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The secret of correct growth, for people, trees, a business, is the correct boundaries and restrictions, directing the energy into a restricted channel.
Correct growth requires energy, a lot of energy…
Without restriction or with incorrect boundaries the growth will be limited, or along the wrong lines.
But in today’s day and age restrictions, outside restrictions are harder to come by…
Parents are permissive. They think that is good parenting. There is plenty to go around… food, clothing, everything. So the child never has to do anything, and they don’t…
If you look at a river, if there is no boundary, it causes flood, or a very wide delta… and it is no longer a river, no energy there, it is more like a lake.
If you force smoke into a chimney, it goes up… if you let it go where it wants to go, it covers large territories, poisoning people.
If you have all day to complete a task, like a homework, you leave it to the end, and most likely it won’t get done, or it will be hurried so you can get back to playing, or something other non-restraining activity.
Result: around you nothing gets done, and you never become anything worth becoming… you are a bum, even if you have a place to live, and even a job.
This is not personal. This is how life works. In every area of life.
You need restraints to become more, better, to grow.
If you watch dogs, they need discipline, discipline is a restraint: they know what to do and when to do it. Trees grow to the sky. And humans become smart, and successful, and someone they can be proud of.
Nowadays you need to invent your restraints, or you need to HIRE someone to give you restraints… coaching with the right coach is such an arrangement. I am not the right coach for that, unfortunately. I probably could be… but my track record says: I am not.
Even an accountability partner can cause unprecedented growth if they are uncompromising with you… but the moment they get lax… you stop growing.
The secret method where you create your own restraints is what I am going to show…
I know, I know, you can’t be trusted. That is YOUR track record. So let’s invent some ways that you can gently turn yourself around, and become self-managing.
If you don’t know how, you are definitely not alone. Peter Drucker, famed management guru wrote a book that has been printed and downloaded in millions of copies (I am guessing) telling you that even after reading that book, most people are clueless… and more importantly, many people who own the book never read it…
here is a short video version:
or the audiobook:
They want the result but not the process. And this is the disease of our times… we want something for nothing… all of us.
Some of us will do what it takes… A grand total of a quarter of 1 percent of us. The rest: we don’t do it, and still expect the results.
Doing only some of what it takes is considered not doing… by the way.
I can see it in my challenges: The Sight challenge, the water energizing challenge…
Complete and thorough are considered alien territory for most. For the 99.75%.
Now, truth be told, in some areas you may allow discipline to guide your actions, but in others: no way!
The reason for that inconsistency is hidden in your Self-talk… it was for me. It still is… I still don’t quite know what made me, for almost 70 years, struggle with having more money than was strictly needed. I have some hunches, but no clarity, yet.
But it looks like you don’t need to know, you can start building some restraints for yourself right away.
About a year ago I bought a subscription to a newsletter. At the time it was prohibitively expensive for me: I really lived hand to mouth then. But I set a challenge for myself. I said: I will spend this money if I can promise that I will make the money back before my next payment is due, and do that every month.
I didn’t see where the money was going to come from, but Source said (I muscletested while connected to Source… that means that the muscles said what Source says…) “You can do it”. Interestingly it had the voice of a one time client and friend, Barry. When I asked how he made it to millionaire without even an elementary school education by age 30, he said: the secret was his mother. Every time he set a new challenge for himself, his mother said “You can do it”…
At the time I didn’t hear that he said ‘set a new challenge’. Maybe you don’t hear it either…
This conversation was 33 years ago. I just heard for the first time: ‘new challenge he set for himself’.
But that is the essence: he set challenges for himself, then played his mother’s voice in his head “You can do it” and little by little he climbed higher and higher. At that time he was very rich, but he was fat, and he ate a lot. Later he set himself a new challenge: he started exercising and became a thin man. What triggered that is the death of his brother from a heart attack. He made sure he was going to live.
I have lost touch with him when I moved to Syracuse New York… almost twenty years ago.
OK, how do you create a restraint for yourself?
I watched a video the other day, where there was a self-restraint and a circumstance…
In the end the narrator says: invent a do or die restraint for yourself, like the conquerors of America did: they burned the ships. You do or die.
I have my own methods to force my energies, like a river, between two edges.
- Fear of being homeless on one edge. If I don’t make enough money to pay my bills, then I’ll be homeless and no one will bail me out.
- If I don’t take care of my health, I have no health insurance to lean on.
- If I don’t do the work I do, no one will do it… and the world will be worse off for it.
And, of course, the declared purpose of my life on the other edge… making a difference, blah blah blah.
But in the area of money I used to have no restraints: the moment I had more money than was strictly needed, I would give it away, waste it, or simply stop generating revenue, until I was in dire straits…
What is dire straits? Originally it was a seafarer expression. A strait is a narrow opening in landmass, often rocky, and the water, as it flows from one body of water to the next, tends to be stormy. So it’s dangerous: you can easily end up on the rocks… and lose everything.
