Keeping Your Word

I worked with a group of execs last Saturday at Moonview, and for multiple reasons used the Tibetans to anchor the conversation, rather than FlowFit. I can teach FlowFit during one-on-one sessions, or if I have a continuing relationship. But what if the client is walking out the door in an hour, and I'll never see them again?

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I have to give them something to shift their breathing, which can have a massively powerful effect on stress levels. And the Tibetans seem my best bet for this, due to simplicity. A note: if you can keep your breathing low and slow, even under stress, you can keep it from devolving to strain. And if you can prevent stress from becoming strain, the organism responds by becoming stronger. Assuming you've chosen goals in all three arenas, and are moving toward them, stress will come at you fast and furious...but if you maintain your forward progress while staying centered, you will grow.

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Note please how much of this is related to keeping your word to yourself. Discipline. Honesty. If you want to increase your motivation to do something, come up with a dozen solid reasons for doing it. Invariably, when someone says they can't maintain a program of some kind, when you ask them their reasons for sticking to it, those reasons are weak and watery. There's no bedrock there. If you are serious about doing something you've never done, you have to have more reasons to DO it than to AVOID it. That requires digging deep.

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For instance: if you commit to I.F., or the Tibetans, or writing a thousand words a day, or meditating daily, or spending an hour a day in direct communication with your family...I promise you that if these things are not a part of your life already, you will devise countless "reasonable" reasons not to do them.

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And what it boils down to is: can you keep your word to yourself, or not? If you can, you can accomplish miracles. If you cannot, it simply doesn't matter how smart you are, or what skills you have. You will never accomplish all you could in life, for that single reason. Learning to tell yourself the truth, learning to keep focus, learning to calm the mind until the illusions peel away...these are core steps along the path to self discovery.

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If you cannot keep your word to yourself, I beg you not to pursue an artistic freelance career. Go after a job where someone will breathe down your neck, and force you to stay on-task. Otherwise, down the road, you will be in for serious pain. And I mean hitting-the-skids, can't-earn-a-living type pain.

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And the question of the day is: without naming names, who was the person you knew with the highest level of potential, who crashed and burned the worst due to their own actions/inactions? To what personality flaw would you attribute this?

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