This inspired vibe has many forms, which include aspects like caring, playfulness, happiness, passion, curiosity, exploration, love, and oneness. There are countless ways to be in the flow. The common element is that when I’m in the flow, I feel open, connected, and graceful.

It took years of public speaking practice to reach the point where I could experience this flow consistently while in front of an audience. When I first began on this path, I started as many others do. I focused on the words I was saying. I learned to write speeches. Then I learned how to deliver what I’d prepared.

I attended workshops on how to improve at writing and delivering speeches. I networked with successful speakers. I got involved in Toastmasters International and the National Speakers Association.

I also stretched myself by competing in speech contests, winning several of them. I did comedy improv for a few months and performed in a couple shows. I kept pushing myself to get better.

In the long run, however, I found this approach to public speaking to be a dead end for me. It always felt a bit unnatural for me. This style of speaking, while very popular and well developed, was too rigid and controlled for me. I can’t speak like that and be in the flow of inspiration at the same time.

My message is about waking up to conscious growth, to live more truthfully, lovingly, and powerfully. It’s not a message just for me. It’s a message for all of us. It’s not a message of words. It’s a message of being.

The particular words I use to deliver this message aren’t as important as I was led to believe. I sure have written plenty of words so far, and I’m always coming up with new ones. If I’m delivering this message to an audience, what I say isn’t critical. I find that the most important factor is who I am when I’m on the stage.

Public Speaking as a Co-Created Experience

If I’m speaking to an audience, delivering a well-written and polished speech, but internally I’m focusing most of my energy on remembering what to say and do at each step, then what is the audience’s role in that speech?

I’ve seen many speeches that seemed excellent from a technical standpoint, but I didn’t feel the speaker was actually present in the room with us. His/her energy was focused on what to say next… or what gesture to make… or where to move on the stage so as to use the whole speaking area… or perhaps on appearing confident. On the whole I don’t enjoy such speeches, and I prefer not to watch speakers who communicate like that.

When I’m really in the flow of communicating with an audience, I’m not thinking about what I’m going to say next. I’ll have an idea of what I’m going to talk about, but I’m not really giving a speech. The experience is much more interactive. It feels like my energy combines with that of the audience, and I become a conduit for the flow of a co-created experience.

This might sound chaotic at first, but it works well in practice… perhaps because when people come together for a workshop or presentation, they’re showing up with similar assumptions, expectations, and desires. People typically attend my workshops because they want to grow, and so our collective energy co-creates a growth experience for the group. Everyone wants that to happen, and so it does.

I’ve done 5 Conscious Growth Workshops so far (with a 6th one coming up in 4 weeks), and each one has been unique. I do continue to improve the structure each time, but I believe that most of the difference in how these workshops turn out has to do with the particular energy of each group. Every audience broadcasts a collective energy, and it’s a different broadcast each time.

While I understand that for many people, public speaking seems like a frightening thing to do, for me it’s a very beautiful and harmonious experience. This is probably because I don’t see the audience as being opposed to me in any way. We come together with a common purpose — to create a powerful growth experience for all. So we’re all on the same page. I want to be a good facilitator, and the audience wants me to have a good experience. So what is there to be nervous or worried about? A workshop is not a performance; it’s a stimulating group adventure.

I understand pretty well how this co-creative model works in the area of public speaking. I think it’s why I enjoy speaking so much and why I find it so rewarding. Lately I’ve been pondering how to expand this co-creative model and apply it to other parts of my life as well.

Co-Creation vs. Domination and Submission

Last year I shared some ideas on domination and submission and how it applies to personal growth. While this can be practiced as a sexual thing, it’s really a general pattern of relating. If you tell someone what to do and they do it, you’ve dominated them. If the opposite happens, you’re practicing submission. Don’t get hung up on the words — it’s the underlying concepts that matter, not the words used to describe them.

You can use domination or submission patterns in any part of your life. You can relate to others by trying to dominate them or by submitting to them. A boss tends to be a dominant figure in many organizations, one that employees are expected to submit to. You can use a dominant parenting style by controlling your kids and telling them what to do. When dealing with a gun-wielding law enforcement agent, you might find yourself taking on a more submissive role.

Co-creation, on the other hand, is a more cooperative approach. Parties combine their power to create something together, with neither submitting to the will of the other. In a way you could say that all parties agree to submit themselves to the collective will, but no one is personally in charge of the collective.

I’m not suggesting that one model is superior to the other. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. In urgent situations a command-based approach may be important — there may be little time for discussion when fast, decisive action is required. It makes sense for the surgeon to be the boss of the operating room when a critically injured patient is on the table, and time is of the essence.

In other situations a collaborative approach may produce superior results. To continue the medical example, multiple doctors may confer about a patient’s care, potentially coming up with better treatment options than any one of them might have chosen individually.

I’ve explored the D/s pattern enough to see that it does have value, but my interest in focusing on it has basically run its course, and now I’m drawn to explore a co-creative model. Since I love immersive experiences, I’ve already stepped into that space this week and plan to continue with this direction for quite a while. I want to deepen my understanding of co-creation through direct experience and see what it’s capable of.

Subjective Reality and Co-Creation

Since I’ve been getting incredible mileage from exploring subjective reality, naturally I want to explore how co-creation and subjective reality can mesh with each other.

At first glance it may appear that subjective reality is in conflict with the idea of co-creation. If you create your reality, and if there’s only one consciousness, then how can we talk about multiple consciousnesses creating something collectively? Does that even make sense within a subjective universe? Isn’t there only one being, and how can you co-create with just one entity?

I understand these concerns, but there are easy ways to resolve them. Remember that subjective reality is not a truth per se — it’s just a perspective, a lens through which you can look at truth. It isn’t difficult for the subjective lens to include a co-creative aspect.

Clues from Lucid Dreaming

For me the major clues regarding how to connect the dots between subjective reality and co-creation came from lucid dreaming. I’ve had many more lucid dreams this year, i.e. dreams where I’m conscious and aware that I’m dreaming, so I’ve been doing further experimenting along these lines.

If you’re having a nighttime dream, would you say there are multiple consciousnesses in the dream, or is it all just you? I imagine you’ll probably agree that there’s ultimately just one consciousness there, and it’s yours. You’re the dreamer of course.

What are the other dream characters? Do they have independent will separate from your own? You’d probably say that they don’t. At best these characters may represent different parts of your psyche. Since the whole dream world is playing out in your mind, everything in it is coming from you.

Those who believe that the objective lens is the only truth would probably agree on this much. They’d probably say that the whole dream is due to a pattern of neurons firing in your physical brain, and therefore everything in the dream world is coming from within your brain. So of course the dream characters don’t really have a consciousness that’s separate from yours.

That said, I’ve had some fairly interesting experiences involving a certain aspect of lucid dreaming — trying to mind control the other dream characters.

You might think that if you get really good at lucid dreaming, you should eventually be able to mind control your dream characters perfectly. What’s to prevent you from controlling them just as easily as you control your own avatar? After all, the dream body you have isn’t the real you. It’s just a mental projection. So are all the other dream characters. So it seems reasonable that you might develop the skill to control the other dream characters, willing them to do your bidding however you see fit. If there’s some mechanism to prevent you from doing this, it’s not clear what that would be. The main limitation seems to be just developing the skill to do it, just as you’d develop any other lucid dreaming skill.

As I tried to further develop this ability in my lucid dreams, I noticed that while I could successfully mind control other dream characters, it wasn’t as easy as I expected it to be. It takes a lot of concentration to bend a character to my will, and on some level it feels like the character is resisting being controlled. As soon as I have a lapse in concentration, that character breaks free for a bit and stops following my mental commands.

I called Erin and asked her about her experiences in this area since she’s been lucid dreaming much longer than I have. She reported similar results, and she added that it feels like the other dream characters are pre-programmed to do certain things. If you try to mind control them, you can, but as soon as you let up or lose concentration, those characters’ original programming reasserts itself, and they continue following their previous scripts. Erin suggested that the resistance may come from the characters being programmed to play out a certain storyline, and when you try to mind control them, you mess up the storyline to an extent.

Erin also said that it’s possible to take control of the whole dream and to essentially wipe out the pre-programmed story. When she does that, she says it’s much easier to mind control the other characters. They no longer have a scripted routine to return to. I haven’t tried wiping out the entire dream story, but what Erin described is consistent with my own experience.

Now the interesting part is that waking reality seems to work in much the same way. If you try to control other people, then to a certain extent, they let you. Perhaps you don’t do this through the same mechanism of telepathic mind control, but you can just as easily develop the skill of influencing others, essentially using your will to override their previous behaviors for a while. It’s not that difficult to knock someone out of their pre-programmed script for a while.

Hitler and the Nazis are one potent example of this phenomenon. Since then there have been some intense psychological experiments demonstrating just how easy it is to control and direct people. Perhaps the most notable would be the Milgram Shock Experiments during the 1960s. If you aren’t familiar with them, I encourage you to follow the link and read up on them. These experiments have been repeated numerous times with similar results.

If we commit to doing so, we are indeed capable of dominating and controlling others, and to a great extent, they’ll let us. Similarly there’s also a part of us that’s eager to submit to authority. Start noticing how often you tell people what to do, and they obey you. And also notice how often people tell you what to do, and you obey them.

Become aware of all the subtle ways the command and control model comes up each day. When you get an email and you reply to it, you’re doing someone else’s bidding. If they hadn’t sent you that message, you’d have directed your time elsewhere.

What I’ve observed regarding how dream characters react to being dominated aligns pretty well with how waking characters respond. They may offer token resistance, but they also bend to the dominant will most of the time. When the dominant will is relaxed, the character return to their previous scripts for the most part.

So how might we use this to connect the dots between subjective reality and co-creation?

One Model of Co-Creation

If we assume, as Erin suggested, that our dream characters aren’t really conscious and are just following something akin to a pre-programmed script, then one way of explaining co-creation in a dream world is this:

The other dream characters aren’t really conscious, but they’re pre-programmed with a storyline to follow. This storyline is a higher level construct, one created by our subconscious. When we dominate or mind control other characters, we knock them off script, which can throw off the unfolding story. Yes, we have the power to do this, but perhaps it’s better to go with the flow of the story (or the dream) and see where it leads. Perhaps there’s a purpose to the story that we should listen to and understand.

If we apply a subjective reality lens to our waking world, we could suggest a similar interpretation. The other people walking around aren’t separate conscious beings, but they’re pre-programmed to help create a certain storyline. This story isn’t something we’ve consciously created per se. It’s being created by our subconscious. While we can control people by exerting our dominant will, we may mess up the story when we do so. It’s preferable to allow the other characters to follow their intended scripts, so we can better understand where the story is going and flow with it.

What is co-creation then? Co-creation is cooperation with our subconscious. To co-create is to align ourselves with the unfolding story. The other characters all represent different parts of us. They may not be independent, fully conscious beings, but they are pre-programmed with certain behaviors because it’s part of the storyline. We can resist their behaviors and try to change them, but ultimately this may corrupt the storyline. If we really don’t like where the story is going, we always have the power to consciously step in and take control and redirect a given scene, but perhaps it’s best to let the story unfold as it will and to play our own part in alignment with what the other characters are doing.

To co-create with this model is to acknowledge that a story is indeed unfolding in this reality, and we’re all characters within it. Every character has value because each one contributes something to the story. So this form of co-creation isn’t necessarily something we must do in terms of adopting different behaviors. It’s more of a general attitude of cooperation… of valuing what the simulation is playing out and flowing with it. In other words, sit back and enjoy the ride, and don’t resist what’s happening.

There is some value in this perspective, but overall it’s not my preferred model to use for co-creation. It seems a bit too passive, and it also paints the other characters as little more than automatons or NPCs.

Another Model of Co-Creation

Instead of using scripts and programming to describe how people behave, we could also say while deep down there may be just one creator in this reality, everyone is a part of that creator, just as each cell in your body is a part of the greater whole.

So co-creation is simply consciousness collaborating within itself. Just as you may have a discussion with yourself, listening to the different voices within you in order to come to a decision, you can do the same with other people, and it’s essentially the same process.

You enjoy inner harmony when your different facets are in agreement — your thoughts, words, and deeds are congruent. Similarly, you create outer harmony when the people in your life are mutually supporting one another.

External co-creation is really the same thing as doing inner creative work. In order to create anything, you must somehow get all the different parts of yourself to agree upon what to do at any given time. If your mind wants to write, sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom all at the same time, you’ll just spin in circles.

While you can use a domination-based model to get yourself to take action, it tends not to be very sustainable in the long run. Just like mind controlling other dream characters, it requires intense concentration. As soon as your attention lapses, slippage occurs. In practice it’s difficult to maintain this state for long.

With this model the focus is on creating harmony. Forward action requires cooperation, whether it’s internal cooperation or external cooperation.

In this case we wouldn’t say that other people have a separate consciousness per se, but then neither does your avatar. There is still just one consciousness, and the different human beings within it are projections of the different aspects of that consciousness. So they’re not separate consciousnesses, but they are all conscious… just as your fingers aren’t distinct human beings, but they’re still human.

So to subjectively co-create with other people doesn’t imply that we’re all distinct conscious beings. We’re all individual projections of different aspects of consciousness. Co-creation is the process by which consciousness establishes harmony within itself.

Your avatar is a vehicle for creating that harmony. Instead of passively watching the story play out, you can exert some influence over the storyline. You get to be part producer and part audience member.

To co-create is to influence the other aspects of consciousness, to discover where we can agree, and then to leverage that agreement to develop and release a more powerful aspect of the story.

Exploring Co-Creation

For years I’ve been practicing a model of conscious creation that involves setting goals and achieving them, or setting intentions and manifesting them. This model is effective — it works.

I’d also like to practice co-creation, to see what can be created when two or more people contribute to a goal or intention that goes beyond what either of them would have chosen individually.

Co-creation is more than just teamwork. One person can come up with a goal and assemble a team to work together to achieve that goal. Co-creation, however, is when the team comes up with the goal as well. So the goal isn’t handed down from above.

Co-creation occurs from the idea stage onward, so even the starting idea is worked through collaboratively. If I already know what my goal or intention is in advance, or if some other individual does, then most likely we have one person submitting to another person’s direction. A co-creative team comes up with its own projects.

With co-creation you don’t even know what the goal or intention will be in advance. That’s something to be worked out collaboratively. Each person can suggest ideas and bounce them off each other, but the point isn’t for one person to convince the other that any particular idea is best. The idea is for all involved to collectively reach an agreement that everyone willingly commits themselves to.

Co-Creation and Relationships

While I could apply this model to my business (and I’ve already started doing so, with some cool new ideas percolating), I’m actually more interested in applying it to my social life first. Due to the highly social nature of co-creation, this just makes sense to me. But in practice I have to be more flexible than this because you never know where co-creation will lead. So my social life is merely a place to get started.

Because it’s uncommon to consciously co-create our connections with others (we normally do so unconsciously), we often fall into the domination-submission realm in terms of how these interactions play out. One person decides what they want and then seeks to get the other person to go along with it. This works to some extent, but as with mind controlling a dream character, it normally meets with some resistance.

In situations where I’ve already been using a co-creative model, the results have been promising. My workshops are a good example. I don’t feel overwhelmed or overloaded there. We create a certain energy that seems to keep things pretty balanced and harmonious. I think the face-to-face feedback helps as well. People tend to be open and friendly but also respectful of the fact that I can’t have 5 conversations all at the same time. I don’t need a list of rules telling people what’s okay or not okay. Within the environment that we create, people tend to be pretty socially graceful. You might say that it’s because of the face-to-face element, but I see this online in some places too, such as with my Google+ interactions.

I do believe it’s possible to co-create with large groups, but it may be more difficult to get everyone to agree. Take note that this isn’t the same thing as dominating and controlling large groups, such as Hitler did. My workshops attract people with common interests, so it makes sense that co-creation can gain a foothold there. But with more diverse groups, it could be more challenging.

