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The currency of life are capacities and distinctions.
The less capacities you have the closer you are to the bottom.
What? The bottom of what?
The bottom of the power pyramid. Where personal power, personal authority is the currency.
Asking what those capacities are, those seven is a little dumb, but just think about it.
So what does everyone who went to school has to have as capacity? Reading, using language, i.e. writing and speaking, adding and subtracting numbers, recognizing faces, smells, sounds, telling the time, basic stuff.
You may be able to cook.
You may be able to clean.
And of course, you may be able drive…
But these are not really capacities: they use capacities, but they are complex activities. Not VERY complex, and yet, complex nevertheless.
If you look, parents who take their children to play soccer or sports strengthen the base capacities, but don’t add any new capacities. Especially if the parent chauffeurs the child to those activities.
On the other hand intelligent parents enroll their children in extracurricular activities, activities that activate capacities beyond the base capacities.
Spiritual capacities… DNA capacities. They are beyond those base 7-8-9.
Playing a musical instrument,- reading musical notes
- pantomime
- playing chess,
- playing bridge (card game),
- photography (not just snapping pictures),
- art,
- acting,
- languages,
- choir,
- debate team,
- spelling bees,
- electronics,
- archaeology,
- science museum classes,
- movie classes…
Those more intelligent parents are diligently building a human who is more capable and has a chance to be more, do more, have more in life.
Your state of low number of capacities is a testimony of your parents not encouraging you to expand.
Some of my students awakened, activated capacities by virtue of their travels. By virtue of taking jobs that needed new capacities. Started businesses that needed new capacities.
But most people prefer an unchallenged life: it is good enough. They learned their view of what is enough from their environment. That is why it is so rare that someone can break out and be more than what’s predictable by the environment.
I recently watched a video where a person was talking to his two brothers who remained limited to what the environment considered enough. But he broke out. The trigger was that as a child he read the Martin Luther King famous ‘going to the mountaintop’ speech with the right diction, the right emotion. That simple act became the foundation of his future… his future that suddenly required capacities his environment considered beyond what’s enough.
Traveling
Traveling to a foreign country can be an excellent starting point for growth. But pay attention: it is traveling in a way where you HAVE TO interact with the locals, where you’ll have a tight budget, so you ARE exposed to different cultures, to different ways of communicating. And you need to adjust fast or you will be miserable, or robbed, or even jailed…
But even if bad stuff happens, something quite irreversible happened to you: you see that you could have expand… and you could have chosen to expand. You may be able to see the value of expanding, whereas at home you can just stay comfortably the same.
When I was nearing 18, I went to England to be a maid. An au pair. My father was in the government, we had staff at home. He had a driver, we, the family had a house-cleaner… In England suddenly I was the one doing the cleaning, the clothes and dish-washing, the ironing, the shopping, making and serving tea for everyone… in bed. I also did some of the cooking for a family. Serving when there were guests… and myself eating in the kitchen, standing.
I grew some capacities that summer… but I didn’t grow them fast enough. I was slapped a few times by the master of the house… and was sent packing in the end. Disgraced.
After that summer I became unrecognizable. Hardship was nothing to me. I became mentally and physically tougher that summer. I had to… either that or breaking.
Looking back, I don’t know if I actually chose it or not, but from that point on the hardships, the difficulties, the challenges kept on coming.
I met most head on. Some flattened me… but I always bounced back and readied myself for more.
What was the capacity? To be unbeatable… by anything.
Unfinished business
By the time I came to the US at age 38, I had lived in 3 countries, spoke six languages, had two advanced degrees. What none of those experiences help with was the childhood hurts. I carried a large burden of unfinished business from ‘home’.
It took me another 30 years to get rid of that unfinished business. Good guidance is hard to come by. Therapy wasn’t it…
Now, I expanded myself through the hard path, through hardships.
I don’t regret it. Having gone through, successfully, many forms of challenge and hardship makes me a better coach than someone who learned things from a book or a course. Life is a tougher teacher.
The key to coaching is being able to connect, through compassion, to what a person is going through. Otherwise you are talking AT them.
Who I have a hard time to connect to, to relate to, is someone with no capacities beyond the seven…
That is why I should refuse to coach or work with people who have too little going for them. Unfortunately 99% of humanity, and especially the people who want to work with me are of that ilk.
When I see some limiting aspect of the person I can relate to I may take them on. Limiting aspect like ethnicity. Like trying to fit it… Trying to shrink to fit in…
Well… you can start growing on your own and work your way up to where I can work with you.
Do you have capacities beyond the 7-8-9?
One of the most accurate tests I know is the ‘skill assessment’ test from the book What Color Is Your Parachute.
It tests what skills you have. Skills you have used successfully. Skills you have enjoyed using through accomplishing projects, from beginning to end.
Most people have had none, or one. Unless you have had at least seven of such projects, you are not really trainable, because you don’t even have any need for training. You are on the level that you earned having no capacities.
It is never too late. It is not over until you die
So if you wanted to grow, if you wanted to expand, then the fastest and most effective way is to start creating a project for yourself, and take it to accomplishing the result you set.
A project has many steps towards a specific and measurable result… in time. Meaning: it has a deadline.
Here is one project one of my students could set up, but hasn’t.
By Christmas I’ll be able to cook a full meal that is good enough to invite people to. All vegan, all using the items on my food list only.
Challenging? Yeah. Worth doing? Yeah. Builds capacities? Hell yeah.
Or here is another, another student of mine could set up, if he were interested in causing his own growth:
By Christmas I’ll have a set of short videos. Each video accurately expressing one or more of the 7 universal micro-expressions on the seven facial expressions chart.
You see, to expand, you need to expand… Huh?
To do something, you don’t need to know how to do it. You need to put yourself in the middle of it, like getting into deep water, where you either swim or you sink. No other way to expand. Swim or sink. Do or not. How to comes once you know the doing. Then it can be improved upon. Not ahead of time.
The non-expanding students I have observed all wand to know ahead of time how to do the thing I ask them to do. That is why they are not expanding.
PS: I have been experimenting. People who have only 5-8 capacities start to climb when they accept and use the DNA activation of the capacity of humility. The capacity to say you don’t know anything, please teach me. I am incompetent in what you are trying to teach. Feels impossible to say that? Now you know why you haven’t been growing, why you haven’t been expanding.
It seems that even growing capacities follows a process…
PPS: read the text on the picture just above. Then email me or post as a comment what you think the superpower you were born with, that each person was born with. Don’t guess… look before you post.
not quite, but close. The superpower I am talking about is innate, and every single person has it. Try again, please.
The superpower looks like curiosity to me.