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If you find yourself behind the eight ball… or way behind…
I am surprised this is just surfacing now.
Someone being behind their rent, behind other payments, or behind taking care of their health and the numbers are going crazy.
Getting to what seems to be unmanageable.
What do you do?
Your/my inability to be with what doesn’t work will take you there. Just give it time.
The sound of scrambling is everywhere.
So without making you wrong for what you have done wrong…
Let’s see how we would suggest that you dig yourself out from under the rubble.
Step 1: tell the truth about how it is. To yourself and maybe to one other person.
I have been there. Once. Twice.
Life is going to give you the same lesson again and again until you learn what you need to learn.
For me the lesson was: no one is coming to rescue me.
And as long as I had resentment about it I didn’t learn the lesson.
The lesson to learn really is this:
You don’t need rescuing. You never did.
Your original incident
In your original incident there was nothing wrong, therefore you didn’t need rescuing. Whatever you said was wrong is now giving you this lesson to learn.
Whatever is happening is because of what you said in your original incident. And as long as it seems to you as something wrong is happening TO YOU… you’ll have it on repeat, but in an ever stronger, ever bigger way.
So you need to buckle down, and look at what happened, and see that whatever you said never happened. You weren’t worthless, you weren’t left out in the cold, you weren’t abandoned. Or whatever the f… you have been saying.
You caused the drama by what you said. Otherwise there was no drama.
And if you managed to enroll other people in your victimhood: un-enroll them… asap.
You’ll know you are done because you’ll feel lighter… I think.
Check in with me if you are not sure… I’ll muscletest it for you. The question I’ll ask: did you learn the lesson?
So what is the lesson?
The lesson is that you are creating life one sentence, one action at a time. You are and always have.
What you have is what you’ve created. YOU. Created. Unconsciously, but created nevertheless.
And if you created it, you can un-create it… But if it took 40 years, it will take time to undo it.
So what do you need to uncreate it?
The unmanageable finances, the almost hopeless health, the life that doesn’t work.
Your first action needs to be ownership.
Own the fact that you did it. You created it. You did thousands of small actions, said thousands of things to create it.
So own it, or you’ll remain a victim of it forever. And victims have no power…
- God was invented for victims.
- Positive thinking was invented for victims.
- Attraction was invented for victims.
Victims who are too weak, too fragile, and too much in love with lying and pretense to take on their own power.
You either choose victim, or you choose power. I recommend power.
Power doesn’t mean easy. It also doesn’t mean fast. And it doesn’t mean you’ll know suddenly what to do. You probably won’t.
But when it is all up to you, then you’ll either find a way or you’ll ask for help. And this time you’ll USE the help you get, instead of being arrogant about it.
You can’t see it, probably, but whatever you said in your original incident was said with arrogance. And you haven’t stopped being arrogant ever since.
So it is time to get humble…
I call the next phase simplification.
Sit down and look at everything that seems to be on your todo list… and see what is essential, what is not essential, and designate what is not essential has to go for the trash heap, no matter how much money you spent on it.
If you don’t know what is essential, ask for help… Your feelings won’t serve you well here. But in essence: essential is what is OPERATIVE… the life, the business probably would not survive without it.
For example my business would not survive without me having products and services to sell.
You should be left with only a handful of essentials that you intend to keep.
And now come the phase of negotiating.
You’ll negotiate with people. You’ll negotiate with your body. And you’ll negotiate with yourself.
Don’t do anything dramatic. It can be too much too soon… and it can kill you.
A client with high weight and high blood pressure wants to go to the gym four times a week. Instead she should instead go to the mall, and walk… or if you read this article in weather when you can walk outside… just walk. Flat surface… just walk.
And if you diet: focus on eating less, just eating less. Instead of a crash diet you won’t be willing to keep forever.
The goal is to create a new life, not to do something rash and then go back to the same kind of wasteful, indulgent life you have had.
This applies to every part of life. Money, food, and how you spend your life.
This is where you need to negotiate with your body and yourself.
And about other things: you need to negotiate something that you are able and willing to honor forever.
But warning: neediness smells far and wide.
Don’t try to sell, trade with anyone who will pay you cents on the dollar… because you are needy. You’ll regret it. When you are in a hole, stop digging.
Creditors are willing to negotiate, even if the first person you talk to says no.
If you have done the 67 step coaching program, remember the step #40 with Practical Pessimism, Conrad Hilton’s story. But if you have demonstrated no or low integrity, shore your integrity up, because if you build anything on lies it will crumble.
And if you have been a liar, the people around you know it and won’t trust you. It’s OK… just know yourself. You may get no support, no agreement, no one remaining to help you. Employees, family. Just remember: when a ship is sinking, the rats run off first. It’s OK.
Intend for the situation to be the way it is… Intend until you manage to look with sober eyes.
Eyes with any emotion are distorting your view, and lowering your intelligence.
And you need your intelligence more than ever.
Fear, panic, anxiety are not helpful. Neither is depression. Temporary ‘solutions’ are not useful. Sex, drug and rock’n’roll… will just take you deeper.
One of the issues with restructuring, restarting, recovering is overwhelm.
Overwhelm is a real issue… And emotional issue. A cognitive issue. A discipline issue.
I am not a marshal arts practitioner, but I read a lot of thrillers where the main character fights, often several attackers.
His training is to deal with one single issue at a time. Not to try to do more than one thing.
When you have something in your hand and see something falling, you often let go of what you had in your hand for the sake of catching the falling thing…
This is the consequence of forgetting your one thing…
Overwhelm can only be eliminated if and when you pick the one thing to do…
…and you do that, regardless of the ‘alligators’ that threaten to take a bite out of you.
Of course before you decide on the one thing, you may want to ponder. Shall I pick something important? Or something difficult? Maybe something easy?
Lots of advice says: start with the hard one, and in no time you’ll be almost done.
I, instead, prefer the ‘prime the pump’ method: I start with something that is not very difficult, and have an experience of myself that I can… Given my Gentian bend, a really hard task would get my goat… kill my enthusiasm and my will to live… and that is not what I want.
In my experience with people in trouble, the hardest thing is to prioritize… To decide what is essential and what is not. And then with the essential list, to decide what is the most OPERATIVE step to do. Operative meaning something that may be able to turn the tide, and make everything easy.
If you at the point where you know that without help you are screwed… you can ask me to help you get some clarity.
Emergency coachingIf you are not ready, not able, or not willing to get one-on-one guidance, I recommend that you get the two ‘clarity is power’ videos.
Get the two clarity videos