Consequently, I’m going to focus for now on co-creating with individuals and very small groups, such as my existing friends. I probably won’t have time to try this with everyone right out of the gate, but I think it would be rewarding and enlightening to have a discussion with a friend about how each of us would like to see our connection evolve, then to see what we can agree upon, and then to commit ourselves to that co-created vision of where our relationship will go next. And then of course we have to keep adjusting our vision as we grow and change, so it doesn’t go stale.

I already did some of this with Rachelle yesterday. We had a deep discussion about what we want to create next in our relationship. Instead of only discussing what we each want as individuals, we tried to gain a sense of what we could co-create that would inspire both of us. I think that individual desires are necessary because they provide fuel for the collective vision, but then you have to let others’ desires combine with yours to create something together, something that goes beyond what either of you would have come up with individually.

This morning I had another experience while talking to a business partner. Going into the call, we had two separate projects to discuss, one of his and one of mine, but after we’d talked for a bit, he suggested a creative way to combine them. I instantly liked the idea, recognizing it as something that would be good for everyone. We agreed to make it so immediately, and now we’re already moving forward with it. It was a very fast way to work out a win-win arrangement. The best part is that this will ultimately produce something that’s free for everyone but which will also benefit our respective businesses, so it isn’t just a win for the two of us but also for everyone else who will be affected by it.

A Co-Creative Attitude

At the individual level, you may set goals and intentions based on what you desire.

A co-creation attitude is all about win-win. It isn’t just about what’s good for you. It’s about what’s good for everyone. You can co-create at the level of determining what’s good for the team, or you can co-create as Marc Allen recommends — for the highest good of all.

My experience on this path is pretty limited since I’m just getting started with it, but I can already see that the energy signature of co-creation is different than the one I’m accustomed to with traditional goal setting or intention-manifestation.

Co-creation requires a more flexible attitude. It’s important to bring your own desires to the table, but then you must be willing to allow the energy of others’ desires to merge with your own, so that you eventually come to form an intention or goal that everyone loves.

I’m looking forward to talking with more friends to discuss what we might co-create together next. It’s too early to say what the results will be, but I’m pretty optimistic about it thus far, and the few interactions I’ve had with this mindset in the past couple days have all been great.

I feel this is a good time for me to get started on this path, but I can’t predict where it will lead. To be truly co-creative as opposed to dominant, I have to open myself to seeing my relationships evolve in ways I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen on my own.

I’m not treating this as a 30-day trial since I expect it will take considerably longer to explore it, but it does feel a little like embarking on a new 30-day trial where I don’t know what the outcome will be.

I’ll surely be sharing more about subjective reality and co-creation at the upcoming Subjective Reality Workshop in October, which already has dozens of people signed up for it, but I also expect that I’ll blog about new insights along the way.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Some people mentioned that I seem to be doing two overlapping trials here. First, I’m doing 30 days of acting promptly on inspiration whenever it strikes. Second, I’m also delving more deeply into the subjective reality frame. So what’s that all about?

I honestly don’t know, but I’ll try to make sense of it as I write.

Could I separate these two trials? On the surface it sure seems like I could. My initial idea for this trial was just going to be the inspiration part. I wasn’t planning to do a subjective reality trial. But these two aspects got tied together in a strange way, and now they’re inextricably intertwined. I can no longer separate them out.

Planning vs. Inspiration

The subjective reality aspect actually started first. This goes back to Sunday, July 18th, the final day of the July Conscious Growth Workshop. The final segment on spirituality was from 2pm to 4pm. Dana, a local friend and one of our CGW staff, asked me during lunch what I was going to talk about during that final segment. I said, “I have no idea.” He laughed. I repeated, “No, really. I honestly don’t know.”

For each CGW I’ve always gone in well-prepared. I live and breathe the topics I talk about, so I could seriously do the entire workshop off the cuff if I had to, and I’m sure it would still turn out well. But my mental side always likes to plan everything out, so I can know in advance how everything will fit together. I also like to create a good balance of different teaching modalities, including lecture, demonstration, interactive exercises, games, fieldwork, one-on-one sharing, group work, written exercises, Q&A, and more. Good planning is important for pacing too, so I don’t spend too much or too little time on any particular segment.

That said, I’ve noticed that as I was delivering this past CGW, I was breaking from my plan a lot. For most segments I felt inspired in the moment to do things differently than what I’d originally planned. I’d change up the order of certain elements, tell different stories than I expected to, and swap in different exercises. And overall it worked really well when I went with the inspiration of the moment.

I’m comfortable in front of an audience, so I don’t have to deal with nervousness or anything like that. I’m fine being in the moment, and I trust that I can speak well off the cuff, even for hours at a time. But I know that people come from far and wide to attend CGW, and I want to deliver the best value I can. I’d find it dishonorable to go into a CGW not feeling well-prepared with a solid plan for each segment. When I do a CGW, I commit to doing my best.

I always assumed that careful planning and structure were necessary for me to deliver my best and for attendees to receive good value. Now I’m not so sure. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve reached the point where I may be able to deliver an even better experience if I set that plan aside and allow myself to be fully in the moment and go with the flow of inspiration.

Can I Trust Inspiration When the Stakes Are High?

This last CGW experience was beginning to challenge my notions of the best way to deliver value. Do I truly deliver more value when everything is pre-planned, or am I somehow able to do an even better job when I’m just being there in the moment, and I don’t know what I’ll say in advance?

Well, at the end of that Saturday (Day 2 of CGW), I went home to plan out the final two hours of the workshop. I had delayed planning this part of the workshop because I wanted to see how this particular audience handled the first two days. I’d made a lot of changes for this CGW, and there were good reasons why it made sense to apply just-in-time planning for the final closing segment. I’d already delivered this segment three times before at previous workshops, so I had old templates I could have fallen back on, and I also figured it would only take about an hour to make the plan.

That night, however, I couldn’t seem to bring myself to create the plan. I wrote something out that seemed reasonable, but it felt hollow to me… heartless. I didn’t understand why my intuition said, “This is stupid.”

As I tuned into my intuition for more guidance, the message was loud and clear. Let go and forget the plan. Just get up and speak your truth. It’s already inside you. You don’t need a plan. It will only hold you back and cause you to get stuck in your head.

So I left the plan behind and decided I was ready to allow inspiration to flow through me when I delivered that final segment.

The morning segment that Sunday had already been planned out, but I broke from the plan a lot. The resulting mixture was probably 70% inspiration of the moment and 30% pre-planned. And it seemed to go really well. I noticed that my energy was shifting to a different place the more I was able to let go. More passion and enthusiasm — and fun — were flowing through me.

I normally have a handout for each day of CGW, but for this final day I decided not to use one. That wasn’t due to laziness. The Day 3 handout was already designed since I’d used it for previous CGWs. But I felt we’d be better off without the written exercises that day, so we could do more interactive exercises and fieldwork that morning instead. I thought that worked well. Some people actually liked the fact that there were no written exercises that day.

As we got closer to the afternoon segment, I had enough evidence to believe it would work out okay. I could say that I had to push myself with a bit of courage here, but it didn’t play out that way. I was at peace with the decision.

The workshop had been going so well up to that point that I felt that even if I semi-flubbed that final segment, people had already received so much value, so I felt I had enough social capital to take a small risk without it being a big deal either way. I also believed that I could share plenty of insights and ideas without a structured plan, so I really wasn’t worried about screwing up. I felt competent and confident to do this segment without a plan.

My main concern was that I’d open too many threads, and I’d have a hard time wrapping everything up on time. How was I going to pace myself? I felt it was okay to let go and trust in that area as well. If I opened a loop that I wasn’t able to close, I could always blog about it later.

Speaking from Inspiration

When I got up to speak, I didn’t even know what the first words out of my mouth would be. But the words were there. I ended up talking mainly about the question, “What is the true nature of this reality?” That led into a discussion of subjective reality vs. objective reality.

I shared the details and results of some experiments I’d already done, going back to 2006. We didn’t do any special exercises, but the segment became very interactive. Lots of people asked questions and shared their own stories, and instead of holding Q&A till the end, I integrated all of that on the fly. It was like a dance where neither partner is trying to lead, but somehow they still synchronize their movements.

The segment didn’t feel like a presentation. It was more like a conversation, almost like I was talking to myself.

Would you pre-plan a conversation? Would that even make sense?

I felt like I was listening a lot more. I was tuned in to what people in the audience were thinking and feeling. As I spoke, I was mainly addressing the energy I perceived in the room. I was constantly looking for eddies in the audience’s energy and seeking to smooth them out. If I sensed confusion, I simplified by offering up analogies people were already familiar with. If I sensed mental overwhelm, I shifted into story-telling mode. If I sensed curiosity, I shifted to Q&A. If I sense the pressure build-up of people wanting to say something, I invited them to share their experiences. If I sensed eagerness to hear more, I went back to exposition. These are the things we naturally do when we’re engaged in a compelling one-on-one conversation.

The flow of that segment was very different from the previous times I’ve done it. So was the content. I felt that the audience was really with me. People were much more present — leaning forward, nodding in reaction to certain segments, asking questions, sharing their own insights.

I loved every minute of it. It was such a wonderful experience to be fully present and to enjoy such a cool dialog with like-minded people. Of course we’re like-minded since we’re all projections of the same mind!

I didn’t seem to be sharing answers or advice or solutions, not really. Mostly I was sharing questions, observations, experiments, and stories. It was like having a conversation with myself. Even as I spoke about subjective reality, I began to slip into a subjective mindset.

If you want to have a really strange experience, try believing that you’re actually dreaming while you’re speaking in front of a live audience.

Subjective Blogging

This is the same manner in which I’ve been blogging this past week. I’m sharing my observations as a fellow explorer, not as a teacher with answers to share. But perhaps that’s the best form of teaching anyway — to explore and share along the way. That’s what got me started with blogging in the first place, and it’s why my website’s URL is my own name instead of something more generic.

This website is a chronicle of my personal journey. My best writing comes through when I’m writing for myself, fully living my life and using blogging to deepen my understanding along the way. I feel that, and others notice it too.

What really fascinates me is that I’ve been getting tons of positive feedback about my blogging this week. It’s a major brain-pretzelizer to try to understand why subjective blogging generates more positive objective feedback than objective blogging does. Why the heck do you like it better when I blog just for myself and not for you?

Perhaps it’s because the idea that you and I are separate is truly a delusion.

When I blog for myself, I am in fact blogging for you because we’re the same self. When I try to blog for you as a separate person (or group of people), then I’m actually splintering myself, and my writing reflects that.

I wonder if your experience of reading my articles is the same. When I blog for myself, do you feel like you’re reading your own thoughts and feelings? When I blog objectively, do you feel more distanced from me, like we’re just not on the same wavelength? Do you feel closer and more connected with me now than you did a month ago?

If subjective reality is false, then why does it generate results that are objectively better than an objective mindset? In 2006 I increased my financial results dramatically through subjective experimentation, and I’ve always enjoyed an abundant flow in that area ever since. Now I’m seeing huge positive shifts in my relationships too, results that are way beyond what I was able to achieve with an objective lens.

If subjective reality is bunk, then I’d expect a decline in my results. But I’m seeing the opposite. That gives me good cause to go further down this path, since I’m seeing more and more evidence that subjective reality is the more accurate lens of the two.

When you realize that you’re dreaming, you have much more power to change the dream vs. when you’re unaware (or in denial) that you’re dreaming.

You can’t launch a satellite into orbit if you believe the earth is flat.

Perhaps we’re both projections of the same consciousness after all. Perhaps you’re also awakening to the possibility — no, the likelihood — that this is a dream world. This dream world blog you’re reading is reflecting back to you your own shifts in consciousness.

As you awaken to the notion that you’re really dreaming, this blog is manifesting those shifts. I’m here to reflect back to you the truth that yes, you are indeed dreaming, and I’m a projection within your dream world. In the weeks ahead, many of your own thoughts and feelings are going to show up here in written form, in such synchronous ways that it will be harder and harder for you to deny what’s happening. You’ll be pushed further down the rabbit hole. But you’re ready to take that leap, aren’t you? It will take courage to leave your objective comfort zone, but by now you’ve already concluded that the old path is a dead end. You can’t go back. You can only press on.

Silly Rabbit

After that CGW, I began feeling it was time to go deeper down that rabbit hole myself. I almost couldn’t help it. After speaking about it for nearly two hours, my mind was already shifting into subjective mode.

One thing I really like about CGW is that it’s such a flexible workshop, so as I learn and grow, the workshop and how I present it can continue to evolve. The core principles of Truth, Love, and Power all make sense whether you view them through the objective lens or the subjective one. For example, we can talk about objective Truth (science) or subjective Truth (awareness). We can talk about love objectively (relationships and social support) or subjectively (joy and sorrow). We can talk about power objectively (cause and effect) or subjectively (intention and manifestation).

I think it would be an amazing experience to deliver CGW #5 in October from the subjective frame. Just thinking about that excites me and freaks me out at the same time. What the heck would it be like to deliver a 3-day workshop while believing I’m actually in a dream world the entire time? That would mean I’m actually doing an entirely internal workshop, talking to various parts of myself and seeking to elevate, expand, and integrate them into a more complete whole.

It’s still 3 months away, but this does feel like an inspired idea to me. If people like my subjective blogging better, would they also prefer a subjective workshop?

On one level, I regard this sort of thing as risky. What if it just turns out to be too strange for people? What if I don’t seem to be delivering enough value? What if people get upset with me because I don’t deliver the kind of experience they expected?

On another level, what if it works? What if it delivers more value than I previously thought possible? What if it creates a much deeper level of connection and raises the energy of the room to higher highs? What if it leads me into a whole new experience of communicating? And what if every CGW afterwards benefits from this?

What does value even mean in a subjective dream world? I can only be delivering value within myself. In that regard, value equals healing and re-integration.

I think these risks are manageable, even in an objective sense. For starters, not many people have signed up for CGW #5 yet because it’s still 3 months away. I think we’re at 8 registrations so far, which is actually really good to see this far in advance. If any of those people think CGW #5 may turn out to be too strange after reading these recent blog posts, I’m happy to offer them a refund. However, one of those people already shared with me how excited she is about this new direction, so that’s a good sign.

Objectively speaking, I have a solid structure for CGW already worked out, as it has evolved over the previous three workshops. So I know I always have that game plan to fall back on if I feel it’s wise to do so. I don’t have to take the risk of going into a 3-day workshop with no plan at all. I can actually play it safe in this case since the fallback plan is already there.

I’m pretty good at gauging the audience’s experience, so if I start out delivering CGW #5 this way, and I see that by the morning break on Day 1, it isn’t quite working, I can always back off and switch modes. It’s a 3-day workshop, and there’s plenty of room to experiment without risking a serious degradation in the overall experience and the value people receive from it.

I can solicit advanced feedback as well. So if you like this idea — if some aspect of it resonates with you and makes you more likely to attend CGW #5 — please tell me. If you don’t like it and you feel it would make you less likely to attend CGW #5, please let me know that too. If there’s a lot of support for this idea, I may update the CGW page to reflect that.

If I’m really honest with myself, I have to admit to myself (and to you — what’s the difference anyway?) that deep down, I already know that this is the path I must take. But some part of me fears it, and so I project those fears onto you. I assume that you probably won’t like it, or you’ll think it’s crazy. At least that’s what I tell myself, so I can reject the idea in advance. After all, I have to give you what you want, and if you don’t want this, then who am I to argue with you? But I haven’t even asked you yet, so how can I really know? And what if the answer comes back that you’d really love to experience such a thing? And what if we do it that way and it works amazingly well? Will we ever be able to come back out of the rabbit hole again? Will we lose ourselves in that world for good?

Will we finally swallow the red pill instead of just tucking it away in our cheek?

The Connection Between Inspiration and Subjective Reality

My inspiration trial is entangled with subjective reality because they both hit me at the same time. By following my inspiration at the previous CGW, at the point where I finally let go, I was inspired to talk about subjective reality. Then as I moved forward with a subjective perspective for the next few days, I began to receive an even greater flow of inspired ideas. I started seeing inspiration itself as a form of communication with the true dreamer of this world.