So that is what I needed to force me to make money… lol. Being in dire straits. (Oh, by the way, the expression ‘strait and narrow’ is using that same narrow opening between landmass… and that is what you have to adhere to to get to the happiness, or good life, or heaven… the principle of the Anna Karenina Principle.)
Obviously this is not a popular principle… people prefer meandering, wishing, moaning, and doing, in essence, nothing for what they want.
So when I, due to what I learned in that newsletter, started to generate a surplus of money every month, I had to invent a restraint, a dire strait in spite of the extra money.
And I did. I call it: Rob yourself wealthy
In essence, you need to create an ‘eye of the needle’ circumstance, where you either get through and go to heaven, or don’t… and go to hell… (forgive me if my knowledge of all things religion is spotty at best.)
So this is what I did: as soon as I had five hundred bucks to move, I moved it into an account it is tricky to take money out of. Possible but tricky.
That left me in dire straits… so I had no choice but keep on generating more… so I can pay my rent. Remember, being homeless is the scary monster that keeps me on the run. I tried it in 1985, and barely survived it.
It worked for me…
Of course if you earn your money with work you don’t like, my exact method won’t work well for you.
You need to see how you can create a do or die situation for yourself. I am available for coaching to help you with it.
I have a long history with this, by the way, money is just the most current area I have created power.
It began back around 1997. I invented a declaration that has managed to keep me straight… by creating a dire strait.
My car was in the shop, and I didn’t have a ride to go to my weekly seminar 17 miles away. I called the seminar leader and said: “I am not coming tonight. I don’t have a ride.”
The woman said: “I know who you are…” As an empath I heard the condescension in her voice… ugh.
I said in my head: “No you don’t!” I probably said bitch, or something like that… but what I said after that is what made all the difference “There is no way I am going to be anything less than magnificent”
And in this situation that meant taking a bus to the train station. Taking the train. and taking a taxi to the seminar site.
It took me two hours… but I did it. Because there was no way I was going to be anything less than magnificent.
Defiance.
If you think badly of me, I’ll defy you. If life throws hurdles in my way, I’ll defy it.
Obviously you need to build up to this. The measure of the ability to defy, to go beyond where it is comfortable or easy, to demonstrate superhuman effort, is called, in my Starting Point Measurements, measure #9, your TLB…
You could call it mental toughness, toughness, but I think TLB captures it best. TLB stands for Twitchy Little Bastard score… you are weak, you are twitchy, you avoid pain, difficulty, commitment, anything that is hard or looks hard. You are a Twitchy Little Bastard.
You can also try to win every step or everything, be clever, beat people in every game… that is low TLB as well.
And as everything, it is not a yes/no phenomenon, it is on a 1-100 scale.
Some of my students have raised their TLB since working with me.
Some really high achievers in the world have a TLB as high as 70%. My coaches (I have now two) have a TLB of 30% and 50% respectively.
My TLB is 50%… compared to you I am solid like a rock. Compared to what’s possible, I am a weakling.
My favorite hero succeeds in whatever endeavor they are engaged in, against incredible odds.
There can’t be a hero if there are no odds, if there are no restraints, if there are no dire straits.
That makes for a lousy story… If you like those no dire strait stories, you are probably a mush cookie, a Milquetoast, a TLB 1.
Every self-imposed ‘dire strait’ grows your TLB score. The higher the better…
One of my students has started to walk-dance with weights publicly, even though he is shy, and he gives to much hoot about other people’s opinion.
At this point he takes his whole family with himself… the family is like a buffer, a safety buffer…
When he can do it by himself, then it will be a lot more painful, and a lot more TLB growing. His TLB, at present is 11%.
He needs to get out of his own head, and just do… heedless of how he looks.
That is one way to create a dire strait… On the other side of the strait is a whole different business for him that is more fun, more profitable, and more interesting.
Now, you may invent all kinds of things for yourself… and then you don’t do it. This is totally normal… normal as self-hate is normal.
What is not normal is self-love.
The number of people who consistently love themselves is so small, it is hard to express it in percentages.
Mainly because the key to self love is not known to most people. It’s probably the exact opposite of what would make sense… self-indulging.
But, of course whatever makes sense almost never works. And what works almost never makes any sense.
You’ll never stumble onto what causes self-love… and what causes self-hate… You need to learn from someone who knows.
I teach this in the Self-love course. The fundamentals were taught in a workshop two years ago… and you can buy the recording of this workshop.
And if you like it, if you want to pursue it and bring self-love into your life, you can add the live workshops to it…
Get the Love yourself workshop
