those things as more food it can endlessly consume.
- If you’re identifying with your ego, you derive significance from feeling bad.
- If you identify with your ego, you derive importance from complaining.
- If you identify with your ego, you like feeling wronged.
The fact is, events don’t make you react/respond or create anything. Your ego or observer perceives them in a way that has you choose.
I catch myself doing this all the time. If I’m not alert, I’ll let my ego get triggered. If I am alert, I embrace every event with awe which usually elicits the behavior and outcome I want from the situation and/or have the courage to tell the hard truth.
If you’re fulfilled, you choose to embrace the flow of life and see them as challenges that make you grow and expand, and add to your journey.
If you’re not fulfilled and you’re striving to ‘get bigger’, you choose to perceive challenges as events that cause stress or decay.
So how do we find fulfillment? Here’s the process Tony Robbins recommends.
Every action we take is because of one or more of these six needs:
1. Certainty: knowing you have control enough to avoid pain and gain pleasure.
2. Uncertainty/Variety: the need for the unknown, change, new stimuli.
3. Significance: feeling important and/or needed.
4. Connection/Love: a strong feeling of closeness or union with someone or something.
5. Growth: expansion, capability and understanding
In any moment you have, you’re yearning for one of these things. Every action that’s had, is taken to feel one of these things.
Next time you perceive, see, do or want something, recognize which need you’re going for and feel it right then and there.
What you’ll learn is if you raise your consciousness, you’ll be able to feel these needs now.
With a high state of consciousness, you have the skills to manage fear. And if you’re able to manage fear, you can manage most events as most of what we do is driven by fear in one form or another whether it’s checking Facebook or striving for something.
An easy way to think about levels of consciousness and raising yours is referencing Dr. David Hawkins consciousness map.
Hawkins committed his life to exploring the nature of consciousness and how it affects our minds, bodies and realities.
Hawkins gives a great example in his book,Letting Go, of a story on how different levels of consciousness would handle a car accident.
I’m approximating and paraphrasing though here are the examples he gave.
Approximate levels of Shame through Grief: Something like “oh I’m such an idiot, this always happens to me. Life sucks”
Approximate levels of Fear through Pride: “ah what an asshole. I’ll sue his pants off if he tries anything. My day is ruined.”
Approximate levels Courage through Acceptance: “Well these things happen. Thanks goodness I have insurance. I hope he does too. We’ll figure it out either way.”
Approximate levels from Reason through Joy: “I bet it’s a coincidence we connected on this day. I’m so happy my insurance company exists. Let’s see what we can learn from this experience.”
Approximate levels from Peace through Enlightenment: “What’s brought me to this person today? Ah who knew, you’re the biggest real estate developer in town and I’m an attorney. Isn’t this great! Let’s grab lunch and help each other.”
As this different perception of the same events indicates, it’s we who have control to see things how we want, and therefore control our minds and feelings, and therefore thoughts and bodies (keeping hormonal responses that harm us in check like cortisol).
As Hawkins says further, if you have a fear of missing a thing (most of why we want anything), feeling or need, you can simply recognize the fear and let it go.
Often, when you relinquish the underlying fear that’s driving the action, you won’t require that action or strive to have that feeling anyway.
You’ll realize you’ll have it, now. That’s the most empowering feeling in the world.
This is why people retreat to solitude when they achieve this level of consciousness, they know they have everything and just want to remain in high consciousness.
4. You Don’t Do The Self Inquiry Required To Understand How The Intangible Becomes Tangible
Humans are the only species (for the most part at a sophisticated level) who have the capability and capacity to visualize a goal in the future, plan for it and take daily action toward it for a long period of time.
We’ve evolved so much, that we even create beliefs and thought that literally trick us into ensuring we don’t get what we think we want! This is the reality of what holds so many people back.
In our recent evolutionary past of hunter gathering, goals and planning used to be very short term like hunting or following a trail. Goals that were way more immediate and often forced the presence of mind required for accelerated learning (chased by other predators, win the hunt or starve) and goal achievement to happen. Now our goals are complex and long term, and we have multiple goals for multiple parts of our existence whether it’s work, health, financial, relationships and spiritual.