That led to some intense curiosity, and by the middle of that week, I began thinking about doing a 30-day trial of acting on inspiration 24/7. I couldn’t escape the subjective lens though. By that time I was becoming too immersed in it.

I don’t fully understand the link between subjective reality and inspiration, but I can see and feel that there’s definitely a connection, and it isn’t a trivial one.

The more I act on inspiration, the more it’s shifting me to view reality subjectively. These inspired actions and their consequences make a lot more sense to me when viewed through the subjective lens. I can’t objectively explain where these inspirations are coming from. But subjectively something quite beautiful and amazing is unfolding. The dreamer and the dream world are becoming one.

Likewise, the more I shift into the subjective reality mindset, the easier it is for me to receive and act on inspiration without hesitation. If I were on the objective side, I’d be too worried about the consequences. It would be much harder to let go and trust the flow of what’s happening. But if I know this is a dream world, I’m less freaked out by the strangeness of it all. If this is a dream, then anything is possible.

If I know that reality is a dream, I’m inclined to give more weight to certain aspects of the dream world. For example, I consider the inhabitants of the world and my relationships with them to be of greater importance because they all represent parts of me. Interacting with the characters of this world becomes utterly wondrous and fascinating because it’s like I’m delving deeper into the contents of my own subconscious. I’m deeply invested in creating positive, loving relationships with the other characters in this dream world because to me, it is all self-love and inner harmony. If I see conflict anywhere, I’m motivated to gush love all over it to resolve it, since otherwise I’m neglecting an internal conflict within my own being, and it can’t be healthy to let that fester.

Consequently, I’ve been spending a great deal of time on communication. Whenever a problem or conflict arises, I do my best to act immediately. I can’t ignore it and hope someone else will handle it. If I’m the dreamer, then I must be 100% responsible for it. Everything I see in the world… is me.

My role then becomes that of a healer. By healing damaged relationships within the dream world, I’m healing myself. I’m becoming whole again.

This is a huge shift in thinking, and very quickly I developed a backlog of relationships that I feel need to be cleansed and healed with love and forgiveness. I’m tending to them as best I can. I may not be able to heal everything overnight, but the progress within just this past week has been stunning.

Money and possessions, on the other hand, become almost inconsequential. What does it mean to own something in a dream? You can still acquire dream stuff if you want, and most dream characters will respect your claims to dream property, but it’s still a bit silly to think of dream objects as something you can own. Even if you buy something with dream money, is it really yours? It’s just a dream object you associate with your avatar’s dream inventory.

You can just as easily enjoy the physical aspects of the dream world without having to own any of it. You can use up your dream money or spend it too fast I suppose, but it can’t be all that hard to replenish it either.

When you view reality through the subjective lens, your focus shifts a great deal, especially with regard to what you define as important.

If your life isn’t quite working, if you aren’t happy or if you aren’t getting the results you desire, could it be that you’re focusing on the wrong things? Could it be that the objective lens has led you astray? Are you still asleep, unaware or unwilling to accept that you’re dreaming?

What would your life be like if you did your own 30-day trial of inspired, subjective living? Is that part of your path with a heart?

At present I’m feeling more inspired than ever. And I’m also viewing reality as a subjective experience more than ever. That cannot be a coincidence.

You’re feeling more inspired too, aren’t you?

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

The atmosphere at TLC is like a big family reunion. It’s a place where people who are doing transformational work can come together to help and support each other both personally and professionally. Sometimes business deals happen, but the main focus isn’t transactional. It’s about caring for each other, supporting each other, and helping each other grow and improve.

We meditate together each day, we sing, we dance, and we do fun and sometimes silly activities. We share many laughs and hundreds of hugs. We help support those who are going through rough times. We share our best ideas on how to accelerate the healing of this planet.

We also pool our knowledge and skills to help each other in a spirit of cooperation. For example, at the January TLC retreat in Puerto Rico, I did a presentation on building web traffic. It was rewarding to see that six months later, a number of TLC members had already applied those ideas to reach more people with their positive messages.

On top of that, we do a lot of deep introspection. We push ourselves to grow as human beings, to become more aware and to recognize new truths, to become stronger and more courageous, to connect more deeply and to become more heart-centered, and to more fully step into our missions to help create a better world.

One of the most important elements is that we do this away from the public eye, sans fans and critics alike, so we can keep the energy very positive and loving but also honest and real.

For me, going to TLC is like taking a weeklong spa day for the heart and spirit.

Immersion

Imagine spending a week with 80 transformational leaders, many of whom are the top experts in the world at what they do. Some are fabulously wealthy. Some are deeply insightful and brilliant. Some are very loving and compassionate. Some are incredibly fearless.

You can informally walk up and ask anyone there about anything, and they’re happy to share their best ideas as if they’re your brothers and sisters.

Some of them have been doing this kind of work longer than I’ve been alive. They know all the best methods and processes and whatnots. They know the places where fear, denial, and falsehood love to hide.

Being at TLC is like going to a place where everyone has X-ray vision, so by default you end up walking around naked the whole time, even if you think you’re wearing clothes.

If you speak something other than your truth, you’ll get called on your B.S. But you don’t get judged for your foibles. You just receive more unconditional love and acceptance. The focus there isn’t on fixing ourselves or transcending what we believe to be our faults. It’s about integrating the various parts of ourselves into a complete whole.

The atmosphere at TLC is similar to what you’d find at CGW (especially on the third day of CGW). My ego would just love to credit the brilliant CGW content, but the content is only part of it, and arguably not the most important part. Many of the shifts have more to do with being around the energy of so many conscious people. It can be difficult to define or explain those shifts afterwards, but they’re extremely potent, and they can send one’s life spiraling off in new directions. Every CGW and TLC have had that kind of effect on me. In such an environment, much of the B.S. we tell ourselves simply burns away, and new truths finally have the chance to be seen and heard.

For example, when people at CGW see how their lives could be filled with so much more love and connection, they cannot return to doing soulless work on Monday morning; the utter foolishness of that approach is too obvious to ignore, so they quit that same week and quickly transition to a path with a heart. They finally see that on the heartless path, they were already living without that which mattered most to them, so there was nothing more to lose… and everything to gain… by letting it go.

TLC has a similar effect on me. It’s not really the content we share that’s the biggest element. The content does help, but the bigger shifts have to do with being bathed for several days in the positive energy we create. We could gather with no formal plan or structure, and it would still have a transformational effect. Great content just makes it that much better.

Many TLC members recognize that working on ourselves and working to create a better world are inherently the same thing. Healing the world is a journey of self-healing. We are teachers because we are lifelong students, and teaching is one of the fastest (and most intense) ways to learn.

That’s why I wrote 1000 articles and a book… and why I do workshops that turn out differently each time. By giving thoughts and ideas form and expression, I deepen my understanding of them. If I knew how an article was going to turn out before I started writing it, I wouldn’t need to write it. Everything I share and express is a growth experience for me; otherwise I delete it before it’s done and never post it.

Intensity

Every time I’ve gone to TLC, I’ve returned home feeling like a different person. At times the TLC experience can be like drinking from a fire hose. Occasionally I have to spend some time walking around by myself just to internally process the shifts that occur.

Before attending TLC this time, I was already in a really good place. I’d just finished an amazing Conscious Growth Workshop a couple days earlier, so I was still enjoying that post-workshop high, feeling incredibly grateful and happy and super motivated.

The first couple days of TLC were a bit of a letdown, energetically speaking. It usually takes a day or two for the energy at TLC to amp up, just as it does at CGW. It was great to reconnect with so many friends, but on Day 2 I started feeling bored and listless. By the next morning, I was actually feeling grumpy, and when I turned within to ask myself why, I realized that part of me felt that I really didn’t need a “vacation” right now and that I’d much rather be getting some real work done. Going to this particular TLC seemed like an unnecessary indulgence when I had so many other things to attend to, both personally and professionally. At this particular time, I didn’t want to be on a retreat. I wanted to be advancing. I was already renewed and energized when I got there.

But I still had several more days there, and I didn’t want to be fighting with myself the whole time, so I acknowledged and accepted that feeling and the message behind it, applying a process that was a blend of Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind method and Hale Dwoskin’s Sedona Method. (Both of them were at TLC.) This process took only minutes. In fact, I did it while taking a shower, so it didn’t even take any extra time.

Almost immediately, the grumpiness and boredom vanished, their message received. By realizing that I wanted to be active and productive rather than taking time off and restoring myself, I shifted my focus and saw that I could use TLC to get some actual work done and to make it a productive experience, instead of treating it like an unwanted break. This might seem obvious in retrospect, but it wasn’t obvious to me at the time.

With a better attitude, I launched into the third day of TLC with a lot more motivation and passion, and this energy carried me through the rest of the week. I spent many hours connecting with people I wanted to get to know better, and I deepened some existing connections. I picked up ideas for improving CGW, and I got advice for growing my business. I found several new potential joint-venture partners. I learned new methods and techniques.

I also shared a lot of advice to help others, especially with blogging and traffic building. And I recorded a few videos to help members promote their work.

And I had a lot more fun since I was congruent about wanting to be there.

I took the exercises seriously and worked a lot on myself too. It’s too much to explain in a blog post though. (That’s a B.S. excuse, but I’m hoping you’ll buy it for now while I do more inner work on it and build up the courage to share it.) Suffice it to say that I went through some huge emotional shifts related to my past. One morning I woke up in my hotel room, and all I could do was cry for about an hour, struck by some realizations I’d been repressing for most of my life. Pretty frakkin’ painful stuff. I’m still not sure I’m ready to deal with it yet, but I have to practice what I preach. Sometimes it annoys me that I teach courage.

There was another attendee who arrived later in the week, and her needs were practically the opposite of mine. She’d been on the road for a few weeks, and she was feeling worn down. She came to TLC for renewal and rejuvenation, and she got that.

Authenticity

One thing I love about TLC is that the people there are very authentic.

One thing I hate about TLC is that the people there are very authentic. (That isn’t a typo.)

As much as you might think you’d love it, hanging out with dozens of highly authentic people for a week is tougher than it sounds. That kind of experience shines a light on your own authenticity issues. You may even come to see that the pursuit of authenticity is yet another form of self-delusion.

Many people have asked me how on earth I can publicly share certain aspects of my life on my blog, such as I wrote about in the article Share Your Shame. The underlying assumption is that if people knew the real truth about you, you could be socially ostracized. Your friends and family would shun you. You’d be cut off, abandoned, and tossed aside for being unworthy. In the end you would receive less love.

But the truth is that the exact opposite happens. Initially there may be some tumult, but the long-term outlook is extremely positive.

When you learn to love and accept all parts of yourself, especially the parts you’d rather keep hidden, then you attract a lot more authentic love and support from others. Instead of being shunned, you’re welcomed and invited and included.

We all have these dark parts of ourselves that are difficult to accept and integrate. But your secrets aren’t secret at all. People can see right through you. They just aren’t telling you about it because they can see you aren’t ready to deal with it yet.

Your inner shame is far from unique. We all have similar issues. Only the details are different.

My friends in TLC have plenty of dirt on me. It’s not like it’s a secret.

They know I separated from my wife last year, that I went bankrupt, that I used to be a thief, that I’m into D/s, and so on. And it just isn’t a big deal. In fact, all that stuff is more like a badge of honor. During the awards ceremony one night, I joked that I was hoping to qualify for the most recent divorce award.

The truth, however, is that my issues just aren’t particularly striking or unique. It’s practically a truism that the people there have had to go through some serious challenges at one point or another, such as divorce, loss, addiction, financial scarcity, abuse, and more. It’s a pretty common pattern that a TLC member’s life has been a roller coaster of ups and downs, as opposed to smooth sailing all the way.

The stuff that really tugs at my heart is when these loving and compassionate people have to deal with things like the death of a spouse or a drug-addicted child. And they ultimately process those experiences in ways that allow them to become even more loving and compassionate, even though they have every reason to justify becoming resentful and bitter.

People sometimes ask me, “Is so and so the real deal?” And having met these people behind the scenes, I have to say yes again and again. These people pour their hearts and souls into their missions, and I respect and love them immensely. I feel honored to be included in this group.

The Challenge of Being in the Public Eye

One of the reasons TLC is so important is that doing this kind of work can be very challenging, especially when you’re in the public eye. The exposure to criticism can be brutal at times. It’s really helpful to have a group of supportive friends you can turn to, get bandaged up, and go back out into the world again.

These people aren’t superheroes. They’re very much human. When they take a beating, it hurts them and slows them down, but in the long run, it also makes them stronger and more compassionate.

I can’t say I’ve encountered anyone there who does this kind of work for the money. If such a person exists, I’ve never met him/her. Even the ones who teach about wealth and abundance seem to be primarily motivated by the love of the work and the desire to contribute. The truth is that it breaks their hearts when they see people suffering from lack, and they want to do what they can to alleviate suffering and spread more happiness and abundance.

I think if you got to know the people behind the scenes as I have, you’d feel immensely grateful for them. Even when they’re dealing with major personal and professional challenges, they just keep giving, giving, giving. Maybe their contributions aren’t perfect, but they do the best they can.

What you may not realize is that these people question everything they do. They question whether they should use certain Internet marketing techniques, or if the methods would be manipulative. They wonder about how they can help more people. They wonder how they can be more impactful on each person they connect with. They wonder about what to work on in themselves so that they may become better teachers.

For all the criticism they receive, they are their own harshest critics. If their critics actually knew the personal standards these people hold themselves to, it would make those critics cringe and say, “Whoa… go easy on yourself.”

Of course this is something I had to learn as well. I spent a good 10 minutes today casting unconditional love at Tony Robbins. He isn’t a TLC member, but it became clear to me that he too must be doing the best he can.

Inspiration

I realize this is a rambling article, perhaps a bit too stream of consciousness, so let me get to the wrap up portion.

This was a mind-blowing week, but one element in particular was especially mind-blowing.

About halfway through the week, Joe Vitale gave a talk on inspiration. I first met Joe and his wife Nerissa at the July TLC in 2009, so I’ve known them for about a year, but this is the first time I saw Joe speak. He was simply brilliant.

Joe and I have something in common in that we are both content machines. He’s authored 52 books, for instance, and he’s constantly giving birth to new products. I haven’t been working in this field as long as he has, but I’ve authored a respectable 1000 articles in less than 6 years, which is enough to fill about 25 books… not to mention getting one actual book published as well.

Joe explained how he creates his content, which I recognized as essentially the same approach I use. When an inspired idea comes to me, I act on it almost immediately. I know that I have about a 48-hour window — maximum — to write and publish that idea. Otherwise the energy is gone. Trying to create that same content later is possible, but it’s much more difficult and takes a lot longer.

The experience is like catching a wave. I might wake up one morning and get an idea for a new article, and I know I need to grab my laptop immediately and let it flow through me. In those situations I can write nearly as fast as I can type, without having to pause to think.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s a real wave and what’s just a minor swell, but this calibration gets better with practice. When you catch the wave and stick with it, it has sufficient energy to carry you all the way through to completion of whatever it is you’re creating, as long as you’re willing to put most other things aside and stick to that wave like glue. Again, it’s like surfing. If you stick with the wave, you can ride it all the way to shore.

Well… as Joe continued to speak, I realized that he does something I don’t. He uses this same method for acting on business ideas in general. I haven’t been doing that. I only use it for content creation, and the vast majority of that content has been in the form of free articles.

Joe, however, also uses this method to conjure up new products, workshops, events, business deals, and so on.

That’s when I gave myself a mental slap upside the head.

Duh. Duh. Duh.

For some stupid reason, I’ve been managing the rest of my business in a much more left-brained fashion. I get inspired business ideas all the time, but instead of acting on them immediately and riding them like the time-sensitive waves they are, I toss the ideas into my inbox for later processing. Then perhaps a week later, I’ll consider each idea carefully and integrate it into my to-do list for future action. But by and large, by the time I get around to them, if ever, that wave of energy has long since dissipated, and trying to start those projects is like pulling teeth.

Consequently, the content creation aspect of my business has always been super easy for me. I know I’ll never run out of ideas there. But the rest of my business changes much more slowly. My website, for instance, has essentially the same design as it did 5 years ago.

Very quickly I got the idea to do a 30-day trial of acting on inspiration almost immediately whenever it hits me, whether it has to do with content creation or some other idea. I decided that I wasn’t going to wait, so I kicked it off while I was still at TLC. To be honest, I really don’t care about the exactitude of the 30-day stretch for this trial, but today was Day 4.

This is new territory for me, so it may entail some hidden risks. I know it works on the content side, but I can’t predict what will happen as I apply this to the rest of my life. In order to begin this trial, I had to remind myself that worst case, I probably can’t screw things up so badly in 30 days that I can’t repair the damage later if necessary. Because the potential benefits are so great, I’m willing to take this risk.

30 Days of Inspired Action

The same day I heard Joe’s talk (Friday), I was in my hotel room at around 8pm, and a stray thought popped into my head. I got the idea to put up an eBay auction for a 60-minute consultation, as I shared in my previous blog post. I began to ponder it, and my initial inclination was to jot down the idea and then consider it when I got back to Vegas the following week.

Then I stopped and smacked myself and said, “No… you have to catch this wave now and see where it takes you. Don’t just let it pass.”

So I dove into immediate action. I wasn’t sure how far I’d get with it, but I started by checking to see if my old eBay account was still good. I hadn’t logged in since March 2001, but the account was still there. I haven’t used eBay in a very long time, so it took me about 30 minutes to create the listing and make it live, something an experienced eBayer could have done in 10 minutes or less I’m sure. Then I spent another 20 minutes writing a quickie blog post about it, and that also fed to my Twitter and Facebook pages.

Imagine that. Less than an hour after getting the idea, it was already up and running. If I’d written it down instead of acting upon it immediately, I could have wasted that much time just pondering whether or not I should do it.

A few minutes later, I was Skyping with Erin, and I told her what I’d done. She loved it. Then she checked on the auction and told me I was already up to $51. I said, “You’re joking… it hasn’t even been up for 10 minutes yet.” But she wasn’t joking. By the time I went to bed, it had reached $132.50. The next morning it was at $425. Today it hit $1000, and there are still 3 days left till the auction closes. I can’t predict where it will end up.

If you want to see what it’s up to now, you can visit the auction page. The auction officially ends on Friday, July 30, at 9:28:29 PDT.

The next day I told Joe about this, and he loved it. I told other TLC members about it as well, and throughout the rest of the conference, people would check in with me to see how the auction was going. I think they were just as curious about it as I was.

One morning at breakfast a fellow TLCer asked me, “So what are you up to?” I started telling him what I’d been doing, and he said, “No no… I mean, ‘What are the bids up to?’”

Some people have asked me what this means. Does it mean I’m going to be doing paid coaching and consulting? Does it mean I’ll do more eBay auctions?

Honestly I have no idea. It’s not part of some grand plan. This was pure impulse. I’m simply going with the flow of an inspired idea and riding it to shore. I can’t say when the next wave will arrive or what it will look like.

This wasn’t even an idea with an intention behind it. I wasn’t intending to make money with it or anything. The motivation for this idea was sheer curiosity. I want to see what happens when I act on these sorts of ideas immediately, without trying to analyze or understand them first.

In order to be true to this 30-day trial, I can’t think and plan ahead. If I schedule a bunch of stuff in advance or try to plan things out, I’m at risk of not being able to ride those waves of inspiration when they come.

One thing I find very interesting is that from today through the rest of the trial, my calendar is completely blank. I don’t have a single scheduled appointment at all — no interviews, no meetings, nothing.

There are still some events coming up, including my son’s 7th birthday and some potential travel, but none of it is in the form of a fixed appointment, at least not yet.

I did have an appointment to meet with someone Wednesday morning, but it got bumped to today, so it’s already done with. And I would definitely say it was an inspired meeting.

I’m used to having a flexible schedule, but it’s pretty unusual to have such a huge block of time with no scheduled appointments. I should at least have a radio interview in there… or a workshop… or a scheduled phone call… or something. But no — it’s totally blank. Is that just a coincidence? I can’t say. But this is an ideal time for me to conduct such an experiment. I could even extend it well beyond the 30 days, especially since the next CGW is still 3+ months away.

A Sample Day

As a typical example of how things are going with this trial so far, I’ll share how today went. I woke up at 5:30 this morning, and immediately my mind was racing with thoughts of writing this blog post. I didn’t originally plan to blog about my TLC trip, but the inspiration was there, so I had to ride it. I went straight to my computer and started writing, which was effortless.

After 3 hours of writing, which passed in a blink, the phone rings. It’s Erin inviting me to go to breakfast with her. I realize that I’m starving and could use a break anyway, so I accept. While at breakfast, I got some inspired ideas related to our separation. Instead of pondering them and hashing them out a bit more, I shared them with her immediately. That turned out to be a wonderful thing, as it sent us down a path towards resolving some tricky practical aspects of our separation. Erin and I both leave happier, with a commitment to taking some specific actions that should make life easier for us both.

From breakfast I drove to Starbucks to meet with a British military intelligence officer. I didn’t have any particular need to meet with him other than the fact that he expressed interest, and my intuition gave it a green light. We ended up having a fascinating 2.5-hour conversation. I learned a lot that I didn’t know about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After a couple hours, the thought occurred that many of my readers might be interested in hearing what he had to say, so I asked him if he’d be up for an interview. He agreed. It turned out that doing an interview would be a win for him too because he’s about to enter a phase of writing and publishing his own ideas, including starting a blog.

By the time I got home, he’d already sent me some article links that we discussed. I haven’t had a chance to read them yet, but I quickly wrote up a forum post to keep riding that wave. I wanted to see if there was interest in such an interview and if people had specific questions. It looks like there is indeed interest, so I’ll compile some questions and send them off to him when I feel inspired to do so.

I wasn’t feeling any major waves of inspiration this afternoon, so I ate lunch, processed some communication, and handled a few minor tasks while watching the movie Pulp Fiction.

Lately I’ve been getting a number of synchronicities associated with the film Inception, which I haven’t seen yet. I thought maybe I’d go see it this evening, and I saw there was a 7pm show at the local IMAX, so I “planned” to hit that show. Whoops.

But around 6:30pm when I was thinking about leaving, I realized that I just didn’t feel inspired to go see the movie, at least not yet. I was starting to feel a mild pull in a different direction — oh yeah, I still wanted to finish up and post the blog entry I’d started in the morning. So I decided to skip the movie and go with the writing wave. You’re reading the result.

While I’m writing the final section of this post, I hear a text message come through on my cell phone, but I don’t check it till now. It’s Rachelle asking about Skyping tonight. That feels right, so as soon as I’ve posted this article, I’ll flow into that next. I haven’t had dinner yet, but I notice I’m not hungry.

There’s another IMAX showing of Inception at 10:20pm. If I go to that show, I’ll still have 30 minutes to Skype, but it would keep me up till 1am. I can’t predict whether I’ll see it tonight or not. I’ll have to wait and see if the energy of the moment is pulling me in that direction.

As I was typing the last sentence, my laptop tells me I’ve got 9 minutes of battery power left. Time to go plug it in.

This is going to be a very unusual 30 days. I have no idea how it will turn out. I can’t even say how much I’ll blog about it along the way — that too will depend on whether I’m inspired to do so.

In any event, you may see some rather erratic behavior from me in the coming weeks. I’m extending this trial across all areas of my life, both personally and professionally. It’s a 24/7 commitment with no breaks except those that occur naturally as the inspirational waves ebb.

I’m excited about this. It’s going to be an interesting 30 days to be sure. Wish me luck!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Tired of Isolation

When I worked as an indie game developer during the mid-90s, I felt isolated for many years. I was focused on my own projects for the most part, often working alone for days on end.

I had friends, but most of them had regular jobs in other fields. After college they zigged into the job market, while I zagged into entrepreneurship. We always had fun hanging out together, but we couldn’t do much to help each other succeed professionally.

Eventually I grew weary of my professional isolation. I wanted to make more friends within my industry. I wanted to network more and to feel more connected and integrated. I wanted to feel like I belonged there and that my presence actually mattered to someone. I felt that my progress was stagnating because hardly anyone in my field even knew I existed. Making my business succeed was an uphill battle. I got tired of having to figure out everything for myself or always having to learn from third-party sources. I wanted more help and assistance. I wanted people in my life who could offer me solutions and keep me abreast of new developments. I got tired of doing things the hard way, and I wanted to find a more effective way of doing business.

Deciding to Connect

One day I decided it was time to take action. I was ready to do whatever it took to become more connected professionally. I figured that one of the best ways to do that would be to raise my profile within my field, so more people would at least know who I was. Then I could leverage that to make more friends and contacts. I figured that it would take time, but I expected to be working in that field for many years to come, so I might as well get started. That way I could expect to be in a much better position a few years down the road. If it worked out, I anticipated that my life would get easier, and my business would become more successful.

One of the triggers for this decision was listening to self-help audio programs over the years. I noticed how often speakers in this field would name-drop other speakers. Tony Robbins knew Deepak Chopra, who knew Wayne Dyer, who knew … It seemed like there was some kind of “in crowd” where everyone knew everyone else.

I gradually saw that this was also true in the software and computer gaming fields. Those fields didn’t seem to be as well-networked as the self-help field (perhaps because professional communicators have an advantage when it comes to interpersonal networking), but it was clear there were multiple overlapping social networks where many of the top developers knew each other and often seemed to hang out together. It was obvious to me that I was an outsider, and I wondered what it would take to get integrated into one or more of these networks.

Connecting Through Contribution

I determined that the best way to raise my profile would be to contribute to my field in some fashion. I noticed that the people I respected most in the software and computer gaming fields — and the people who seemed to be the most well-networked — were frequent and generous contributors. These were the people who spoke at conferences, wrote articles for magazines and journals, and published books. They didn’t just work for themselves. They passed on their knowledge and helped to elevate everyone in the field. I particularly admired game developers like John Carmack, Sid Meier, and Will Wright who helped to advance the field as a whole.

But by and large, these people weren’t pounding the pavement to make new friends and contacts. Quite the contrary — people were constantly coming to them. They acted like magnets, attracting others to them with ease.

As I pondered what I could do to contribute, one particular event really got to me. I was attending one of many technical lectures at the annual Game Developers Conference, and the speaker couldn’t have been more than 20 years old. I’m guessing he was only 17 or 18. Yet he got up and spoke to several hundred people, sharing some fascinating ideas on dynamic sprite compression. His technique was somewhat tricky to implement, but I found it ingenious. I later applied his overall approach in two of my games with great success. His ideas allowed me to squeeze what might have been a 2-5MB game into just over 1MB. This was important at the time because I was still shipping games on 1.44MB diskettes, and this saved money and postage by allowing one of my games to fit onto a single disk. It also made the download size smaller, which saved bandwidth and made it easier for people with slow dial-up connections to download the game.

Now the developer who shared these ideas wasn’t a great presenter — I recall that he seemed a bit nervous at first — but I doubt anyone in the audience cared. He was still able to deliver value by sharing what he knew. That was a key lesson for me. I realized I didn’t have to be a great writer or speaker to be able to make a contribution to my field. If the content is worthwhile, and if it’s shared in a spirit of giving and cooperation, audiences tend to be very forgiving.

Passing on Knowledge and Advice

I certainly wasn’t the best game developer or entrepreneur out there, but over the years I’d figured out a few things that I imagined others would find useful. Some of these were technical ideas, and others were related to marketing and sales optimizations.

I started by writing an article called Zero-Defect Software Development (this link goes to a copy of it that’s still available online at GameDev.net). That was my very first published article. If I recall correctly, I wrote it in 1999, had it published in the Association of Shareware Professionals newsletter, and when asked I gave permission to other sites to republish it as well.

Incidentally, the advice in that article was partly from doing research on industry best practices and partly from my own personal experiences developing software for several years. I got pretty good at releasing computer games with a very low defect rate, and for years I offered a bug-free guarantee on all the software I sold (bugs fixed promptly or you get a full refund). To my recollection no one ever took advantage of that guarantee, so it worked out pretty well.

Initially that article was probably seen by no more than a few hundred people, but the feedback I received was positive and encouraging, and I was inspired to keep writing. I went on to write a couple dozen more articles over the next several years, so this was a very gradual process. I typically wrote about one new article every 1-2 months. I had most articles published in several different places and eventually created a central archive for them on my computer games site. Some authors even requested reprint permission to include one or more of my articles in their books, which I readily granted. Later on I also did some work for hire for CNET, writing 1000-word articles for their developer newsletters. I got paid $1000 per article, which was a nice bonus. On average it took me about 2-3 hours to write each piece. CNET owned those articles though, so I couldn’t republish them elsewhere.

The Ongoing Expansion of Contribution

As a result of writing these articles, I started getting invites to speak at conferences, such as the Shareware Industry Conference and the Game Developers Conference. I also ended up doing hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of volunteer work in that field. For many years I accepted nearly every contribution-oriented invite I received. It was a lot of extra work for no pay, but I learned a lot from it, and it most certainly raised my profile in the field. At times I definitely overdid it and started to feel burnt out, but eventually I learned how to calibrate the right balance of contribution with self-renewal.

Further down the road, I added a discussion board for indie game developers to my website, and it became very popular, partly because it was free and ad-free and had some really awesome volunteer moderators to keep it spam-free. Years later when I switched careers to work in the personal development field, I gave that forum away to some industry friends to keep it going, and they successfully transplanted the community to another site. In fact, that community is still thriving today at http://forums.indiegamer.com/. It’s very gratifying to see that after all these years, it’s still going strong. I can even see that some of the subforums I originally added are still there. Over the years I’ve received dozens of thank-yous from indie developers for playing a role in helping them start their own businesses and/or release interesting new games. I’m grateful that I was able to leave a small legacy behind in a field that I’ve been so fond of.

None of these contributions were particularly difficult to make. They mainly took time and patience. The most important thing was getting my mind in the right place first. I imagined that I was in a relationship with my field, as if we were a family. I thought about what kind of relationship I wanted to cultivate with that family. Did I want us to ignore each other, to fight, or to love and support each other?

I loved making games, and I loved being a part of that field, but it struck me that I was being too much of a moocher. I’d learned so much from others, but I wasn’t being a very good mentor to others. After years of working in the field, I could semi-predict where my old path would lead, and I didn’t like what I saw. Maybe I couldn’t contribute as much as someone like Will Wright, but surely I could give a leg up to someone who was just starting out. I could at least share some practical software development and business tips for beginners. I didn’t worry about trying to out-contribute others. I just focused on helping those I felt I could help.

Contribution Pays Dividends

Professionally, the cumulative payoff from all these contributions was wonderful. My income went up by roughly a factor of 10 over a period of about 5 years. I made many great friends in the field, some of whom I still keep in touch with. I published about two dozen games. And I enjoyed some lucrative side deals with people I met as a result of raising my profile. I also got hundreds of free games.

Fast forward to the present day, and I’m sure I can trace at least a million dollars worth of business to the free articles I’ve written. Even if I never wrote another article again, I’m sure there would be millions more dollars of business to come as a result of the articles I’ve already written. They consistently produce a strong ongoing flow of new opportunities. I’ve done many business deals over the years with people who originally found me by stumbling upon one of my articles. The financial results make it easy to sustain and continue this practice.

While financial rewards aren’t a major motivator for me, I do want you to see that contributing isn’t all about self-sacrifice. Rather I think it’s about cultivating a mutually supportive relationship between you and your particular field. I often think of it like humanity’s relationship with the environment. It works best if we’re sensitive to each other’s needs and do our best to work cooperatively. When we fight each other or ignore each other, we all suffer for it.

Be Generous With Your Value

The truth is that just about anyone who works in a particular field long enough will make some interesting distinctions that, if shared, could provide a lot of value for others. I certainly learned a lot from others in my field, especially from their books, articles, and lectures. Their generous contributions saved me a lot of time and helped me tremendously. I think it’s only fair to continue that tradition and pass on what I’ve learned, so that others may be able to benefit from it.