Hunter gatherers were mobile and didn’t accumulate wealth because it couldn’t be carried around. Relationships had a very direct purpose and fulfillment and satisfaction were luxuries if they were even thought about, and not in a way we’re accustomed to them today.
I doubt they cared about maximizing their potential and living a fulfilled life.
Richard Leider has spent 30 years with the Hadza tribe in Tanzania, in this post he writes specifically on the purpose of hunter gatherers, he writes:
- “Everyone shares. Everyone serves. Everyone leads. That’s the power in [immediate] purpose.
You live in the now, since today’s “immediate return” (purpose moment) is the primary focus of your day.”
The Hadza wake up every day to the reality that time is precious and limited; living close to life and death, they realize every one of us will die. The wise person seeks fulfillment in the present moment. The Hadza appear to experience more joy in a day than some of us do in a lifetime. Living in the now and living on the edge brings forth the power in purpose.
Hunter gatherers lived in a fasted state out of necessity, and ‘health’ by picking your diet was a program that didn’t exist. We now have to learn about fasted states in an article and go on a lifestyle changes to achieve our health goal.
This is all of course progress and the reason why the human species won, because they could cooperate in large numbers, forge alliances, politic, think and achieve goals.
Now that we’re in 2017, we want so much more and we’ve made goal achievement so much more complicated. We need to bring the way we set goals back to the way the hunter gatherers did, by manufacturing immediacy and the forced presence of mind to learn things at the level of the nervous system.
How does this translate to a first world goal?
It begins with your effectiveness. The right mindset, skill set and tool set.
With the right mindset, you’ll learn and practice.
With the right amount of practice, you’ll develop your skills to become competent and confident.
And with the right toolset, you’ll accelerate your results and master your field.
With all three, you have the presence of mind and confidence to possess the ultimate power: Absolute Resourcefulness
This is when you’re in a state that re-writes the rules of your field.
The point at which you don’t miss.
You’re the person that doesn’t lose.
You’re relentless and not winning isn’t even a possibility.
Your state of mind and commitment lead you to the ends of the earth to find what you need whether it’s capital or skills.
This is why some immigrants came to America with nothing and became billionaires.
This is why some of the poorest people who have been through psychological trauma have what it takes to uplift themselves out of poverty. They not only ‘figure it out’, not figuring it out was never an option.
This is the difference between the artists that make it with ease and grace and others who struggle and don’t.
If you’re deeply decided and commited, you’re absolutely resourceful.
In a state of absolute resourcefulness, you’re mind is on fire when you work.
In a state of absolute resourcefulness, you’re day to day is a riveting journey no matter what happens.
With absolute resourcefulness, you’re so committed you visualize the book deal happening with so much confidence that you don’t even care whether it happens or not.
You’re going to master your field and have a ton of fun a long the way.
This is the secret of Michael Jordan who always worked and Lenny Kravitz who locked himself in an apartment and played music until success happened.
But it’s still not about “working so hard” or being a machine though it may appear that way and that’s ultimately what the process becomes.
It’s about tapping your inner greatness that everyone has in them so it becomes fun. It’s you, expanding, and whatever you do is a reflection of that.
It may sound like I’m a proponent to “work so hard” but I’m not. Top performance comes requires rest and recovery. It’s a fine line to walk (and what makes it hard).
What I am saying, is forced resilience brings out the best in people because it creates the right context for themselves so they can succeed.
Their boats are burned.
Conclusion
With absolute resourcefulness, you have to go out of your way to take time off because working isn’t work, it’s a journey that gives you a daily thrill.
This isn’t a ploy to say “work harder” though that becomes the by-product. I have to force myself to take leisure time each day because I’m on a riveting journey of reading and writing.
By doing the deep inner work, you’ll understand how consciousness, fulfillment and emotion dance together to create the high performing state of absolute resourcefulness — the culmination of mindset, skill set and tool set that allow you to achieve anything and become whoever you aspire to be.
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