Many publications are eager for fresh content, so if you can write something halfway decent, it isn’t that hard to get published. And these days it’s a no-brainer to self-publish, although it may take a while to build up some readership.

When I started working in the field of personal development, this lesson was so ingrained that I felt it was more important to build a substantial contribution to this field than it was to make money. So in the first six months, I wrote more than a hundred free articles, but I only earned $167 total. That didn’t discourage me though because I knew that if I could simply contribute enough value over time, eventually the money side would take care of itself, which of course it did. It was simply a matter of planting enough seeds through contribution. Within two years of starting, my income hit $40K per month. And most of that was a result of writing for free. It was nice to see this kind of validation in a different field than the one in which I first learned and applied this lesson. I believe these lessons can be applied to just about any field with positive results.

I’m sharing these stories with you because I want to clarify how all of this works. I’m not trying to impress you with my generosity or anything like that. For me this is a habit that began more than a decade ago, so these days it’s second nature to me. Most of the time I don’t even think about it; the associated behavior patterns are automatic and subconscious. But what shifted me onto this path was largely a sense of frustration. I was tired of working so hard with only debt to show for it. I felt like I was stuck on the outer fringes of my field and that it didn’t really matter whether I showed up for work or not. Who would even care whether I succeeded or failed? I could disappear overnight, and scarcely anyone would notice. My motivation was that I wanted my business to be more successful, and I also wanted to feel more connected and integrated into my field. I wanted to know that what I was doing actually mattered and made a difference to people. Working just for myself was becoming boring and de-motivating. I felt that if more people cared about what I did and were checking in with me, then I’d have more incentive to succeed. And that turned out to be true.

Take Action and Make a Difference

It’s my hope that if you can understand these ideas a little bit better, that perhaps you’ll adopt the long-term habit of contributing to your field as well. You can share technical ideas, practical how-to advice, lessons learned, and mistakes to avoid. You can also help motivate and encourage people by sharing your enthusiasm. Even if you think you can’t contribute much, try it on for size. You may be surprised to discover just how many people are grateful to learn from you. You may not even realize how much knowledge and expertise you’ve acquired until you start sharing.

I now have a much better understanding of why the leaders in various fields tend to be such prolific contributors. Contributing makes life so much easier. Regular contributors stand out in any field. They attract abundant friendships and business opportunities. They’re welcomed into the “in crowd.” I’m not referring to some Skull & Bones style of networking here, but when people recognize that you’re a contributor, they tend to trust you more easily, and trust is a powerful business lubricant. Trust motivates people to refer their friends, family, and co-workers to you because they expect they’re doing their friends a favor.

What can you contribute to your field? Do you have something worthwhile to share? Could you offer some practical advice to someone who’s just starting out? There are a lot more beginners in need of help than experts.

Don’t worry about creating some grand legacy. Just contribute something in the here and now. Establishing the long-term habit of contribution is what matters. Don’t delay indefinitely because you think you must make that one giant, blow-out contribution “someday.” Let someday be today. Your legacy will take care of itself — it’s the cumulative impact of all the little contributions you make over a period of years.

If you really want to advance in your career, I encourage you to kick off a 30-day trial of contributing to your field. Do something every day to add value to the lives of others. Don’t over-engineer this, and don’t get stuck in perfectionism. Just write up and share one potentially useful idea each day. A few paragraphs is plenty if that’s all you have time for. You can post it on your blog, on your Facebook account, or even on our discussion forums. Instead of contributing randomly and haphazardly, focus on one particular field where you’d like to have a small positive impact. Don’t worry about adopting the posture of an expert. Simply consider offering a leg up to people who are just starting out.

If you can maintain this habit for 30 days, there’s a good chance you’ll find it so worthwhile that you’ll want to continue with it indefinitely in some fashion. Once you get used to it, I think you’ll find it a very positive addiction, one that will serve you and others for many years to come.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

I made the decision a few weeks ago, and I’ve already notified my club President. That was rather easy since the President of my club is Erin.

Just in case you’re wondering, I’m not quitting my club because of Erin. If I’d felt any social awkwardness due to our separation, I could simply switch clubs and continue on in Toastmasters (there are about 50 clubs in Las Vegas alone). But there was no such awkwardness to speak of, so that’s a non-issue. This is something I’m doing for different reasons.

My Toastmasters Experience

For most of my years in Toastmasters, it’s been a wonderful educational and social experience filled with many growth lessons and great friendships. Toastmasters was a terrific group to join after I first moved to Las Vegas in 2004. I made new friends quickly, and it allowed me to enjoy a rich social life in a new city. It was also a great complement to blogging, helping me expand my verbal communication skills along with my writing skills.

I learned a tremendous amount about public speaking, and I got to speak a lot. For the first year, I averaged about one Toastmasters speech per month. I also competed actively in speech contests and even won a few. I performed every possible meeting role many times over.

I wasn’t overly afraid of public speaking when I started in Toastmasters — I’d already had some experience speaking at tech conferences — but I still had some nervousness to shed, and I had a lot to learn in regards to technique. Toastmasters worked very well for me in that regard. I got much better, shed all the nervousness, and grew to really enjoy speaking. These days I feel very comfortable on a stage in front of a group of people. It’s easy for me to be completely myself without feeling pressured or nervous. On the contrary I find it a lot of fun.

My journey of learning to be a better speaker is far from over. I still have much to learn, and of course I’ll continue on that path. But at this point, my learning must progress beyond Toastmasters. There are better ways for me to continue growing in this part of my life, one of which is simply to rack up a lot more stage time and gain additional experience.

Deciding to Move On

For more than a year, I’ve felt the disconnect building. Toastmasters meetings have become easy and predictable to the point of being boring. I skipped a lot of meetings this past year because I didn’t see much point in going. On the occasions that I did attend, I realized I was mainly there to hang out with friends, not because I wanted to attend Toastmasters.

I haven’t given a speech in my club in about a year. It doesn’t make sense in terms of opportunity cost for me to continue working on Toastmasters speeches. The feedback I receive isn’t particularly helpful to me anymore. I get no value from doing 7-minute speeches or performing other various meeting roles when I’m now doing 3-day Conscious Growth Workshops on the Vegas Strip. My best ideas simply don’t fit into 7 minutes or even 20 minutes.

Toastmasters is very focused on polishing delivery skills, whereas my focus is on developing great content. Delivery is important, but between delivery and content, great content is still king. I’d rather get feedback on my content, and there’s a general rule of thumb in Toastmasters that you don’t give feedback on someone’s content, so that rule doesn’t serve my needs. I can get all the content feedback I need online, so Toastmasters isn’t necessary for that.

There are people who’ve been in Toastmasters much longer than I have, but for the most part Toastmasters serves as a social club for them. I have more social opportunities than I can keep up with right now, so I don’t need to attend club meetings as a social outlet. Our club has gotten so big that I barely have time to chat with my friends there anyway. I can easily contact such friends directly if I want to hang out with them, such as by arranging a disc golf game.

Furthermore, it goes against Toastmaster etiquette to speak on certain topics that are of interest to me. There are many topics I’d love to speak about that would be considered inappropriate in a Toastmasters environment. If I really spoke about what mattered to me in a style that I enjoy, it would create too much drama, and I might put my friends in the difficult position of having to kick me out of the club. Toastmasters simply isn’t the right venue for what I want to communicate. There are better outlets for that, such as my own website. I’m perfectly okay with that. Toastmasters’ etiquette is there for good reason. If I stuck around, I’d probably end up going kittywompus and sabotaging my membership, so I’d be forced to drop it. (In fact, this is exactly the kind of behavior we see in members of our discussion forums when it’s clear they’re ready to move on, but they can’t get themselves to let go with love. So instead they go crazy nutso, create lots of drama by breaking rules, and eventually get themselves banned. I’d prefer to just bow out while the bowing is still good instead of going the drama route.)

What about using Toastmasters as a place to give back? It isn’t the right outlet for that either, given my particular situation. It makes sense to do more writing and speaking for people who are keenly interested in what I have to share… as opposed to delivering short-form content to a small captive audience. If I write a new blog post, I can get it into the hands of tens of thousands of people within a matter of hours. That just doesn’t compare to writing and delivering a speech for such a small group. I already have much better outlets for giving back.

I only needed to give one more speech to earn my AC-Silver designation, but picking up another educational award wouldn’t have any meaning for me, so I will have to remain an AC-Bronze. I’ve given so many speeches outside of Toastmasters that I could have gotten credit for, and I didn’t even care to do that. That tells me I really don’t place any value on further advancement in Toastmasters. That path is a dead end for me.

Letting Go With Love

This isn’t a decision I’m making against Toastmasters or against my club. It’s a decision I’m making for me. I recognize that it’s time for me to let go and move on. I have lots of wonderful memories from Toastmasters, and I shall forever cherish them.

But for now, this is a part of my life where the energy has become stagnant. It’s no longer flowing with growth and abundance. There are many new areas I wish to explore, and by dropping Toastmasters, I can free up more attention, time, and energy for new adventures.

I still highly recommend Toastmasters for people who want to develop their communication and leadership skills. It works. Especially if you’re nervous about public speaking, Toastmasters is a great way to overcome your fear of the stage and become a competent communicator. It helped me go from being a pretty weak speaker to being able to earn $50K in a weekend for speaking — and to have fun doing it. Given that a Toastmasters membership costs about $70 per year, I think that’s a pretty good return on investment. This is more evidence that the best place to invest your money is in your own personal growth. Now I get to apply and enjoy the speaking skills I developed for the rest of my life.

I’m very grateful for all the amazing lessons and friendships I gained from Toastmasters. Joining Toastmasters in 2004 was one of the best decisions I ever made. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have joined much, much sooner… ideally during college.

I’m also excited about what else I might do with the time and attention I previously devoted to Toastmasters. Removing this activity from my plate will free up more space to take on something new.

This is not an early April Fools joke by the way, just in case you were wondering.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

These workshops will be held at the Flamingo Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip on the following dates:

May 14-16, 2010 (Fri-Sun)
Jul 16-18, 2010 (Fri-Sun)
Oct 29-31, 2010 (Fri-Sun)

Feedback was so positive on the first two CGWs that it made sense to commit to doing many more of them. On a scale of 1-10, the average rating from CGW graduates was about a 9.

Social Abundance

One of the primary strengths of CGW is the social element. I’m still impressed by how much CGW alumni are keeping in touch with each other, both online and in person. Week after week I’m seeing CGWers encouraging each other, supporting each other, or hanging out just to have fun together.

I know of two CGW alumni who are going out to dinner tonight for raw/vegan food, even though they haven’t seen each other in a while. I get the sense that it doesn’t matter how much time passes. As part of going through the CGW experience together, people seem to develop lasting bonds very easily.

I even know of some new relationships that have formed because of CGW. I’m in that same boat myself at present.

Venue

All of the 2010 CGWs will be in the same Flamingo Hotel meeting room at the Jan 2010 CGW. That was a really nice ballroom, and unlike the room we had for CGW #1 in October, this room was big enough to do classroom-style seating with tables and chairs for everyone. (At CGW #1 we had to use theater-style — chairs only with no tables.) The room at the Flamingo also had a nice gathering space outside with lots of room for attendees to hang out and socialize before and after each day’s sessions.

I’m sticking with Las Vegas for now since I think it’s an ideal location for these workshops. We do various social fieldwork exercises in this environment, and it’s a fun place to enjoy after hours for those who are interested. At previous CGWs many attendees got together in groups to go out to dinner, see shows, go dancing, and do other fun things in the city.

If you attend the October workshop, that could be especially fun since the final day is Halloween, and many people dress up in costume and parade around the Strip that night.

To help you make travel plans (air travel, hotel, transportation to the event), check out the extensive Workshop FAQ. It includes links to various resources to help you plan your stay.

Pricing

Despite urgings from some of my friends that I should raise the price to $1000-2000, I’m stubbornly keeping the price the same: $497 USD if you register at least 30 days in advance, $597 if you register less than 30 days before a workshop. This is to make sure we have a reasonable idea of the expected attendance within 30 days before the event for planning and execution purposes.

This pricing is definitely on the low side for 3-day personal growth workshop. Many of my friends in this field would charge at least double that (and they’ve told me so). The main reason I’m able to keep the price so low is that my marketing costs are virtually nonexistent. We were able to fill up the past two CGWs just by promoting them on my blog, newsletter, Erin’s blog, Erin’s newsletter, Twitter, and Facebook — none of which cost us anything. Typically for a workshop of this type, marketing is the single biggest expense. So this is a nice way I can leverage my online resources to keep the costs low. Otherwise if I had some serious marketing expenses to lay out, I probably would charge at least $1000 for this workshop.

I also think that if we keep the price low relative to the value being provided, it will generate more word of mouth from attendees, which means even more free marketing. This is the same basic strategy I used to build my blog traffic — deliver high value at an unbeatable price.

CGW Photos

You can see some pics of previous CGWs in my Facebook photos if you’d like. They’re on the first couple pages of the main photo section, not in one of the albums. There are also some pics of post-workshop gatherings with CGW alumni. I doubt the pics capture the essence of the experience, but they’re there if you care to take a peek.

Sign Up!

If you want to attend a CGW this year, go ahead and register. It only takes a minute, and then you know you’ll be there. Please don’t wait till the last minute since there’s always a chance that your preferred date will sell out.

Hotel rates at the Flamingo are pretty reasonable right now ($100 per night or less on average), but room rates tend to go up a few weeks before the stay dates, so it’s best to reserve your hotel room well in advance. If you reserve with a credit card, you usually won’t be billed for the hotel until your stay, so there’s no reason to procrastinate. You can reserve a room at the CGW venue hotel online very quickly on the Flamingo Hotel’s website. You can select the dates of your stay right on their home page. It only takes a few minutes.

One last time, here’s the link to learn more about CGW and sign up: Conscious Growth Workshop.

I look forward to seeing you there for an awesome life-changing experience!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Dozens of people have already registered, including many return attendees from the previous CGW, so it’s great to know that we’ll have another amazing international group. At the first CGW, about 1/3 of the participants came from outside the USA.

Workshop Details

All the workshop details can be found on the Conscious Growth Workshop page, including the specific topics we’ll be covering each day.

This will be a very holistic workshop, blending high-level ideas with practical application. We’re going to cover career development, money, health, skill building, habits, productivity, emotions, relationships, spirituality, and more. I’ll be sharing the best insights I have on each of these topics. My goal is not to send you home with pages and pages of notes that you’ll hopefully implement later. This workshop is geared to create many a-ha moments that shift your thinking right there in the workshop.

Erin’s Role

As with the previous workshop, Erin will be helping to facilitate and will be contributing on stage as well.

Although Erin and I are now separated, we continue to maintain a positive, loving relationship with each other. In October we made the conscious decision to separate in order to break free from patterns in our marriage that weren’t working for us. This is giving us the space to re-explore our connection from a new angle.

Based on the feedback we’ve received about our separation, it’s clear that some people are having a hard time understanding how Erin and I can still be best friends, still love each other, and still happily work together. The best explanation I can offer is that conscious relationships don’t necessarily fit into standard social labels. They can twist and turn in unusual ways. The path with a heart usually isn’t a paved road.

Erin and I continue to connect in all the ways that are working for us, but we’ve taken the opportunity to disconnect in those areas where we aren’t as compatible. This notion comes directly from the second principle of conscious growth: Love.

At the January CGW, Erin and I will be conducting the relationship segment together, just as we did at the previous CGW. We’ll share what we’ve learned from our 15+ years together, including what we’ve learned thus far during our separation. We’ll explain how we apply the principles of conscious growth to continue to love and support each other even as our relationship has changed form.

Workshop FAQ

If you have questions about the workshop, please consult the Workshop FAQ first. It packs in a lot of info about the workshop, travel arrangements, hotels, and staying in Las Vegas.

Workshop Forums

If you have questions about the workshop, feel free to post them in the Conscious Growth Workshop discussion forum. This is a great place to interact with CGW alumni if you want to learn about their experiences. You can read plenty of feedback from them about the previous CGW as well.

Some CGW attendees are also discussing various social gatherings for hanging out together informally outside workshop hours.

Conscious Growth Is Honest Growth

If you’re looking for a guru who offers only the cleanest, neatest answers that align well with society’s standards, don’t come to CGW. That isn’t a role I can ever fill. What I offer you is honesty.

Anyone can grow unconsciously — that happens automatically just by living your life. But conscious growth means that you’ve become an active co-creator of your own life experiences. You decide what your career, finances, health, relationships, etc. will look like next, and then you take on the challenge of making those desires a reality. This is a very difficult undertaking, but it’s also extremely rewarding.

There are so many different aspects to conscious growth — making decisions, applying willpower, cultivating a supportive environment, maintaining momentum, and so on — that very often you may find yourself feeling confused, frustrated, or simply overwhelmed.

What we teach at CGW is how to understand the big picture of conscious growth. My role is to simplify the process to a core set of universal principles that you can understand and apply under real-world conditions. So whenever you get stuck or confused, you can return to these principles time and time again to get unstuck. The principles not only allow you to diagnose any personal or professional problem, but they also show you what specific actions to take in order to get moving in a positive direction.

If this is the kind of life experience you’re ready for, then I can offer you no better way of getting there than to attend the Conscious Growth Workshop in January. And be sure to sign up today to save $100 on your registration.

See you in Vegas!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

The first Conscious Growth Workshop earlier this month was such an unqualified success that I started the process of booking another event less than 48 hours after it ended. It took a little while to select the meeting room and get the paperwork signed, but we’re good to go now.

Workshop Details

All the workshop details can be found on the Conscious Growth Workshop page, including the specific topics we’ll be covering each day.

This will be a very holistic workshop, blending high-level ideas with practical application. We’re going to cover career development, money, health, skill building, habits, productivity, emotions, relationships, spirituality, and more. I’ll be sharing the best insights I have on each of these topics. My goal is not to send you home with pages and pages of notes that you’ll hopefully implement later. This workshop is geared to create many a-ha moments that shift your thinking right there in the workshop.

Workshop Location

The first CGW was at Harrah’s. This one will be at the Flamingo, which is just two doors down, still right in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip.

For CGW #2 we’ll have a significantly larger and nicer meeting room. This new room can hold up to 400 people, so we’ll have more capacity too. I expect attendance for this workshop to be considerably higher than for the first workshop, especially given all the positive buzz about it — and the fact that CGW #1 alumni can attend for free.

Comparison to CGW #1

I’ve received a tremendous amount of feedback from attendees of CGW #1. I didn’t calculate it precisely, but it looks like the average rating was higher than a 9 out of 10. So obviously we did something right. We don’t want to mess up what’s working, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

In the months ahead, I’ll be poring over the feedback in detail and making lots of tweaks to the format, the exercises, the fieldwork assignments, and the way the material is presented. I REALLY appreciate the level of detail people used when sending me their feedback. Rest assured I’m reading every word of it and carefully considering what you shared.

One simple change is that we’ll be doing 2-hour lunch breaks each day instead of 90 minutes. It was obvious that people wanted more time to socialize at lunch, myself included. To compensate for the longer lunch breaks, we’ll be ending 30 minutes later each day (5:30pm on Fri and Sat, 4pm on Sun), so the actual time in the workshop will be the same.

We’ll still cover the seven fundamental principles of growth on Day 1, and then we’ll apply them to different areas of life on Days 2 and 3. The feedback I received suggests that this overall structure was very effective. Most of the changes I’ll be making will pertain to how each individual segment is structured and delivered. I’ve already refined some of the exercises (including the Master-Servant one), and I’ll probably make a lot of changes to how we do the written exercises to make them more impactful. The biggest challenge is figuring out how to incorporate the best ideas into the time we have available.

My goal is to make CGW #2 significantly better than CGW #1 while retaining the elements of CGW #1 that worked best. I can’t yet say what all those changes will be. It’s going to take time to fully review the feedback and re-factor each segment of the workshop.

Workshop FAQ

If you have questions about the workshop, please consult the Workshop FAQ first. It packs in a lot of info.

I did my best to anticipate any questions you may have about the workshop, travel arrangements, hotels, and staying in Las Vegas.

Workshop Forums

A few weeks ago, we added a Conscious Growth Workshop discussion forum. This is a great place to interact with CGW #1 alumni if you want to learn about their experiences. You can read plenty of feedback from them about the experience.

A good place to start is with Alex Wu’s day-by-day review of CGW #1.

You can also use that new forum to introduce yourself to other CGW #2 attendees, arrange social gatherings in Vegas, find people to share hotel rooms, ask questions about Las Vegas, etc.

Additionally, you may enjoy reading through this thread about the workshop results, which includes lots of feedback on CGW #1. Just be aware that it’s pretty long (more than 140 posts). You may find this post from Daan Buckinx especially insightful since he shares the specific changes he experienced.

The CGW discussion forum is also a good place to keep in touch after the workshop. It’s very likely you’ll make some great new friends there. I’ve been seeing CGW alumni continuing to stay in touch on Facebook, Twitter, and sometimes in person.

CGW Alumni Attend Free

As I mentioned previously, anyone who attended the very first Conscious Growth Workshop in October can attend one of the 2010 CGWs for free.

Will there be any benefit to attending more than once? Yes, absolutely. This workshop is designed to meet you where you are right now and to help you grow from there. If you attended the first workshop, you may recall the analogy of the different planets. Next year your Planet A will be different, and so will your Planet B. Even though the material will be similar, you’ll be applying each principle to your current life situation, so your experiences will be different each time. Also, you’ll have many new friends to make and hang out with, so the social opportunities will be unique as well.

If you’re a CGW alumni, and you’d like to register for CGW #2, don’t use the online registration form. Instead, please visit Erin’s contact form, and send her a message letting her know you’d like to register for CGW #2. Please provide her with the following info:

• Your name (as you want it to be printed on your badge)
• Your city and state (city and country if you live outside the USA)
• Your email address
• Your phone number

If you send Erin this info and she confirms receipt of it, we’ll have a badge waiting for you at CGW #2.

There’s one caveat though. We need to make sure we don’t get too many alumni saying they’ll be at CGW #2 and then not showing up. That could mean having empty seats we might otherwise have offered to someone else. So if you request a badge for CGW #2 and you flake for some reason, then it means you’ve used up your freebie pass for good, and you won’t be able to attend another CGW in 2010 for free.

Since there were 115 attendees of CGW #1, we should have enough capacity to accommodate anyone who wants to attend CGW #2 for free, as long as you request a badge early enough. However, if we sell out with paid registrations, then it’s possible we may have to turn away some alumni freebie requests if they wait till the last minute to request a badge.

I’d suggest that if you want to request a free alumni badge, please submit your request by December 1st, 2009. That gives you more than a month to decide. We may be able to accommodate requests after that date, but I can’t guarantee it.

If we do get close to selling out, we may follow up with each alumni freebie request to verify that you’re still planning to attend. That way we can offer your seat to someone else if you change your mind. But please don’t request an alumni badge unless you’re willing to commit to using your freebie pass.

If we can swing it, we’ll use a different color for the alumni badges, so you’ll be able to tell at a glance who’s alumni and who’s new.

I don’t know how many CGWs we’ll have in 2010 — that depends on the demand — but I’d like to do at least 3-4 of them, roughly one per calendar quarter. CGW #2 is the only one that’s been scheduled so far.

Time to Register

It should be obvious that I’m EXCITED about doing another workshop. I had so much fun at the first one that I couldn’t wait to schedule another one.

This workshop has had a huge impact on my own personal growth. I thought I was there to be the facilitator, but it turned out that I was just as much an attendee as anyone else. Together we created a space where many breakthroughs were able to occur. The last two weeks have been – without a doubt – one of the most intense growth periods of my life.

Some of the changes I’ve been experiencing are still creating ripples and will have to be revealed in the weeks ahead. But one of the simplest changes I can share is that I’ve been exercising a lot more, eating more lightly, and sleeping less. My fitness level has measurably improved, and I dropped six pounds in the past two weeks.

But perhaps the most astonishing change is that I did something I’ve never done before. That’s right — I bought a Mac! After 20+ years of continuous PC usage, I decided to switch to a Mac for a while. The fact that my laptop PC and desktop PC both went belly-up within the past 3 months made it a good time to switch. I figure it will be an interesting growth experience to become a Mac guy for a while. I ordered a Macbook Pro online last week, and it’s supposed to arrive on Thursday. I also bought a 24″ Mac monitor, which I received yesterday. Before the workshop I’d never have thought it possible!

So what are you waiting for? Go sign up for January 2010 Conscious Growth Workshop. You’ll love it!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

This will be a personal development workshop, not a blogging workshop. The content will be loosely based on the material from my book, so we’re going to cover the whole she-bang of personal growth — habits, career, money, relationships, health, and spiritual growth. This workshop will include a nice blend of stimulating material plus interactive exercises. I expect it will be very transformative and a lot of fun for everyone.

One of the reasons I’m doing this is to get out from behind the computer and spend more time working with people face-to-face. I also know that an immersive workshop can stimulate a lot more growth, change, and a-ha moments than reading articles or listening to podcasts. There’s just no substitute for a live event.

The workshop hours will be reasonable, so you’ll have your evenings free to go out and have fun in Vegas — see a show, sample an insane variety of food, or manifest some casino winnings (if you’re 21 or over). Most likely we’ll go from 9a-5p on Fri and Sat and 9a-3p on Sunday, so people can fly or drive home Sunday evening if they so desire. You also won’t have to drag yourself out of bed too early.

I know that a lot of people who read my website are on special diets (vegetarian, vegan, raw, etc). It shouldn’t be hard to find something to eat no matter what type of diet you’re on. There’s also a huge buffet on the floor below our meeting room with tons of variety.

Erin will be there to help facilitate, so you’ll get to hang out with her too, but she probably won’t be presenting any material herself. However, she might share a story or two if I can convince her to do that. She’ll probably offer a few in-person readings on the days before and after the workshop as well.

We’re still discussing the pricing, but very likely it will be $497 if you register before August 31st and $597 thereafter. We know there are some budget conscious readers in our audience, so we wanted to keep the price reasonable.

How much will a hotel room cost? The hotel rooms in Vegas are constantly updating their prices based on supply and demand, but fortunately there are many good deals to be had. If you stay at Harrah’s, my best estimate is that it will be around $100-140 per night on average. I believe Harrah’s is a 3-1/2 star hotel. If you want to go cheaper, there are rooms for $59 a night at the Imperial Palace next door (connected to Harrah’s by a bridge), and I’m sure you can find even cheaper rooms ($39 per night or so) if you go a little further away. If you want to go ritzier, Caesar’s Palace and The Mirage are across the Street, and the Bellagio, the Venetian, and the Wynn are within walking distance too.

Ideally I’d like to bring this workshop to other cities, but that won’t happen till 2010 at the earliest. We’ll probably start with the Western USA and branch out from there. For now Vegas is the place to be.

For this first workshop, our goal is to have 50-150 attendees. It would be fun to have a larger group, but if we go much bigger, we’ll have to start guaranteeing hotel rooms and do a lot of marketing and promotion, and our risk would be much greater.

I’m really looking forward to this. I’m sure it will be a lot of fun and a wonderful growth experience for anyone who chooses to attend. Plus it’s a great excuse to come to Vegas and have fun. Your trip may even be tax deductible if you can claim it as a business educational expense.

I expect to have a registration page for this event online sometime next week, so you can sign up for it then. I’ll announce it in my blog and newsletter as soon as it’s ready. For now I just want to give you a head’s up to save the dates — October 2-4, 2009.

If you expect you’ll want to attend this workshop or if you have questions about it, please let me know. Depending on the volume of replies I get, I may not be able to answer every question personally, but I’ll consider them when I create the registration page, which will probably include a FAQ.

Update 7/15/09: You can now learn about the workshop and register for it here: Conscious Growth Workshop.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

This is a majorly long article. At about 8,600 words, I’m pretty sure this is the longest article I’ve ever written. It’s more like a free book chapter. The length is because my goal is to share one of the most comprehensive articles ever written on this topic. If you actually read the whole thing, you should gain many helpful insights from it. There are many subtle ideas here. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to print it out for later. It goes good with peppermint tea.

Calibration for Long-term Success

When you begin any new activity or endeavor, initially you won’t be calibrated for success, so you’ll experience mostly failure. However, if you keep moving forward with a clear goal in mind, and if you progressively adjust your thinking and actions along the way, you’ll eventually calibrate yourself to get the results you want. This calibration only occurs from directly applying a skill under real-world conditions, not by reading about it.

When you’re in the pre-calibration period, achieving even a small degree of success in a new field requires a massive, all-out effort. Post-calibration, success is practically on auto-pilot; you can consistently achieve the results you want with minimal effort.

Calibration Examples

It’s easiest to understand calibration by way of example, so here are some detailed examples to consider:

Social Dynamics, Making Friends, and Dating

In the field of social dynamics, calibration is the process of learning how to meet new people, initiate conversations, keep conversations going, make new friends, get dates (second meetings), and basically achieve positive social interactions.

How you calibrate your social skills will depend on your personal goals for this area. A salesperson may focus on learning how to build rapport, generate interest, close sales, and construct a database of quality contacts. A professional speaker may learn how to get attention, arouse emotion, generate laughter, and inspire people to action. A pick-up artist may study how to initiate conversations, demonstrate value, build attraction, and achieve successful closes (a close could be getting a phone number, a date, or a sexual encounter).

In high school I was comfortable within certain social circles, but I was still more introverted than I wanted to be. So when I started at college, I decided to remake myself into a more extroverted person. I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I just dove in and attempted to be as social as possible. I accepted any and all opportunities for social interaction. If anyone invited me to go out, I always said yes. I made a huge commitment to elevate this part of my life, and I stuck with it for my entire freshman year.

This strategy actually worked. I hadn’t read any books on social skills at the time, but I quickly calibrated my social skills via trial and error.

Within a few weeks, I’d made dozens of new friends, and I was going to parties every week. If I ever wanted to hang out and do something fun, I could always find someone willing. Not including sleep time, I’m sure I spent more time in other people’s dorm rooms than my own. I was always going out — for parties, poker games, volleyball, ping pong, or just for pizza. I created an absolutely amazing social life and packed more fun into each month than I used to enjoy in a year. I practically became like a different person.

What I found interesting was that in the beginning, it seemed like I was always the one to initiate new connections, but once I felt comfortable doing that, additional connections began flowing into my life almost effortlessly. During my first week at college, I noticed a party across the hall and asked if I could join in the fun (and got a quick yes). After that I was always getting invitations to parties and virtually never had to ask. During the first few months, I initiated a lot of social experiences (Wanna join me for dinner at the dining commons? Wanna grab a slice? Wanna get a poker game together?). But eventually I had so many invites coming to me passively that I didn’t have to initiate as much.

Looking back, I probably went way overboard. The good news was that I really took control of this area of my life. By throwing myself into it with a passion, I quickly became comfortable meeting new people, and I learned to make friends easily. The bad news was that I totally blew off my studies and was flunking out of school. In retrospect it wasn’t such a bad trade off though. I got expelled after my third semester, but the social calibration I gained during that time has served me well ever since. I went to a different school later and still earned my college degrees, but I think the social calibration has proven more valuable in the long run. I don’t feel intimidated in new social situations, and it’s normally easy for me to make new friends and connect with people. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a wife without even trying.

When Erin and I moved to Las Vegas in 2004, we didn’t know anyone in the city. We went from having a lot of friends in L.A. to having zero local friends in Vegas. It was just the two of us and our kids in a big city of strangers. But part of the reason I was happy to move to a new city was that I knew I could make new friends easily. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before I had plenty of great local friends. The bigger challenge for me has been feeling over-socialized at times. There have been some weeks where I’d have preferred more alone time.

This social calibration has benefited me tremendously in business. I can go to a mixer or conference where I don’t know anyone, and I have an easy time making new friends and contacts. I remember when I first started attending the Game Developer’s Conference many years ago, most of the attendees seemed shy and socially awkward. They’d mostly keep to themselves or cling to their co-workers, especially at meal times. Meanwhile, I was going around making new friends, which just felt natural to me. Some of those chance encounters led to new opportunities and deals that helped grow my business. It was also nice to have more friends with similar interests.

One year at that conference, I hung out so late that the shuttles had stopped running. It was pouring rain outside, but a new friend offered me a ride back to my hotel. In fact, something similar happened at a different conference this year. It’s nice to know that my social calibration can keep me out of the rain when necessary.

To some people this may not sound like a big deal. Many people develop such skills in high school or younger. But for a shy kid like me who went to an all boys Catholic high school, it was indeed a big deal.

Although I use my social skills mainly to make friends and business contacts, you can use a similar process to develop dating and relationship skills. For example, if you want to go on more dates, you can calibrate your skills to get good at opening conversations with strangers, develop fun and interesting conversations, build attraction, and at least close with a phone number. There are lots of people teaching this stuff online now, with varying degrees of credibility (and sanity), but the most important thing is to just dive in and start experimenting. You’ll experience some rejection at first, but if you just keep learning and adapting, your skills will calibrate to the point where you’re able to get consistently good results.

If you happen to be suffering from loneliness, most likely it’s because you never took the time to adequately calibrate your social skills. Consequently, you may avoid making new friends because you don’t understand the social nuances of how to do it. You probably feel socially awkward and suffer from an amplified fear of rejection. The solution is to focus on a different goal first. You need to calibrate your social skills before you can apply them. Go out and socialize for the sake of learning how to socialize. Don’t worry about whether or not you make any new friends. Once your social skills are calibrated, which may take a few months, then you can focus on building the kinds of friendships you desire, and it will be much easier for you. Aim to get good first. Then aim to get results.

Martial Arts

If you study martial arts and begin learning to spar, you’re going to be pretty bad at it initially. You’ll have no sense of timing, and you won’t grasp the rhythm of a sparring match. You’ll probably bang knees with your opponent a lot. All the newbies do that.

For the most part, you can expect to look and feel like a total dork. The first time I sparred, which was more than 10 years ago, I was laughing during the match, mostly at how awkward I felt. I’m sure I looked like a total dork.

This is to be expected. You can try to play it cool, but the truth is that the first few times you attempt any new sport, you’re virtually guaranteed to look and feel like a dork. This is because your mind and body aren’t calibrated to that sport.

Within a few months of regular training, your sparring should be fairly well-calibrated for an intermediate level of skill. At the very least, you won’t embarrass yourself. You’ll have sparred many different opponents, and you’ll have a good sense of what to expect. You’ll be able to use different moves successfully, land punches and kicks, and pull off the occasional surprise. I remember how cool it was when I stripped an opponent’s helmet off with an axe kick during a sparring match.

While sparring at the beginner level feels awkward and intimidating, once you gain a little competence, it becomes a fun challenge. At this point the subtleties of the skill begin to reveal themselves. Once your basic sparring moves and tactics are calibrated, you can begin to calibrate your strategic decisions, and this is where the richness of sparring really opens up. The game becomes less physical and more mental. Some would even say it becomes spiritual at a certain point.

Calibrating to a particular sport is a lot like learning to ride a bicycle. Even if you don’t train for a while, the mental calibration remains, and you can easily pick it up again later.

I trained for about three years in Tae Kwon Do in the late 90s with a mix of group classes and private lessons. Over time I got pretty good at sparring and really enjoyed it. I moved away from the studio and stopped training, but several years later, I started training in a different martial art, Kempo, starting as a white belt. Kempo is geared toward self-defense, while TKD is more sporty. Fortunately, all the moves that are legal in TKD are also legal in Kempo, and Kempo allows you to do some things that aren’t legal in TKD, such as punching to the face. (Protective gear is worn during sparring, but there’s still some risk. I suffered a bruised rib and a split lip on different occasions.)

Even though I’d lost most of my flexibility, the first time I sparred in Kempo, I did amazingly well, certainly far beyond the white belt level. From my first Kempo sparring class, I was able to hold my own against one of the black belts in the studio. I was sparring TKD-style, not Kempo-style, but that actually gave me an advantage because the other students weren’t calibrated to that style. TKD is mostly kicking, but Kempo uses more hand techniques. My preference for kicks surprised the other students because they would hover just outside of punching range, but they were still within my TKD-calibrated kicking range, so I hammered them with kicking combos until they figured out they needed to back up. This threw them off mentally, and it took months for many of them to adapt to my style. Of course, it also took me a while to get used to having punches thrown at my head.

After a year of training in Kempo, I was fairly well-calibrated to that style, but I had to unlearn some of my TKD habits that were ineffective in Kempo. I had to work on my speed, defensive maneuvers, and incorporating punches, strikes, and backfists into my sparring.

The point is that once you gain calibration at a particular skill set, you may very well lock in that skill for life. I feel as if basic competence in sparring is so ingrained in me that even if I didn’t spar again for 20 years, I’d be able to quickly pick it up again. I can actually feel that calibration in my body.

Blogging

Since blogging is still a fairly new medium, it usually takes new bloggers a while to properly calibrate. The failure rate is pretty high for newbies because most of them give up before they calibrate for success. I’d say you need to write at least 200-300 posts before you get a decent calibration going, and that assumes you’re making a solid commitment to getting better. For some people it will require more than 500 posts to achieve reasonable calibration, especially if they aren’t very good writers. There’s just a lot to learn.

In particular, there’s a huge gap between writing posts that people read and forget vs. writing posts that people will remember well enough that they’re still referring their friends, family members, and co-workers to read a year later. One of the key calibrations for long-term blogging success is to learn how to write the latter type of post; that’s how you get your archives working for you, and your traffic can still grow even when you aren’t posting anything.

For example, of the top 10 articles on my website that generate the most referrals, only one was written this year. Articles I wrote years ago continue to attract new readers today. However, it took me a long time to learn to write the kinds of articles that would produce such results. I’ve publicly shared how I do this, and that’s been helpful for some people, but it still takes time for new bloggers to “get it” to the point where they can apply it.

Not long ago I was at a party, chatting with a woman who got started blogging after attending a blogging workshop I did a couple years ago. She was telling me some of the mistakes she made with her blog during that time, all of which were mistakes I explicitly said to avoid during the workshop. For example, she wrote lots of timely content instead of timeless content, so she felt like she was on an endless treadmill, and her archives were largely worthless. She remembered that I said to avoid those mistakes too, but that wasn’t enough to stop her from making them. Despite having the opportunity to learn from my experience and avoid the pitfalls I described, she still had to go out and make those mistakes in order to refine her own calibration. I’ve seen countless bloggers make the same mistakes. They seek my advice, I tell them what to do and what not to do and why, and they do exactly what I tell them not to do and then wonder why it isn’t working. Oy vey! This is okay though, as long as they keep plugging ahead and learn from those mistakes. We human beings aren’t known to be the best listeners in the galaxy. We learn much better by doing something than by reading about it.

Different bloggers will naturally calibrate themselves toward different goals. For example, I wanted to calibrate my blogging skills to the goal of having a deep, long-term impact on my readers. I want to change people’s lives for the better. This is partly why I do things differently than most bloggers. I blow off many practices that other pro bloggers defend as sacred. My articles tend to be very long and detailed. I typically avoid posting shallow short info-crack pieces. I post less frequently, sometimes going a week or more with no fresh content. I largely ignore current events. I don’t often link to other blogs. This is all because I’m calibrating my skills toward a certain type of result. Those popular strategies just aren’t very helpful at achieving the results I desire, so I don’t use them. If you want this to become yet another info-crack blog, get used to disappointment. I want to change your life, not provide you with a five-minute distraction.

So be careful when taking advice from others. If you’re calibrating toward a different goal than they are, their advice may hurt you more than help you. It’s best to learn from people who’ve already achieved a similar calibration to what you want to achieve. For example, if you just want to make as much money as possible and don’t care how you get it, then you probably wouldn’t want to model my blogging methods because I’ve calibrated myself toward a different goal. But you might want to follow those bloggers who proudly proclaim they’re in it for the money — there are plenty to select from. On the other hand, if you believe you’re here for a reason and that blogging could potentially become a sustainable expression of your life purpose, then you’d probably benefit greatly by studying my style, since I’ve been getting positive results in this area for years. The point is that if you decide to model someone, be sure you’re modeling someone with compatible goals (and thus a compatible calibration).

One thing I’ve learned from 4+ years of blogging is that it really isn’t that hard in principle to become a successful blogger; however, it’s very hard in practice. Newbies’ minds are typically filled with many false notions. In some ways they need to unload more useless ideas than they need to absorb useful ideas. I’ve raped quite a few pro blogging sacred cows, yet my blog is still going strong.

There are a lot of blogging success factors that are somewhat counter-intuitive. You won’t realize this if you just read sites about blogging because they’ll rarely write about these factors. For the most part, it’s not that anyone is intentionally withholding information. The ideas are simply too subtle for most bloggers to be consciously aware of them. Many calibration issues are like this — they’re just too subtle to appear on any “top 10″ or “how to” lists. Sometimes people who succeed can’t document all the specific reasons they’ve succeeded. They can’t consciously unearth every detail of their unconscious calibration. There are some things I do as a successful blogger that I’ve never seen anyone write or speak about publicly, myself included. Some of the concepts are so subtle or intricate that even if I explained them in detail, nobody but other successful pro bloggers would even understand what I’m talking about, and some people would accuse me of lying.

Yesterday another blogger emailed me a link to a post he wrote, explaining why he personally dislikes my writing style. This is a blogger who says he gets significantly less traffic than I do. His main criticism is that I state my opinions too directly, as if they’re facts. This is a perfectly valid criticism of course; I confess to doing this liberally. The attitude of that blogger was that this is a personal defect I should correct. However, what he probably doesn’t realize is that this is a trait I developed over time as part of my calibration process for blogging success. I’m sure his advice is well-meaning, but I know that if I take his advice, my results will actually decline. I can say he’s wrong and that I’m right because I’ve learned which approach works best for me via trial and error. As a generalization, I know that making strong statements works better than making weak statements.

This is one of many subtle calibration refinements I learned from years of blogging. I discovered that prefacing every opinion with phrases like “I think…” or “I feel…” or “In my opinion…” leads to the creation of wimpy content. So this was actually a personal defect I learned to correct, and I intentionally make strong statements. My readers aren’t stupid. They know that since this is my website, such statements represent my thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. When I offer up my thoughts directly, as opposed to watering them down with qualifiers, people are challenged to agree or disagree with me. This helps people question their beliefs, strengthening some while weakening others. This is what I like to see.

Another benefit to making strong statements is that other bloggers, including the one critical of my posting style, will take the time to write posts just to disagree with me, thereby sending traffic to my website and actively helping me achieve my goals. Yet because their content is usually wimpier, they don’t benefit equally from this same mechanism. There are a lot of subtle interactions going on here, and I’m only offering a cursory overview here, but the net effect is that by posting strong statements, I enjoy more blogging success, but I also attract more criticism. However, the criticism actually benefits me. This is pretty counterintuitive, isn’t it?

Part of the reason I’ve been so successful as a blogger is that people remember what I’ve written, especially if they disagree with it. If you look at the comments written about my work throughout the blogosphere, you’ll find that most people have very polarized opinions about my work. Some people love my work. Some absolutely despise it. Very few are neutral. However, love it or hate it, these same people keep discussing my work, constantly spreading the word to those who don’t know about me. Such controversy makes people curious and brings new readers to my website every day. Isn’t this just insidious? The more people dislike me, the more they actively go out and market my work to others, and the more they help me achieve my goal of helping people grow. This is so effective that I can even tell such people how they’re helping me, and they’ll keep right on doing it.

I could certainly write more agreeable posts that few people would find objectionable. I could apologize for every opinion of mine that isn’t mainstream. But that’s totally the wrong calibration for my goals, not to mention for my personality. It’s way too cowardly. I don’t want to calibrate as a wimpy blogger that nobody can find fault with. It’s more effective to calibrate as a blogger who challenges people and makes a difference, even if it sends some people running the other way (to go out and promote my work instead of reading it themselves).

Uncalibrated newbie bloggers often blog scared. They try to please everyone and avoid taking risks. Consequently, they write posts that are easily forgotten and which will generate few referrals. Then some new upstart blogger comes along with a better calibration, breaks all the newbie rules, and surges ahead in traffic. And the other newbies think it’s luck. It’s not luck though. A good example is the blog Stuff White People Like. I first happened upon it shortly after it launched, and I knew it would become successful. I could see it had a great calibration for building traffic quickly — it was only a matter of time before it took off. The posts were politically incorrect to the max, but they were witty and memorable. Sure enough, that blog became a hit and even led to a book deal. If this sort of success surprises you as a blogger, it means your calibration is off. If your calibration is solid, you should be able to browse through the early posts on that blog and NOT be surprised by its success. Overall, if you’re often surprised by the success of others in your field, it means your calibration isn’t very good yet. As your own calibration matures, you’ll get better at being able to predict successes.

One of the keys to success in any field, especially blogging, is to accept that there are good reasons the successful people are succeeding, and it has nothing to do with luck. If you see someone who’s getting better results than you, even if it’s someone with less experience who started after you, chances are they have a more accurate calibration than you. You can rail against that, feel jealous, and call them names, but it’s better to take a step back, eat your humble pie, and learn from such people if you can. I’ve learned some pretty cool things from bloggers who started long after I did. Although my current calibration is obviously working, I know I can always improve, and I never want to think of myself as such as expert that I can’t keep learning and growing.

One of the worst things you can do in blogging is to write in such a manner that will offend no one. If you don’t offend or challenge anyone, you’re probably writing content that isn’t very memorable or meaningful. If you write what people expect, their minds won’t store it. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any highly successful bloggers that don’t have multiple negative rants written about them somewhere. All of them piss people off. Most of them aren’t intentionally trying to upset people. It’s just that upsetting people seems to be a natural consequence of the calibration required for blogging success.

This isn’t unique to blogging either. Think of any successful media personality, and I’m sure you can find some rants about them with a quick online search. In fact, the biggest stars will have tons of rants. Consider Tom Cruise for instance.

Some people might assume this sort of controversy is a side-effect of success, like perhaps that celebrity got a big head after enjoying some success (causing people to turn against him/her), or maybe the rants appeared as a side effect of the celebrity’s popularity (like it’s just a numbers game). I’d say that’s the wrong way to look at this. It’s more likely that generating controversy was part of the celebrity’s early calibration process. If anything, the ability to handle controversy probably helped them become a celebrity in the first place.

Some of the first articles I ever wrote, even before I launched StevePavlina.com, generated controversy that helped turn them into fast hits. An example was the article Do It Now, which I wrote in 2000. Lots of people love that article, but some people find it disturbing and feel compelled to rant about it (even eight years after it was first posted online), perhaps because it makes them realize just how unproductive they are compared to what they could be achieving if they really made an all-out effort. Unfortunately, it took me years to figure out why that article became a hit and to learn how to reproduce the kind of impact it had. It also took me a long time to realize that the negative backlash generated by that article was actually helping me grow my readership… and that I should accept and embrace such critical feedback rather than worry about it. What I initially interpreted as negative feedback (i.e. I did something wrong) was actually positive feedback (I did something right). Interpreting emails from people saying “you are wrong” as evidence that you did something right is again pretty counterintuitive, isn’t it?

This is a key point of calibration. When you’re building a new skill, you have to look at the big picture in terms of the results you’re getting. You might do something that seems to generate immediate negative feedback from people, but when you step back and look at the big picture, you may see that the overall feedback is overwhelmingly positive. This happens a lot in blogging, where a reader may chew you out for something you wrote, and then six months later, they’re singing your praises for helping them achieve a breakthrough they never thought possible. And even if they aren’t singing your praises, they’re out there telling people why they hate you, thereby making people curious and sending you more traffic.

A similar effect also happens in social dynamics, where the “bad guys” can actually attract more success because they have so many detractors unwittingly doing their marketing for them.

Newbie Fear

Perhaps the toughest part of calibration is dealing with newbie fear. This is the fear of failure or rejection we experience when learning a new skill. Initially we suck, we know full well that we suck, and we really don’t want to deal with the embarrassment and humiliation of other people witnessing just how badly we suck. This is most distressing with skills that must be calibrated in public, such as dating skills and public speaking.

There are some ways to mitigate newbie fear. One of the best ways is to connect with other newbies and go through the initial training together. When you look up to experts who are already well-calibrated, it’s easy to become intimidated and psyche yourself out. You’ll tend to hold yourself to an unreasonable standard of performance. But if you befriend and hang out with other newbies, the learning process can be a lot more fun. It’s comforting to have buddies that suck just as badly as you do. You can blow off steam together, share your latest insights, and poke fun at each other as you learn. “Misery loves company” isn’t such a bad idea in this case.

The key is to associate with newbies who are committed to learning and growing. If you hang out with flakes, it probably won’t help you much. Try to identify other newbies that you predict are likely to stick with it and succeed, and hang out with them if you can. This will help increase your commitment without making you feel too intimidated.

When I first started learning about blogging, I enjoyed connecting with other newbie bloggers. In the old days (old as in four years ago), we swapped links with each other, shared advice, and found ways to help each other gain traffic. Many of those people gave up and quit of course, but a few are doing very well today. It’s cool to watch your newbie friends improve their calibration right along with you, even though everyone improves at different rates.

Ultimately, you’ll only get so much mileage out of trying to reduce newbie fear. The fastest way to overcome it is to simply charge straight at it. Just accept that you’ll suck, that some embarrassment will happen, and that the only way out is through. This is especially important for building good social skills.

You’ll only get so far by sitting at home reading, listening to audio programs, and watching videos. Such educational aids can help, but they can never substitute for real-world experience. Use them as supplemental materials to refine your in-field experimentation. If you want to become a successful blogger, start blogging immediately. If you want to build an online business, get some kind of website online right away. If you want to improve your social skills, go outside and meet people tonight. Yes, you’re going to suck at first. But if you push through the newbie fear and do it anyway, the fear will subside, and you’ll begin to calibrate your skills very quickly.

Even if you read all the books in your field, you will still suck on your first in-field experience. You won’t even be able to apply what’s in those books. So get out in the field and start calibrating.

Get that first crappy “Hello, World” blog post under your belt. Let out that inane “Hey, baby. What’s your sign?” pick-up line. Bang shins with your sparring partner as you scream, “Ouch!”

Newbie Pride

If you’re a newbie at something, and you’re feeling hesitant to go after some live in-field experience, realize that this is very normal. Many newbies resist being newbies, but this resistance only makes them more nervous. So realize that a big part of the problem is your own resistance to being a newbie. You’ll get into the field sooner if you can accept this phase of your learning curve.

My advice for turning this around is to fully embrace your newbieness. Don the badge of Newbie Pride. Instead of fearing that you’ll look like a total dork, take this the other way. Embrace and even exaggerate your dorkiness. Don’t try to resist it. Blow it up even larger.

In martial arts classes, there’s no hiding your newbie status. You wear a white belt, so everyone knows you’re a beginner. This actually makes it easier because you know people don’t expect much of you. The lower belts may be nervous about sparring, but since they know that nobody expects much of them, most are able to get out on the mat and spar without undue hesitation.

However, in other fields, people don’t wear white belts. This has positive and negative side-effects.

In online business, for example, many newbies try to hide their newbieness. I made this mistake when I started my first business. I pretended to be an experienced business person when I just started. I talked about my staff even when I was the only person in the business. That was totally unnecessary, not to mention really dumb. When I started blogging, however, I didn’t try to hide my newbieness. I embraced that dorky beginner phase and had fun with it. And because of that, more experienced bloggers reached out to help me. Back then, “more experienced” meant they started blogging a month before I did.

I still maintain this attitude today. If I’m new at something, I’ll openly share my newbie dorkiness and hesitation. It doesn’t embarrass me to share my weaknesses. On the contrary, it actually invites a lot of help and advice from non-newbies who want to help me calibrate.

The Master Newbie Pick-up Artist

Suppose you’re a guy who wants to learn how to pick up women at night clubs, but you’re terrified of going out, and you can’t imagine walking up to a woman and delivering an opener. Realize that so much of your resistance is because you’re trying to appear cooler and more experienced than you really are. Do you realize this is totally unnecessary? It’s better to embrace your newbieness and use it to your advantage.

If I were trying to develop this particular skill, here’s what I’d do. I’d go up to women and tell them the plain and simple truth. I’ve never actually done this, so take my advice with a grain of salt because this isn’t a calibration I’ve bothered to develop, but I’ll bet you it would work well at initiating fun conversations.

I’d walk up to a group of women with a big smile on my face. I’d get their attention and say to them, “Hey guys, I’m currently learning how to meet women at night clubs, but I’m a total newbie at this. Would you mind if I practice on you just for fun for a couple minutes? And would you give me some honest feedback afterwards?”

I suspect you’ll probably get a laugh if you do this, and if you don’t, then the women aren’t likely worth talking to anyway, so you can quickly disqualify them as boring or humorless. You’ve taken the pressure off by initiating a “practice session,” so it doesn’t even matter what you say next. Your next line could even be, “Okay what do you think of this? [Switch to deep voice] Hey, baby. What’s your sign?” That would probably get another laugh, but even a groan isn’t bad. You can keep saying other funny lines. You could also kick off a meta conversation about meeting women at night clubs, such as by asking a question like, “Okay, after I do the opener, what should I talk about next? Would this be a good time to tell you a quick story to demonstrate that I’m a cool guy? Should I tell you about the time I …?” The context is that you’re just practicing, but in truth you’ve already opened the group.

This is an untested suggestion of course, so you’ll have to try it yourself to see if it works for you. The general idea is not to hide your newbieness. It’s perfectly okay to be a newbie and even to admit it to people. When you’re a newbie, your initial goal is to calibrate your skills, not to achieve a particular result. So take the pressure off as to whether or not you succeed or fail. You can go for results after you’ve calibrated your skills.

If you pretend to be an expert when you’re not, you’ll just stress yourself out. Wear the badge of Newbie Pride.

Incidentally, if you actually try this, please let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear how people react to it. I think this could work for men and women alike.

In fact, if a woman came up and used this opener on me, I’d probably laugh and say, “Sure, let’s practice.” I’d be pretty impressed by a woman who used such a line because it demonstrates a high level of awareness with a certain playfulness. I’d probably fall in love on the spot.

Great… now I’ve gotten myself all riled up to the point where I totally want to go to a night club and try this for real just to see what happens.

The Skill of Calibration

Being able to calibrate yourself to a new skill set is a skill in itself. The more skills you learn, the faster you’ll be able to achieve competence in each new skill you attempt.

One thing that happens as you calibrate to many different skills is that you become more comfortable being a newbie in general. Once you’ve gone through the newbie phase enough times, it ceases to bother you so much. You can start from rock bottom in a new field and be mostly okay with how badly you suck. You get used to it, and you know you’ll eventually get better. This makes it easier to put in the time as a newbie, so you can quickly progress to intermediate. For me the newbie phase is often the most fun and exciting because I learn the fastest during this time.

Another benefit of having lots of calibration experience is that you’ll be less intimidated by the experts. You’ll accept that they fine-tuned their calibration over many years. This will help you develop the patience necessary to keep hacking away in order to build long-term competence.

When I became a raw foodist earlier this year, I spent a lot of time communicating with successful long-term raw foodists. Initially, the information I gained was just overwhelming. I was offered thousands of pages of text to read (books, e-books, articles), plus audio, video, and live lectures to attend. There were some weeks where learning this skill practically became my full-time job. I had to unlearn many bad habits that were holding me back, not to mention breaking a lifelong addiction to cooked food. This was a total lifestyle overhaul, not just a minor diet change.

After months of study and practice, I eventually calibrated myself to being a successful raw foodist, well enough that I felt I could maintain it on autopilot. I’d probably label myself an advanced intermediate at this point. I have a solid grasp of the fundamentals, cooked foods are no longer appealing to me, I feel fantastic, and I love the foods I eat. As part of this re-calibration to raw foods, my taste buds have shifted a lot. I actually crave fresh greens now. I feel mildly deprived if I don’t eat at least a pound of greens each day. Now that I’ve achieved a decent calibration, maintaining this lifestyle is pretty much a no-brainer for me. But during the first few months, I had to invest a lot of thought and effort into it.

Immersion and Experimentation

When learning new skills, my preference is to get through the newbie phase as quickly as possible, so I can start enjoying some good results. In order to accomplish this, I’ll often put other areas of my life on hold, so I can devote the bulk of my time to building competence in the new skill. I don’t always do this, but if the skill is important to me, I prefer the strategy of total immersion instead of working on it a little bit each week.

The danger of being stuck in beginner mode for too long is that your early motivation may fade, and more self-discipline will be required to keep going. Many new bloggers give up within the first few months, well before they’re getting any results. It takes them too long to calibrate their skills to what is required for success in blogging, so they never make it past the beginner phase. After a few months, they still haven’t calibrated, so they continue to make the sorts of mistakes that a well-calibrated blogger could spot within seconds. For example, they write boring posts that nobody cares to read, or they write time-bound posts that will be worthless a year later. It takes too much discipline for them to keep going with no results to show for it, so they give up. Then they repeat the same process again in a different field. Hopefully by now you can clearly see that this is a loser strategy.

On the other hand, I’ve seen bloggers who’ve built a lot of traffic very quickly, earning $1000+ per month within a few months after they started. They threw themselves wholeheartedly into learning everything they could about blogging, and they were willing to be open-minded and flexible. They learned what worked for them and did more of it. They learned what didn’t work and stopped doing it. They understood that if they wrote a blog post, and it generated no increase in traffic whatsoever, then perhaps they should write something totally different instead of sticking with more of the same.

Proper calibration requires a lot of experimentation. If you don’t get a good result, you can interpret that as a negative result, and change something — change anything. But don’t keep doing what didn’t work, expecting that it’s just a matter of time before things pick up. It’s not really a matter of time. It’s a matter of skill.

When you immerse yourself in learning a new skill, don’t focus on trying to get results with the skill — at least not right away. Instead, focus on getting good at the skill.

For example, if you’re learning to blog, focus on writing posts in a variety of styles. You want to calibrate yourself to get good at writing blog posts that generate referrals. Don’t worry about trying to make money with your blog. Don’t even worry about trying to build a certain level of traffic. You can focus on those goals later. But initially, aim to figure out how to semi-consistently write awesome posts that generate referrals. If you can’t figure out how to do that, your blog will surely fail. But if you can calibrate yourself to this skill, then you can shift from building your skill to applying your skill. That’s where you can start really building your traffic and generating income from your work.

A New Equilibrium – Post-Calibration

The funny thing about calibration is that once you reach a certain point, you’ll tend to let go of all the tricks, tactics, and techniques you learned along the way. Now you’re able to maintain a certain level of success just by being yourself.

This happens because the skills you learned have been internalized. You no longer have to think about the details because your subconscious mind takes care of them for you. Applying your skill becomes much easier when you reach this point.

Blogging is largely effortless for me these days. I can crank out a detailed new article with fairly little effort. I got the idea for this particular article while I was at the gym this morning. I outlined it in my head while I took a shower. Later I sat down to write, and the words just flowed. It took me a while to write an article of this length of course, but the process was easy and effortless. The reason it was easy is that I’ve already calibrated myself to the skill of writing articles. There are lots of details that go into writing an article of this length, but I don’t have to consciously think about the process of how to write. It’s all internalized. I can just sit down at my desk, the ideas start flowing, and my fingers automatically start typing. I can chunk the task of writing an article as a single to-do item, even an article of this length, and it isn’t a big deal to me.

When I write a new blog post, I don’t consciously think about all the details that other pro bloggers would tell you are important. I just blog. It feels like a very simple thing to do, not nearly as complicated as it might seem. However, the reason I can keep it simple and still do well in this field is because I went through that complicated newbie phase years ago. I internalized the techniques that proved effective for me, so today I don’t even think about them anymore.

Putting a skill on automatic pilot is the long-term benefit of good calibration. Once you gain this calibration, you can’t really lose it. You may need to re-calibrate your skills from time to time to adapt to changing conditions, but that usually isn’t as hard as acquiring the initial calibration.

If you took away my blog and all my articles, and I had to start over from scratch as an anonymous blogger today, do you think I could repeat my success? I’m sure I could do so very quickly because I’ve already calibrated my blogging skills. I typically experience quick success when I can rely on a previous calibration, such as learning to spar in a new martial art or building a social network of friends in a new city. One of the reasons I achieved quick success as a blogger was that I benefited from my previous calibration of running a profitable online business for years, so I was able to adapt much of that skill to the medium of blogging. I was also able to adapt my blogging calibration to writing a book.

When you calibrate, you lock in a new skill. Then you can use that skill to generate consistently good results. This is a wonderful place to be. Post-calibration, you’ll typically feel very confident within the realm of that skill. You have every reason to feel confident because you’re genuinely competent. I’d feel comfortable starting a new online business. I’d feel comfortable moving to a new city where I didn’t know anyone. I’d feel confident studying a new style of martial arts. I’d feel confident giving a new speech. However, the first time I did these things, I hadn’t yet calibrated myself for success. The only kind of confidence I was able to muster back then was the “fake it till you make it kind,” which is more false bravado than genuine confidence.

Calibrate Is a Verb

Don’t let the newbie phase get you down. Everyone has to go through it. Get a newbie training partner if you must, but turn toward that newbie fear, and run straight at it. The fear will soon go away. It’s not a big deal to fail or to get rejected. That’s part of being a newbie. Accept it. You will get better.

In order to calibrate your skills, you have to take action. You can’t just sit at home reading or studying training materials. You must go into the field and do field work under real-world conditions.

As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody’s got plans… until they get hit.”

I know so many people who’ve spent months reading about and talking about starting an online business. They still don’t have an online business. But they just keep talking about it and planning it, as if that’s some form of phantom progress. Their calibration is still at zero. They think they’re getting closer to their goal. From my perspective, they haven’t even started yet. They’re just procrastinating.

Such people would do much better if they stopped reading and planning and started doing. Nobody earned a black belt from reading about martial arts.

Which approach do you think will generate the best results? Reading about a diet for 30 days? Or doing a 30-day trial of that diet?

Which will improve your social skills the most? Watching social skills videos for 30 days? Or going out every night for 30 days and starting up conversations with strangers?

Which will generate the best blogging results? Reading blogs on blogging for 30 days? Or starting your own blog and posting your own blog entries for 30 days?

Which will generate the best physical results? Read about weight training for 30 days? Or hit the gym and do 30 days of weight training?

Reading and studying will give you knowledge and information that sits in your mind. That seems like a good thing, but you’ll still have zero results to show for your efforts. You’re actually no closer to your goals. You’re still at the starting line. But if you go out and do the best you can to apply what you know right now, even if your understanding is full of holes, you’ll quickly learn what works under real-world conditions, and you’ll adapt. You’ll make a huge leap forward in your calibration. You’ll also generate some real-world results that may benefit you.

Get your nose out of the books and onto the field. Take your licks as they come, and learn from them. Build your skills under real-world conditions, so you can actually apply them to get results. Don’t just read about life. Live it.

Reading and learning are awesome, but make sure you’re using these as supplements for in-field experience, not substitutes. If you’re reading about any skill you want to develop, but you aren’t regularly performing in the field yet, you’re just procrastinating. Deep down you already knew that, didn’t you? I’m here to remind you of this, so you can hate me for it and help spread the word about how awful I am.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina