To wrap up 2011 and transition to 2012, Rachelle and I went to Phoenix for Raw Spirit Fest, and then yesterday we took a side trip to Sedona to meditate in one of our favorite spots. This retreat gave me time to reflect on the past year and to understand what I want to experience next.

During the past few years, I’ve been very active in the social circles surrounding my work, including connecting with people in the forums, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, email, talking face to face, doing consultations, holding workshops, hosting meet-ups in various cities, and so on. I maintained a strong community-oriented focus for much of this time.

For a while it was my conscious choice to immerse myself in all this social energy and to bring people together in various ways. I enjoyed it.

Eventually I began to feel a bit trapped though. Instead of choosing all this social interaction, it became an ever-present part of my life, whether I wanted to engage with it or not. It no longer felt like a choice. I’d engage in social networking simply because I’d been doing so for years. It became unconscious and very routine. Consequently, I developed quite a love-hate relationship with it. When I freely chose it, I loved it. When I felt like I was being sucked into it, I resisted it. I’m well aware that this influenced my interactions with people as well.

I now understand that it’s time for me to move on from this community-centered focus. It was a nice thing to experience, and it stimulated a lot of growth for myself and others, but I know it’s not the best choice going forward. If I keep doing it, it will only hold me back, and it will also suck others into more unconscious socializing.

Getting wrapped up in other people’s energies (thoughts, feelings, beliefs, etc) on a daily basis can be stimulating and rewarding, but the endless repetition can lead to resentment. That isn’t how I wish to feel about my social life, nor do I wish to serve as that kind of model for others.

If I continue actively immersing myself in the social community surrounding my work, I’ll become a victim of my own past. People are typically drawn to my work based on what I’ve written about in the past, but that isn’t who I am today, and it doesn’t accurately reflect where I’m going. When I keep connecting with people who are interested in discussing ideas that I explored years ago, it means I’m not keeping pace with my own path of growth. It’s like trying to drive while looking in the rear view mirror — after a while you begin to hate driving, even if you’d otherwise enjoy it when looking forward.

I’m delighted that so many people resonate with my work. Last month my web traffic hit a new all-time high: 12.4 million page views. Yet all of those pages contain content that was created in the past.

Essentially I’m faced with a question of priorities. Do I continue to actively engage with the social community surrounding my work and allow myself to keep getting re-immersed in past ideas, past energies, etc? Or do I let it go and focus on my own present and future path of growth?

For quite a while, I tried to do both and strike a balance. My efforts along those lines thus far have failed. Maybe a balance is possible, but I can see now that this balancing point isn’t going to be on the side that invites daily social connections that tie me to the past, such as emails, article feedback, private messages, questions, etc.

All this social energy has been acting like an anchor. When I try to move forward, it keeps tugging me back to old ideas I’ve already explored. It re-introduces old problems I’ve already solved but that other people are just beginning to solve. It tempts me to engage in old discussions that have no growth value for me today.

This month is my 15-year anniversary of being vegan, for instance. Is there any value in having the “why vegan” discussion with someone who hasn’t even done a 30-day trial of it yet? Will it be helpful to do more interviews on polyphasic sleep? Do I care to engage with people who think organized religion is the path to salvation? No… that’s looking to the past. I’d rather connect with people who can inspire me to keep growing. To make room for empowering connections, I’m consciously cutting connections that encourage me to keep looking backwards.

I love helping people grow, but I’m not willing to do that at the expense of my own growth.

So in 2012 I want to recenter my life on my path of conscious growth. I want to disengage from all the discussion surrounding my past work and free myself to explore life on my own terms once again.

The forums are closed. My online contact form is closed. I deleted my Facebook page a few months ago. I follow zero people on Twitter, so no one can send me a direct message there. My Google+ page is now closed to comments. If you wish to discuss my work, you remain free to do so; just don’t try to involve me in such discussions.

Socially I’m only keeping open the doors that I consciously choose to keep open, such as my workshops. But I’m closing the doors that encourage too much unconscious communication, such as feedback and questions related to past articles.

Part of this shift involved preparing for the upcoming Conscious Success Workshop, which starts in 11 days. One reason I enjoy creating workshops is that they push me to keep raising my standards. My vision of success involves consciously pursuing my own path of growth, and I want to know that I’m solidly living that vision before delivering this workshop.

As I clear out the mental and social clutter, I’m feeling much lighter and more enthusiastic about this coming year. I’m anticipating new experiments and experiences. I especially love this fresh opportunity to fully engage in what captivates me without regard to other people’s feedback.

In some ways I feel like I’ve been assimilated by the Borg collective for the past few years. There were so many voices in my mind that it was difficult to stay connected to my own desires. Now that those voices are quieting down, I’m enjoying the bliss and peace of reconnecting with what I love most — conscious growth experiences.

Disconnecting from the social elements that didn’t serve me doesn’t mean I’m disconnecting from the world. I love to write and expect to continue doing so. Reading people’s feedback on my writing, however, is something I can live without. I feel I’ve digested enough feedback about my writing to last me a few lifetimes, so I’m cashing in some of those credits to opt out for a lifetime or two.

In addition to refocusing on my own path of growth in 2012 and closing the door on daily social networking, I’d like to reorient my social life to spend more time connecting with others who have similar priorities when it comes to pursuing growth experiences. I had hoped I might meet such people through the social networks surrounding my work, but that didn’t happen. One reason is that such people would rather engage in growth experiences than in discussions about growth. They’d rather travel than talk about travel… would rather speak than discuss speaking… and would rather start a business than talk about starting one.

I don’t want to connect with such people in order to have more discussions about growth. I’d rather connect with people who are up for pursuing some growth experiences together — like traveling together, conducting experiments together, or tackling projects together. We can always talk to each other in the car, on the plane, etc.

Most importantly, when I connect with people, I want to do so from a place of conscious choice, not from a sense of habit, obligation, or routine. What’s most important to me in life is pursuing my path of growth. That comes first. But when this path meshes nicely with another’s path for a while, then why not explore our paths together if it’s something we both enjoy?

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

The Golden Motorcycle Gang

Jack imagines that before he incarnated as a human being, he was part of a gang of spiritual beings speeding through the cosmos on their merry way, and they happened upon a blue planet and decided to take a closer look. What did they see? A planet at war with serious troubles. The year was 1943.

This planet was heading towards a crucial point. If it continued on its old ways, it could soon destroy itself, either with increasingly destructive weaponry, by gradually destroying the planet’s ability to sustain human life, or perhaps by descending into chaos when unsustainable systems ultimately collapsed.

Acting somewhat impulsively the Golden Motorcycle Gang decided to incarnate as human beings. They wanted to help earth move in a more positive direction. Initially they forgot that they were part of this gang, but later in life the memories of their spiritual identities gradually returned, and they were able to reconnect with other members of the gang… and then to begin coordinating their efforts.

The story works whether you regard this as a real soul group or simply as a metaphor for discovering one’s calling. Just consider how it might affect your life and your actions if you believed that you were a part of something like this and that you had previously agreed to fulfill a larger purpose.

In Jack’s case the call to making a difference is well established. Among his many achievements, he co-authored the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which are filled with inspirational stories. This series has spawned more than 200 books that have collectively sold more than 500 million copies. If you visit one of the remaining brick and mortar bookstores, you’ll frequently see entire sections dedicated to these books.

I have a special connection to this book since I’ve been involved with the Golden Motorcycle Gang since 2009. For that reason my name is listed in one of the book’s appendices.

I have a golden motorcycle coin (a symbolic token of initiation that was given to me by Jack) tacked up to my vision board in my home office. I use this board to post words, phrases, symbols, photos, drawings, and artistic creations from my kids — anything that reminds me of my life purpose, goals, and dreams.

Cracking Systems

If you get most of your news from fear-based media outlets, you may worry that the planet is going downhill. The economy is tanking. Wars are being fought with no end in sight. Money is corrupting everything. World leaders trash-talk each other behind the scenes.

Yes, the planet has its problems, but there’s also a rising counter-reaction to these problems. More and more people are progressively waking up, and many are committing themselves to work on solutions to our greatest challenges. Our global challenges are too big for any one person to solve, so collective coordination is necessary.

As many people are well aware, our economic and political systems are showing lots of cracks lately. One problem is that many elements of these systems are unsustainable. For example, we can’t achieve infinite growth from systems that rely on ever-increasing consumption of finite resources. Eventually the simple mathematics will win out. It’s just a matter of time.

On the other hand, there are elements of these existing systems that actually work quite well. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We want to keep what works and re-engineer the parts that aren’t working. I for one feel grateful for just how well systems of business and government work in the USA. There are numerous problems of course — these systems are far from perfect — but they do accomplish quite a lot.

Anarchy isn’t the answer. Even the most unconstrained parts of the Internet has shown that self-governance is a failure. Where free will is present, it just takes a few deliberate wrongdoers to wreck the whole system for everyone else. As much as we’d like to believe it isn’t necessary, at this time in our evolution we still require the foundation of force-backed coercive power to maintain a reasonable level of order, whether that power is wielded by governments or businesses. Where there’s no rule of law backed by the threat of force, things break down.

Government and business systems add significant value to our lives, and life without them would be far worse. Without those systems you and I probably wouldn’t even be able to communicate. What we need is to intelligently replace the unsustainable elements with more sustainable ones. By itself that’s an achievable goal. The tricky part is keeping everything running during the transition process. We can’t simply shut everything down and replace it with something new. If we lose the structure provided by our current systems before new ones can be established, we could potentially descend into chaos, and it could take us a very long time to recover from that.

We can also continue to upgrade the systems that are working poorly. Education is a good example. Many best practices are known, but they aren’t yet being implemented on a large scale. This creates rippling problems since an uneducated society cannot produce enough educated individuals to perform vital functions, particularly when it comes to leadership.

Gathering the Gang

There was a time when these GMG group members acted mainly as individuals — writing books, doing seminars, coaching people, and running their own independent businesses. Then they began coalescing into groups, helping to inspire, motivate, and support each other in doing transformational work. Now those groups are beginning to connect in order to coordinate their efforts on a larger scale. This is a very interesting development to witness.

Group cohesion is a challenging thing to accomplish in this case — almost like herding cats. I’m especially curious to see if these groups will be able to find enough common ground to work on bigger projects that require significant cooperation.

My interpretation of the GMG and similar groups and that one of their desired functions is to help us transition from the old, dying systems to new, more sustainable ones. There’s a sense of optimism as well as urgency arising within these groups. On the one hand, we have a lot of smart people now agreeing to coordinate their efforts, doing their best to keep their egos in check as they work together for the common good. On the other hand, the clock is ticking. The old systems only have so much life left in them before they can no longer be maintained.

Some of these people are working on education. Others are tackling environmental issues. Some are working on basic needs. Still others work to raise awareness and teach oneness and compassion. One woman I know works with prisons. They’re making progress on the important fronts. The main question is whether progress is happening quickly enough.

Birth 2012

One thing that’s being coordinated, as explained in Jack’s book, is to have a planetary birthday party on Dec 22, 2012, which is 1 year, 1 month, and 11 days from now. This is yet another step in the direction of helping people come together, set aside their differences, and embrace that we all share a common destiny on this planet. In the grand scheme it may be a small step, but it will help raise awareness of bigger issues and draw more people into the transition process. You can learn more about this birthday celebration and sign up to participate at birth2012.com.

Expanding Your Life Purpose by Finding Your Tribe

Instead of regarding your life purpose as your individual mission, you may find it more empowering to interpret your purpose as part of a team effort. You’re not acting alone. Your actions can be coordinated with others to have more impact.

This doesn’t mean surrendering your will to a group. It means noticing where your individual strengths could contribute greater results by coordinating your efforts with others.

Most members of the GMG are much older than I am, belonging to my parents’ generation. I resonate with their values, philosophies, and projects, but I can see that their paths and my path are a bit different. We’re all working on similar challenges, just from different angles.

I can see how great the level of mutual support is within this group. Many GMG members have been friends for decades. Sometimes they support each other from a distance. Sometimes they work together directly. Either way they’re bound by common values and a common cause.

Whereas members of the GMG often have their values rooted in the 60s, molded by such experiences as the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, my past was shaped by different events, such as the massive expansion of communications technology, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Gulf Wars, and 9/11. I was also strongly influenced by West Coast values since I grew up in California, which is where many members of the GMG currently live.

I like riding with the GMG, I share a lot of love and support with them, and I can see that their missions combine nicely with my own, but energetically and soulfully, the people I resonate with most strongly wouldn’t think of themselves as members of this group. The GMG feels like family to me, but on the level of aunts, uncles, and some cousins. Lately, however, I’ve been feeling drawn to connect with the people who’d be on the level of brothers and sisters.

The Next Generation

Many of the problems the GMG is tackling won’t be solved within their lifetimes. It will be up to the next generation to receive the torch and carry it further downfield.

Reading Jack’s book got me thinking about the people who might be part of this next generation, people who are currently in their 30s and 40s (and perhaps mature 20-somethings) and who want to help shift the planet in a more positive direction.

I’ve met many of these people, but I feel we’re still in the phase of working primarily as individuals, mostly doing our own things while connecting socially from time to time, like many GMG members were doing a decade ago.

Due to the age difference, our careers aren’t as well developed as those of the GMG. On average we don’t have as many resources at our disposal, and our networks aren’t as powerful. But we do have some key advantages. For starters we understand and can utilize technology a lot better than the previous generation. This is a generalization of course, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable one.

I’ve encountered a few networking groups for people close to my age, but they’re usually very business-centered. Often they just want to help promote each other’s products and become more successful in business. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but such groups don’t usually resonate with me. That isn’t the kind of vibe I’m looking for.

I’d rather connect with people who can direct their ambition towards making a positive difference in the world, especially people with strong service-oriented values.

For many years I’ve been hearing the frustrations of this next generation. Many of them see that the world needs help, and they’d like to contribute somehow, but they see no practical way of doing this. Meanwhile they’re being influenced to play it safe, to go into the corporate world and get a job. When they do this, however, they often wind up in empty, soulless positions — if they can find work at all. They do work that just doesn’t matter that much (according to their values, not mine), but they do it because they feel it’s necessary to support themselves. Consequently, they’re never all that motivated to do their best work or to advance their career skills, so they naturally stunt their career development. Years pass, and they feel they’re falling behind, but they don’t know what to do about it. They often blame themselves and assume the problem is their lack of drive, discipline, or motivation. And they try to hold out hope that something will change for them.

I think the real issue though is that our systems of business and government haven’t kept pace with our evolving consciousness. Many of these people are just too conscious to get sucked into the belief that says moving up the corporate ladder is important. They see through such shallow structures and avoid these dead-end paths, but they lack good practical alternatives.

On the other hand, this generation is more connected than ever, thanks to the Internet, social networking, and powerful portable devices. Quite often these people invest more time and energy in their social lives than in their career development.

Overall these people feel very pressured. There’s pressure to get something going career-wise, but the motivation isn’t there to do it. So the time gets devoted to the Internet and online socializing, and the career path gets drained of life and meaning to feed the social life.

The Need for Better Solutions

I avoided this fate by starting my own business, which is a solution I’ve recommend to others, but I understand that entrepreneurship isn’t a viable path for everyone. Many people would much rather work for someone else, and they’d love to do meaningful work that inspires them — and pays the bills.

Also, starting a new business often involves spending a lot of time working alone, and younger people are so well networked with their peers that it’s harder for them to go that route. It would make more sense for them to work together in groups to do creative work as a team.

Another problem with entrepreneurship is that many people get sucked into soulless business models. They gradually fall into a money-first focus that’s out of alignment with oneness, which leads to long-term unhappiness and stress. It’s sad to see the life drain out of such people when they go that route. They can’t even hug properly after a while.

I love how the community around my work has grown and how people help and support each other and stay connected socially. But many of these same people (perhaps even most of them) are experiencing significant challenges in their career and financial lives. They feel stuck.

Even when they do start their own businesses, long-term success is difficult. I didn’t make my first business profitable till its 6th year, for instance. This isn’t unusual for entrepreneurs. But how to pay the bills in the meantime?

If we want to move away from the soulless corporate job trap as the primary career path that people of this generation settle for in order to cover their expenses, we’ll need to create more and better alternatives.

Getting Stronger

Many members of the GMG are very well off financially. In most cases it took them decades to get there, but it does make service easier when you have a steady stream of royalties from bestselling books coming in, your Rolodex includes lots of influential friends, and Oprah likes you.

When I look at people around my age or younger who have a service-orientated mindset, many of them are struggling in one way or another. Either they’re struggling financially while maintain a strong heart-centeredness, or they’re doing well financially and struggling in their connectedness.

As I’ve seen with the GMG, it isn’t necessary to go it alone. We can help each other grow stronger, which puts us in positions to have a greater positive impact.

At this time in my life, I’ve been encountering a number of people who seem like they could be pieces to a bigger puzzle. Individually they have some interesting strengths and talents, but it’s difficult for them to leverage their strengths on their own. Increasingly I’m sensing that it’s important to help connect the dots between them, whereby some of them could work together in small teams to do some interesting and beneficial work.

Earlier this year I decided to grow my business by hiring more people, but I think that mindset has been too limiting. Most of the people that have been showing up haven’t been the right fit for my current business needs, but I can see that some of them might be able to work well with each other in a more flexible context.

I think it would be beneficial to bring some of these people together in person and help them connect with each other. They could keep in touch online, but for the best possible connection I think a face to face meet-up would be essential.

Most members of the GMG already have their own businesses, but this isn’t as common in the next generation. The next generation, however, has a major social advantage — by and large they’re really good at communicating with each other. In fact, I think many of them would crave the opportunity to work with very conscious people their own age as part of a team. It sure beats getting a mindless corporate job, and for many people it also beats working alone on their own.

Service Orientation

The key is to bring people together who are truly interested in serving the greater good in some fashion, people who have compatible values and similar mindsets regarding service — and people who are willing to work hard to become really good at what they do, so they can increase their ability to contribute over time.

For many years I’ve had a vision of bringing service-oriented people together and helping to provide the support structures that would enable them to do what they came here to do. I think what’s been holding me up was trying to figure out the right business structure for that — by expanding my current business, forming a non-profit, etc. I realize now that the underlying structure isn’t that important. That’s putting the cart before the horse. I think if we can just get some of these people in the same place talking to each other and discussing ideas, the structural issues will sort themselves out.

At this point the idea isn’t fully formed, so I’m tossing this out there to see where it leads. Who are these next generation people? What have they done so far that demonstrates their commitment to service? Would they be interested in connecting regularly with other “family members” who share their values?

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Watch the videos here: A Life That Matters

Once you’ve watched the first video, follow the link at the end of the text below the video to view the next video in the series. There are 3 videos in total, and each one is a little over 10 minutes long.

These videos will give you a good overview of the more detailed process you’ll experience in the Life on Purpose Virtual Video Coach program that helps you discover your life purpose and begin living in alignment with it.

If you feel you’ve been drifting lately and would like to have more meaning, focus, and centeredness in your life — or if you’ve been thinking about a career change to do work that’s more aligned with who you truly are — these videos are a good place to begin.

Enjoy!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

One of the top requests in that survey was for a product on the topic of Life Purpose. In reading through the many hundreds of comments, it became clear that a lot of people still feel they’re drifting, and they need more help bringing a sense of purpose to their lives, so they can feel centered and at peace with themselves — and so they can feel they’re on a path to making a meaningful contribution instead of being stuck in unfulfilling situations.

Another thing that stood out was that people want more than how-to information. They need help motivating themselves to go through the process. So even though I’ve written a good deal about life purpose in the past, and many people have found it extremely helpful, it isn’t enough to get everyone to the place they’d like to be — the place of having a deep-rooted connection to one’s life purpose.

I started working on a product along those lines because it seemed like a good place to start. Many other aspects of self development stem from clarifying your life purpose. I completed the product outline, which I expected would become a 6-10 hour audio program. But when I reviewed the outline, something didn’t feel quite right about it to me. It didn’t feel like this was really “my product.” I felt like I was using a semi-forced process that wasn’t my normal process for creating inspired content.

I acknowledged to myself that I was out of flow, so I put the product on hold for a while, worked on other projects, and took a weeklong road trip through California, intending to come back to the project a little later with a fresh perspective. I pondered whether I should take the product in a different direction. I didn’t want to scrap it because I know there’s a need for it, but I’ve learned over the years that it’s important to trust my intuition when it comes to such matters.

Synchronicities

During this time I received an email from Dr. Brad Swift about a new product he was releasing on the subject of… you guessed it… life purpose. I was already familiar with Brad’s work because I reviewed his book Life on Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life in 2007, and we’ve kept in touch over the years. Life on Purpose is simply the best book on life purpose I’ve ever read, and it deserves the rare honor of maintaining a solid 5-star average rating on Amazon.com.

Brad’s new program is called the Life on Purpose Virtual Video Coach. It’s an online video-based course where Brad personally guides you through his 6-step Life on Purpose process one lesson at a time. All the videos can be streamed online, and the course includes a PDF workbook and some bonus material.

I went through the entire program in May, and I loved it. I had to chuckle at the synchronicity because this was essentially the product I was trying to create. My ideas and processes were different of course, but the end benefits would be the same — to help you bring a clear sense of purpose to your life and to fully ground it in your daily actions, so that you’re truly living on purpose.

I also thought to myself, Well… that was easier than I thought. I intended for the creation of a certain product, and here it is. I didn’t even have to record it.

So first, I received the lesson I seem to keep needing to learn — to create from a place of inspiration and not to try to force creativity. But beyond that, I also got a lot of value from Brad’s course. If you visit his website, you’ll see my testimonial there. That was actually part of an email I sent to him to tell him what I thought of the course, and I was happy to have him include it on his product page when he asked if that would be okay.

Life on Purpose Virtual Video Coach

I don’t think of this as an info product because it’s not primarily a course to put new knowledge in your head, although that is a part of it. The program guides you through a process that’s all about you, so it has more to do with gaining self knowledge and understanding.

One step at a time, you’ll be guided to reveal your inherited purpose (your fear-based false purpose that masquerades as your true purpose), then to discover your true purpose, and finally to ground your true purpose into your life so you can enjoy more happiness and fulfillment.

This course goes well beyond the point of forming a clear statement of purpose. It provides many tools and techniques to help you begin living congruently with your purpose and to shift away from stuckness as well as your inherited purpose.

I read Brad’s book and loved it; however, I gained much more value from his Virtual Video Coach. I was a bit surprised because I figured it would simply be a video version of his book. It does cover a lot of the same ground as the book, but I experienced the material in a totally different way. Brad has a very centered and peaceful way of communicating, and watching him on video is (in my opinion) a much better expression of who he is than words on a page.

I’m not going to go into detail about all the features and benefits of the course because you can find all of that information on his website. I think it would be more authentic to simply share how the course affected me.

Doing vs. Being

For many years I’ve had a pretty clear sense of my life purpose, and I like to think I’ve been doing a good job living it. I feel fulfilled most of the time, and I’m very pleased with my current direction. My normal experience is to feel that I’m in the flow of inspiration, and I seldom feel stuck. My life has been working very well, and it seems to be getting better each year.

Here’s the purpose statement I currently have on my About page:

to care deeply, connect playfully, love intensely, and share generously;
to joyfully explore, learn, grow, and prosper;
and to creatively, brilliantly, and honorably serve the highest good of all.

It may not mean anything to you, but I still get a surge of emotion each time I read it. I think it does a job of succinctly summing up how I wish to live and what inspires me most.

This purpose statement has worked well for me over the years, but Brad’s course gave me another way of thinking about purpose. It didn’t replace my current purpose statement, which I still love, but it gave me another perspective I hadn’t considered.

Instead of thinking about purpose in terms of doing, Brad encourages you to think about it in terms of being.

I think one of the reasons my purpose statement has worked so well for me is that it incorporates beingness, and it isn’t heavy on the doingness in a way that might make me feel pressured or stressed. If your purpose is only about doing, then when you aren’t taking action, you aren’t on purpose; that creates a pressure to be doing, doing, doing… even when you’re feeling burned out. I agree with Brad that it’s better to define your purpose in such a way that you can feel happy and fulfilled at all times, not just when you’re taking a lot of action. I figure I must be doing something right because I often feel very grateful even when I’m just running errands or hanging out with friends.

Fortunately my current purpose statement translates fairly easy to beingness. “To care deeply” means to be a caring person. “To connect playfully” means to be a playful person. “To joyfully explore” means to be an explorer.

I liked considering my purpose statement through the lens of being. It helped me recognize that no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I can always be living on purpose. I don’t always have to be doing something specific.

But there was a greater benefit beyond this. Brad’s insights encouraged me to reinterpret my goals, projects, and tasks from the perspective of beingness. I reviewed those items and asked myself, Who am I really desiring to be here?

My original purpose statement addresses the questions of what and how. I also have an intuitive understanding of the why. But it doesn’t really address the question of where. Where do I ultimately see myself living on purpose?

This is a fairly general question, but it gave me a lot of clarity. I thought about why I’m in Las Vegas and what I can do here specifically. I thought about where in the broad field of personal development I most enjoy working. I thought about what kinds of situations and positions I enjoy most.

There are so many facets to this exploration that I’m still exploring it — which is actually a part of my purpose: to joyfully explore. But I’ve already gained more clarity about some “locations”, or states of being, that I enjoy most.

One place I enjoy is being in the increasingly overlapping space between technology and personal development. I feel perfectly comfortable in both fields. I liked being one of the first people to leverage blogging technology to spread personal development ideas. Now it’s commonplace, and there are lots of people leveraging tech to promote PD. I think that’s wonderful.

I feel right at home in this tech-PD space. I like having an online business, and I regard the Internet as my digital home. I also love exploring personal growth and sharing it with others. Brad’s course gave me the clarity to see that positionally speaking, I love having one foot in the tech world and the other foot in the PD world, and I look for ways to further connect the dots between them.

Another location I love is the space of connecting deeply with people face to face. I like that I can discuss topics like life purpose or subjective reality with people shortly after I meet them. I like “breaking the ice” by recognizing that there never was any ice to begin with. I enjoy maintaining an open and approachable posture; I can’t always do that online due to the overwhelming numbers, but I’m at least able to do it in person most of the time. To me, being in the space of an intimate connection with someone is a very joyful place to be.

When I remind myself to simply be in these places, my life flows very easily, and I feel happy and fulfilled. Interestingly, this focus on being has led to a lot more action.

For example, by reminding myself that I love being in the overlapping space between tech and PD, I’ve been devouring tech company biographies lately, coming up with new ideas for how tech and PD could continue to merge. I’ve also made some tweaks to my website, so it’s serving up pages more efficiently than it was a week ago.

By reminding myself that I enjoy face time with people, I arranged a meetup in a local park last Sunday. About 14 people showed up. I brought a bunch of my discs that I use for disc golf, and several of us had fun throwing them around; that was my way of expressing “to connect playfully”. I’m also working on booking more workshops for the Fall, which will bring even more people together in the same physical location, where all of us can connect playfully and learn and grow together.

The irony is that I don’t feel like I’m really doing much, but I’m getting a lot more done than usual. I’m not trying to force anything. I just focus on where I want to be, and action flows effortlessly from there. I’m enjoying this really nice flow right now.

A few days ago, I was talking to Erin on the phone and she said something like, “I can tell you’re in a really good place right now. I’m not sensing that you need to change anything. You seem really happy right where you are.” She’s right.

Being in the right place is very powerful. When you’re in the right place — for you — the doing part follows naturally from it. You don’t have to push yourself to take action or fight against procrastination. When you’re in the right place of beingness, life automatically supports you.

More Distinctions

What I shared above is only one of many powerful distinctions I got from Brad’s course. Although he presents a 6-step linear process that’s easy to follow, I personally found that the course had a very nonlinear, expanding-in-all-directions effect on me.

If you watch the videos and do the workbook exercises in a straightforward manner, you’ll arrive at the point of having your own statement of purpose and a deep grasp of what it means. You’ll also begin living in alignment with that purpose, watching your life take on a positive new direction.

Don’t be fooled by the seemingly linear nature of the course, however. It’s a lot more than a step by step process. I found that several points really stuck with me, such as Brad’s coffee mug analogy, and got me thinking in new directions about other parts of my life such as my goals, projects, and actions. I started thinking less about to-dos and more about “Where do I want to be right now?” Once I figured that out, I discovered to my delight that the right actions flowed rather easily from there.

Let me conclude simply by saying that I highly recommend this course, and I think you’ll gain a lot by going through it — even if you think you’re already pretty clear about your purpose.

If you want to bring more purpose, meaning, and fulfillment to your life, you can’t go wrong here. Brad is definitely one of the good guys in this field, and I genuinely expect you’ll gain a lot from his program. It even includes a better than money-back guarantee, so you have nothing to lose by trying it.

I completed the course in less than a week, although you can certainly go through the lessons more slowly if you want time to integrate them one by one. An hour or two a week would be a very reasonable pacing.

To learn more, visit the Life on Purpose Virtual Video Coach page.

Well, that was an easy product to get out the door. What’s next?

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Let me share some perspectives that should make it easier to understand the process of waking up.

The Cellular Perspective

From the cellular perspective, you can see yourself as an individual person interacting with other individuals. You’re like a single cell in the larger body of humanity, which is comprised of billions of other people-cells.

For example, I could say that I’m a guy (a cell) who’s dedicated to helping people (other cells) live more consciously. I may communicate with many people during my lifetime, but each person is a unique individual, so the impact is different for everyone. We may all be part of some larger body of humanity, but our interactions mainly occur at the individual cellular level.

This is similar to one of the cells in your body noticing the other cells around it and deciding to do what it can to be of service to those cells. It may help a lot of cells, but it still regards itself as an individual cell helping other individual cells. And it won’t help all cells equally, nor could it do so even if it tried.

The Holistic Perspective

From the holistic perspective, you see yourself as an integral part of the universe as a whole. The overall intent is to help universal consciousness grow and evolve, particularly the human consciousness of which you’re a part.

This would be like one of the cells in your body recognizing that it’s part of a larger physical body, whereby it stops thinking of itself primarily as an individual cell and begins to see itself as being of potential service to the greater whole. Its fate isn’t as important as the fate of the larger body.

So with this perspective, instead of thinking of myself as a guy who helps people live more consciously, I can see myself as a servant of humanity helping to create a more conscious humanity, or as a servant of universal consciousness itself. My primary role here is to serve conscious evolution, which isn’t necessarily what’s best for any particular individual human in the short term.

Other Perspectives

Of course there are other perspective too. We could discuss identification with community, nation, all life, the cosmos, etc. These perspectives are equally valid, but exploring them would add complexity without adding much substance to the core ideas. So for now I want to keep this simple.

On the atomic side, you’re an individual, and other people are individuals too. On the holistic side, we’re all part of a greater whole.

I’m not suggesting that any one perspective is best. All of these perspectives are valid. But I will suggest that it’s important to integrate the holistic perspective more fully into your life if you wish to experience a healthier flow of abundance.

“Waking up” basically means that you consider and integrate the holistic perspective as part of your daily life. Of course there are degrees of waking up, depending on how aware you are of the holistic perspective and how fully you’ve integrated it into your life. In the same manner, the cells in your body may have varying degrees of awareness that they are in fact part of a larger human body.

Alternatively, to be “asleep” is to be unaware of the larger holistic perspective. We could also define this behaviorally by saying that someone is asleep if they’re aware of the holistic perspective, but they don’t attempt to act congruently with it. In terms of semantics, I’d say that the first group is asleep, while the second group is trying to sleep.

Fairness

At the individual level, fairness seems to be about equality. But of course we don’t see that much genuine equality in the world. It’s quite obvious that some individuals have more resources than others. Some people seem to be luckier too.

Does your own human body care about fairness when it doles out resources like oxygen and sugar to its individual cells? To an extent, sure. When resources are abundant, there’s plenty for all, but even then the distribution isn’t perfectly equal. And when resources become scarce, the body will starve cells that are less important to its survival to divert more resources to the most crucial cells.

So the question is, are you an essential cell in the larger body of consciousness? Or are you superfluous? Well… look at the resources that life sends your way. Do you feel all your needs are well met — your physical needs, emotional needs, social needs, self esteem needs, etc? Are you a highly self-actualized individual? Or do you have strong unfulfilled cravings for things that are important to you? Have you possibly given up on meeting some of your needs? Are you flourishing or are you stuck?

If you’re struggling to get your needs met, that’s a hint and a half that life itself isn’t particularly concerned with your well-being. Don’t fret though if this describes your situation. It’s a problem that can be fixed. Just don’t try to fix it by clamoring and complaining — that doesn’t work and will often backfire.

This may not seem fair, but in a way it is reasonable. You may be a very nice, kind, and generous person, but if your focus is at the cellular level, you’re probably missing so much of the big picture that in the grand scheme of things, your contribution just doesn’t matter that much, at least not from the perspective of universal consciousness.

You may be doing what could just as easily be done by someone else, which means you’re highly expendable. You may be playing follow the follower. You may be genuinely helping, but only at the cellular level. You may be doing nothing much, which makes it easy to ignore you.

If you live in such a way that doesn’t really contribute much, don’t be too surprised if it seems like life is starving you for resources. After all, life doesn’t need you as much if you aren’t actively helping with its expansion and growth.

Consider the cells in your own body. You may scratch an itch on your arm and kill lots of cells in the process without even thinking about it. Individual skin cells just aren’t that important to your overall survival. But you’re less likely to scratch off a patch of critical brain cells. A cut on your finger is no cause for alarm, but a cut on your eyeball is something you’d do more to avoid. Your body is even designed to protect some parts more than others. If something flies at your face, you’ll automatically throw up your arms to protect your head. But you won’t normally use your head to protect your arms.

Do you think you’re among the critical humans that the larger body of humanity would move to defend and protect? Or are you among the sacrificial parts?

What Does Consciousness Want?

What do you want as a human being? Think about your goals, dreams, and aspirations for a moment.

Now consider what an individual cell in your body would want. It wants oxygen and sugar. It wants to eliminate waste. Is this on the same level as your goals? Do you aspire to breathe, eat, and take dumps as your primary goals for the year?

Hopefully not.

Now look at this from the other side. From the perspective of the consciousness itself, your human-level dreams and goals seem petty. It’s important to keep people happy to an extent, but the fate of any one human is largely insignificant. Universal consciousness really doesn’t care if you have a job or an income, if you get the house you want, if you have a good relationship or not. It doesn’t care if you get laid or remain a virgin.

Well, it cares a little, but it’s not a major concern, just as you aren’t overly concerned about the fate of any individual cells in your body. It’s the body’s overall status that matters. And you probably identify more with your mind (your collective cellular intelligence) as opposed to your physical body anyway.

Similarly, universal consciousness is more concerned with the evolution of consciousness itself (our collective consciousness) as opposed to the fate of any individual human or even of humanity itself. Now the loss of humanity would probably be a setback, but consciousness may eventually recover in other forms.

What does consciousness really want? Like you and like your individual cells, it wants to get its needs met, and it wants to grow and evolve. But the level on which it’s capable of doing this goes way beyond what you’re capable of as an individual.

Look around at all the amazing — and accelerating — achievements of consciousness. It’s expanding in many directions simultaneously. Consider what’s evolving on earth. Humanity itself is becoming smarter and faster and more connected. And it’s having some health issues to deal with as well. And consciousness wants to keep going.

Living Small or Living Large

You can spend your life fussing over your own piddly cellular needs, but in the grand scheme of things, it won’t be anything to write home about. No matter what you do or don’t do as an individual, it’s just not going to matter that much.

The same can be said of any cell in your body. At the individual level, a single cell isn’t particularly important.

Imagine asking a cell in your body what he’s doing with his life, and he talks about the Bloodstream Marketing course he’s taking and how excited he is about all the extra sugar he’ll earn from his efforts. Oh boy!

But will his efforts pay off? Probably not. If he isn’t getting his needs met, there’s probably a good reason for it. The larger body will see that his needs are well met if there’s a good reason to do so. Otherwise it will divert resources where they’re needed.

This is how silly we humans appear to universal consciousness. It still cares about us and wants to see us happy for the most part, but it finds our cellular perspective to be rather limiting. If you push to get your individual needs met, but you do so in ways that the larger body doesn’t care about or which may interfere with its bigger plans, it will either ignore you, or it will swat you down like a mosquito.

Imagine if a cell in your body said, I just want to eat food and reproduce like crazy. That might seem fun from his perspective, but then the larger body has a tumor to deal with. Send in the white blood cells.

If you feel like some greater force keeps knocking you back down every time you try to get ahead, you’re not imagining it. It really is knocking you back down, and it will continue to do so until you stop trying to get ahead like a cancer cell would. Have you ever noticed, for instance, that as soon as you try to make progress on cancer-like projects, you keep getting distracted, so your attention has to turn somewhere else?

Quite often we cry “Life is so unfair” when from a larger perspective, it’s a no brainer that life is either going to ignore us or attack us. Humanity’s white blood cells will come after us and make life unpleasant for us when we forget that we’re part of a larger whole and that its well-being is more important than our individual well-being.

Now imagine if an individual cell in your body said to you, “Wait a minute. I get it. I may be just a tiny cell, but I’m a part of this whole body. That’s cool. Is there anything I can do to help?”

What would you say to it? You might wonder what one conscious cell could do for your whole body. Not much most likely. But then you might think, What if this cell could wake up many others, and what if those cells could awaken still more? Eventually you could have a body filled with cells that were aware of the whole body and seeking to serve it. This would fix a lot of your problems. You’d have much better health for starters. Cancer wouldn’t be able to take root. Most diseases would be eradicated easily. You’d always be able to maintain your ideal weight.

So you might tell that one conscious cell, “Go around and wake up more cells. Gather them together. Then we’ll talk.”

Being a Conscious Human

A conscious cell is aware of the whole body and realizes that the body matters more than any individual cell. The cells are there to serve the evolution of the body and mind, not merely themselves. There’s obviously a connection between the good of the cells and the good of the body, but it’s easier to have a healthy body if on some level, the cells are aware that the body’s health is more important than their own. A cell that works against the health of the body is a disease cell.

A conscious human being is aware of the larger body of humanity and has a sense of a greater consciousness that’s unfolding and evolving at a much higher level than any individual human can.

There is value in the lower level perspective. It’s not a perspective to ignore but rather to integrate with the holistic perspective. For example, through relaxed meditative breathing, we can connect with the lower level perspective of our own cells. Breathe in. Breathe out. We’re getting plenty of oxygen. Life is good. This cellular level perspective can help to ground us. Many meditations are essentially about tuning back in to this cellular perspective, while other meditations involve expanding to a more holistic perspective. The ideal is to be able to consider all of these perspectives as valid.

If our cells aren’t healthy, our bodies can’t be healthy, and so humanity itself can’t be healthy. And of course the opposite holds true as well. But there are ways of meeting our needs on different levels that are in alignment with all of these perspectives, and there are other ways that are out of alignment. To live consciously, we need to shift towards the ways that are in alignment, so we can meet our needs as we also meet the needs of the cells in our bodies and of the greater body of humanity.

I’m certainly not the first human being to have the experience of “waking up” and becoming aware of this. Other conscious humans helped wake me up and continue to help me stay awake… or to reawaken me when I lose that perspective. I also endeavor to do my part and help other people wake up to the realization that jobs and money and marriage and retirement just aren’t that important. There are more important things to attend to here. Meeting our cellular needs is still important, but we don’t want to fuss at that level too much. We have more significant work to do here, and we could be experiencing life at a much higher level of existence.

Living your life as a part of humanity will take your experience to a level that’s far beyond life as an individual human being. Even if your intention is to help people, try expanding it to a vision of helping humanity, as if humanity itself is a conscious entity. It’s a whole different level of being.

Now what I’m seeing is that the gathering phase is well underway. Many years ago, it seemed like conscious people were very isolated. Now they’re coming together in bigger and bigger groups. I’m involved in multiple groups of this nature, and it seems like every few months I’m hearing about new groups forming. The conscious humans are clustering, and these clusters are growing larger and more organized. It’s as if new organs are incubating with the larger body of humanity. Something is definitely happening, and it’s a wondrous thing to behold.

Consequently, while I know some people are worried about where humanity is headed, I’m not worried at all. In fact, I’m excited about it. I have the privilege of being able to see what many of these conscious people are up to, and they’re starting to create transformational ripples. If you’re reading this article, then these ripples have already reached you, and you’re being impacted by them.

Some conscious cells are still isolated, however. Others are in very small groups only. And of course there are lots of people who still primarily think at the cellular level (go Bloodstream Marketing). But this is changing.

Perhaps the simplest way I can explain what’s happening is that humanity’s Power has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and now its alignment with Truth and Love desperately need to catch up. Otherwise humanity will eventually crash and burn. For instance, the first atomic bombs were dropped only 66 years ago, yet now we must somehow ensure that they’re never used on a global scale, not even 1000 years from now. One serious mistake or lapse during any minute that we have nukes, and it’s a major setback for us all. That’s a tall order that cannot be satisfied at the cellular level of consciousness. We’ve had too many close calls already (see the documentary Countdown to Zero for details on that). The larger body of humanity is aware of this challenge, and it recognizes that we need more people who are Truthful, Loving, and Powerful to deal with this existential threat.

You’re going to start picking up on this at the individual level, if you haven’t already. For instance, you’re going to feel far less tolerant of political leaders who lie to you. We’re going to see different kinds of leaders emerge, the kinds of leaders we truly need in this day and age. There are plenty of people like that, but in order for them to become popular enough, we just have to continue waking up more individual people. Once enough people are awake (or stop trying to sleep), we’ll see some major shifts. These shifts are already happening in the world of business, where popularity with the masses isn’t as necessary.

The Flow of Abundance

What we’re seeing is that on some level, this higher consciousness is taking note of what’s happening, and it seems to be assisting and accelerating the process. It wants human beings to wake up because a body of conscious cells can do much more than a body of unconscious ones. So if you’re concerned that there are too many crises in the world, recognize that there’s an upside. These major challenges are helping more and more people to finally wake up. We can’t even begin to address these challenges with cellular-level thinking, so we have to wake up in order to solve them.

There’s a lot of rebalancing that’s occurring as universal consciousness and individual human consciousness communicate with each other about how to best meet each others’ needs. How can humanity continue to evolve and expand while keeping individual humans happy and healthy? For humanity to be at its best, enough individual humans need to be at their best as well. You’re going to see this reflected in your own life too, as you grapple with the challenge of how to serve some greater life purpose while also making sure your individual needs are satisfied. In a way, you’re helping humanity experiment in order to find good solutions, which it can then spread to other cells. This is why cells like me feel an undeniable urge to pass on what we’ve figured out thus far.

As I’ve seen in my own life, this higher level consciousness is clearly listening. Somehow it can perceive the level at which we’re thinking, and it responds in kind. If you keep thinking at the cellular level, this higher consciousness will keep trying to wake you up. You may lose your job and other possessions, for instance, until you finally realize that those things don’t matter. We have more important things to deal with right now.

I’m far from perfect in this area, but I’m gradually getting the hang of it. I’m noticing that whenever I slip back down to cellular level thinking, I get a good smackdown. I feel like everything slows to a crawl. And when I shift back up to a higher level perspective, it’s like I’m back in the flow again. The phone rings with fresh opportunities, money just shows up, loving relationships flow into my life, and more. Fortunately perfection isn’t necessary. We just have to shift the balance far enough to achieve critical mass.

For those who are stuck at the cellular level of thinking, I suspect that life is going to become increasingly difficult for you. You’re going to see your worries, fears, and frustrations magnified. Life will seem to be getting worse. It may seem like important aspects of society are falling apart around you. This is happening for a reason though. These old systems are going to be dismantled. That’s actually a good thing. They’ll be replaced with better things.

For instance, you may be worried about debt, either your own or your country’s or someone else’s. But from the larger perspective of humanity, debt is meaningless. Humanity really doesn’t care if our financial system collapses or not. In fact, it may be better for it to collapse and be replaced by something else. So if you’re really attached to the current system and the money in your bank, you may get scared. But if you’re looking at the big picture, you’ll probably feel excited instead.

Be willing to lose what doesn’t matter, so we can all gain what does matter. Jobs don’t matter, but creativity does. Paying our bills doesn’t matter, but keeping our bodies healthy does. Getting good grades in school doesn’t matter, but preserving and passing on our collective knowledge does. Start reorganizing your life around what matters, and be willing to shed what doesn’t.

Try not to be too attached to remnants of the old cellular consciousness, like the money you have, the job you do, and the home you live in. The more you cling to those things, the more stressed out you’ll be. Just notice that these are all artificial cellular level concerns. What’s important is that humanity is evolving in a very positive way. You can resist that change and see your old goals fall apart, or you can flow with it and actively participate in the process of change.

For those who are waking up, life is going to become much easier in a way. Your life will explode with opportunities to learn, love, share, and grow. The good stuff will come from your alignment with the expansion of universal consciousness. But it’s important to keep the perspective of what really matters. Money doesn’t matter. Bloodstream/Internet Marketing is pointless and shallow. Waking people up and consciously co-creating something amazing is what matters.

When you align yourself with this higher level consciousness, abundance will flow through your life with relative ease. However, this type of abundance will be universal level abundance, not human level abundance. It doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily have more money, a more luxurious home, or more possessions. That kind of stuff just doesn’t matter and represents artificial needs, not real needs. This level of abundance means that you’ll be experiencing the benefits of being in a healthier body. You’ll get more of what really matters — more growth opportunities, more love, more joy, more inner peace.

Focus on your true needs. What do you need to feel abundant? You need to keep your body healthy with healthy food, sunshine, and clean air and water. You need a reasonable degree of safety. You need love and belongingness. You need self esteem. You need an outlet for your creativity. Your true needs are quite simple in fact, and they’re easier to satisfy than your artificial needs. You don’t need the latest tech gadget. You don’t need a job or an income. You don’t need to get married. You don’t need to master Bloodstream Marketing.

Your artificial needs may not align well with humanity’s larger concerns. But your true needs certainly do align. It’s in humanity’s best interests to keep its best servants healthy, happy, and prosperous. In that sense, it you dedicate yourself to serving this greater body, it will surely watch your back.

Aligning With Higher Level Desires

In order to tap into this greater flow of abundance, you have to tap into higher level desires.

First, recognize that your human level goals are beginning to bore you. No matter how important you try to make them, you can’t get motivated to work on them. You just can’t get that worked up about making money beyond a certain point. People may tell you it’s important to have specific financial goals, but when you try to do this for yourself, it makes you feel yucky inside. You can’t get motivated to work on those kinds of goals. They don’t inspire you. And so you procrastinate and then beat yourself up. It’s time to end this cycle. It’s time to re-align your desires with something that actually matters to you. You can set better goals than the human equivalent of stockpiling oxygen and sugar.

Stop thinking about what you want for yourself as an individual. Start thinking about what you want for humanity as a whole.

In the past, you may have been hesitant to even think at that level. Start thinking at that level now.

What do you want for humanity itself? Where would you like to see this larger body go during your lifetime and beyond?

Do you want us to clean up the planet? Explore outer space? Improve our educational systems? Stop fighting wars?

Let yourself dream about what’s possible for humanity. Notice that these dreams are much more impressive than anything you could possibly do as an individual.

Become a billionaire? Who cares? Start a charity? Big deal. Discover a new planet? Nice try. When will you be ready to work on a real goal, a goal for humanity itself?

Receiving Guidance

The best part is that you don’t even need to figure this out yourself. All you need to do is wake up to this higher level perspective, and then simply ping this universal consciousness to tell it you’re awake and ready to serve. Ask it for guidance, and guidance will come.

Just be aware that universal consciousness is frakkin powerful. It’s way more powerful than human level consciousness. When you tap into this resource and align yourself with it, your life is going to speed up. At first it may seem like drinking from a firehouse. It will take some time to get used to it.

If you feel that the flow is too much for you, you can ask it to slow down. I do this all the time. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I say to the universe aloud, “Okay… this is too fast. Let’s slow this down for a week or two and give me a chance to catch my breath.” Then when I’m ready, I ask it to speed up again.

With practice you’ll get used to this faster pacing. You’ll get used to things showing up when you need them. You’ll get used to experiencing synchronicities almost every day.

A synchronicity is no accident. Universal consciousness knows what you need, perhaps even better than you do. You really don’t even have to ask for your specific needs to be met once you ask to be a better servant of humanity. As Jesus said, just say, “Not my will, but thy will be done.”

Lately I’ve been holding off on setting specific goals for myself. Instead I’ve been saying to the universe, “Bring me what you want me to work on, and also please bring me whatever you know I need for optimal health, happiness, and flow.” And then I do my best to remain open-minded and detached from outcomes. I let the universal consciousness guide me instead of having to set specific goals and intentions. I still have an intention, but it’s simply to do what’s best for humanity as a whole.

Partly I’m doing this because I’ve reached the point where any individual-level goal would bore me, and I wouldn’t be able to motivate myself to work on it. I just don’t care that much about oxygen and sugar to make it the central focus of my life. So I’m willing to risk things like losing my money, losing my home, having my relationships disrupted, etc. just for the opportunity to see where this flow leads. And yet somehow when I move past this fear of losing stuff, I seem to gain much more than I lose. As far as meeting my human needs goes, they’re all nicely satisfied and then some. Bloodstream Marketing just can’t compare.

Effect on Relationships

When you begin to align yourself with the perspective of higher level consciousness, your relationships with other people will shift. Try not to be too attached to what happens here. Your pairings with any one or more individuals aren’t necessarily going to be stable. It’s how your relationships affect the whole of humanity that matters. What ripples are you and your relationships co-creating?

People who aren’t compatible with this new perspective will fade from your life. At first you may fear that you’re going to end up alone, but there’s no cause for alarm. New relationships will come into your life, relationships with people who have a similar perspective. And these relationships will be much better for you than the old ones. They’ll help you hold the new perspective.

These new relationships will be different than what you’re used to, however. There will be less rigidity and more flexibility in this part of your life. Such relationships may defy traditional labels. You may feel a bit ungrounded in this new space. It takes time to get used to it.

Eventually you’ll realize that happiness and love can come from anywhere. You may have your emotional needs met equally well by a long-time partner or with someone you just met. Universal consciousness will guide you to whatever it is that you need to sustain your emotional health, as long as you don’t get too attached to how it shows up. If you remain open and flexible, your emotional needs can be satisfied with relative ease. Trust that universal consciousness knows just what you need, and it will deliver it right to you if you’re ready to accept it. Again, you don’t even have to ask once you’re on this path. It will satisfy your emotional needs because doing so makes you a better servant. You can’t serve humanity so well if you’re feeling lonely and disconnected. You’ll be more motivated if you have love in your life, so love will be delivered unto you.

Compared to where I was a few years ago, my relationship life might seem a bit strange these days. I have many relationships that would be difficult to label, but they seem to be healthy and flourishing in ways that are hard to get my head around. I can’t really define what they are, and I can’t predict where they’re going. But it seems like these connections are good and healthy for all involved. My biggest relationship challenge is unloading the traditional-minded baggage that nudges me to lock down and label each relationship, so I can feel like I understand it. But whenever I fall into that pattern, things get worse, not better. Conscious relationships don’t seem to like being locked down and labeled. They require more freedom and flow.

At first this sort of situation could make a person feel insecure. You may be accustomed to having a sense of security based on the stability of predictable interactions with people close to you.

However, when you align yourself with universal consciousness, you’re likely to move around a lot more relationship-wise. You’re going to meet and interact with a lot more people than you’re used to. Your social life will be rich and varied. Your stability has to come from trusting that no matter where you are, your emotional needs will still be satisfied. You’ll have the opportunity to share love, intimacy, affection, etc., and it can be more abundant than what you experienced at the individual level of being. I assure you that you won’t have to go it alone. This isn’t a lonely path — it’s actually an incredibly social path.

Effect on Work

Your work life will be transformed as well. You’ll probably need to stop thinking of your career in terms of having a stable job and earning a set income. Serving humanity requires a lot more flexibility and flow than a traditional job can provide. Thinking of starting or running a business is equally limiting. This is human level thinking. What does humanity need?

Humanity is more concerned with things like creativity, purpose, and expansion. It would love to see you contribute to the ongoing expansion and evolution of consciousness. That’s what matters. The other stuff is too trivial to fuss over.

I don’t really have a job title. Sometimes I make one up like President or CEO when it’s required for social convention, but the title is meaningless to me. When people ask me what I do for a living, I don’t really know what to say. I don’t do anything for a living. I just live. In certain situations I might say that I’m a blogger, author, or speaker, but that’s mainly what I say to people who are asleep and I don’t have time to wake them up in that particular moment. If I’m talking to someone who’s awake, then either they won’t ask such a silly question, or they’ll understand my honest answer… and they’ll probably share a similar feeling about job titles.

My business cards have the wrong address because I haven’t updated them in 5 years. My website obviously isn’t the prettiest one out there. I’ve never spent money to market or promote my website, book, or workshops. I don’t think it would be a bad thing to do so; it just hasn’t ever been necessary. Humanity takes care of all my marketing and does a better job than I could.

Last year I uncopyrighted all my blog posts and podcasts, so you have just as much ownership of this article as I do. From a cellular level, that might seem like a foolish decision. But that isn’t the level at which I made the decision. What does a copyright mean to humanity? Of course it’s meaningless. What would you think if one of your cells tried to patent the Krebs Cycle? Silly cells…

Some people are repackaging and selling my work for money. Does that bother me? Of course not. Even though they may be operating at an individual level of consciousness, they’re actually helping. They’re spreading ideas that humanity wants to spread; after all, humanity gave me those ideas to share in the first place. They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. I think some of them have been donating back to me as well, since I’ve seen a modest increase in donations lately. But I didn’t do this to get more donations. I did it because it should help the ideas spread and get more people thinking about living consciously. It really doesn’t matter which humans get credit or make money from it.

I think my business actually works better because I don’t manage it with a cellular mindset. Millions of people have been drawn to my work, and it’s been translated into more languages than I can track. People keep sharing it, with or without my permission. New opportunities keep showing up. Money keeps flowing. Everything works. Well, aside from my web server, which I may have to upgrade yet again due to traffic growth. But that’s a good problem to have, isn’t it?

Why does my business work? Because it’s not really a business. It’s a service, not primarily for individual humans, but for humanity itself. The purpose is to help enough people wake up and live more consciously, so that humanity itself may continue to survive and thrive. And by performing this service for humanity, it takes care of all my needs. It’s really good at it too. I barely have to lift a finger to attend to such things. I rather appreciate that.

Individually speaking, there are some humans out there who don’t particularly like my work. But that’s largely irrelevant because humanity as a whole has made it abundantly clear that it appreciates what I’m doing and wants to speed things along with further expansion. These days I largely ignore cellular level feedback because it comes from people at varying levels of wakefulness, so of course they won’t all agree. But I pay close attention to feedback from universal consciousness, such as whether my life is flowing well or not. These days it’s flowing amazingly well, so I figure I’m on the right track.

Is humanity making it abundantly clear that it appreciates what you’re doing? If not, any guesses as to why? Could it be that you’ve been ignoring humanity’s needs, and thus it’s been ignoring your needs? Try doing the opposite and see what happens. I think you’ll like it.

Conscious Business

Recently I’ve been listening to an audiobook about the history of Google. Google began as a fairly idealistic company with the grand mission of organizing and providing access to all the world’s information. Does that sound like an individual level goal or a goal for humanity itself? Of course Google has since become a giant, besting all other search companies. Interestingly, one of the reasons it succeeded is because it attracted some of the brightest minds in the world, people who were inspired by its mission and who would not have worked for the company if it was just about the money. You could say that humanity diverted the best resources to Google because Google’s mission served the best interests of humanity. In fact, Google has helped to create a smarter, more self-aware humanity.

Microsoft used to be a similar purpose-driven company, with the mission of putting “a computer on every desk and in every home.” That was an expansive goal that served humanity. But a lot of people now believe Microsoft has lost its way, and sometimes it acts more like a cancerous tumor than a servant to humanity. Do you believe that Microsoft is here to serve humanity, or mainly itself? Is it working with the expansion and evolution of humanity, or is it working against it? Probably a bit of both. Hence its mixed results and recent stagnation. Microsoft needs a new mission that aligns with humanity’s expansion. So far its current attempts at a new mission have been fluffy and noncommittal. It wastes too much energy on trying to defend its turf, failing to recognize that there’s only one turf, and it belongs to universal consciousness. If you happen to work for Microsoft, do what you can to wake more people up within your company, and eventually the culture will shift, as will the company’s results.

The irony is that companies that care less about quarterly returns and more about service to humanity can often achieve amazing growth. Why? Because humanity wants those companies to succeed. It sends them whatever resources they need to succeed.

Notice which companies appear to be serving the expansion and evolution of humanity and which are only here to serve themselves and their stockholders. If you were a genius, which kind of company would you want to work for? If you were humanity itself, which companies would you support? Which would you ignore? Which would you wish to tear down or transform? Now what kind of company do you currently work for?

* * *

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that we have guided missiles and misguided men. Let’s change that. Guidance is available to you whenever you want. You just have to be reasonably awake to receive it. Then you’ll have all the inspiration you could possibly want.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

I thought up this idea 3 weeks prior when I decided I should finally do an Aprils Fools post. This idea seemed like the perfect combination of various things I’d written about previously (wanting to build a staff, not having a regular job, domination and submission), enough to make it sound semi-plausible. I still thought it was pretty ridiculous and wondered if anyone would really buy into the idea that the poor state of the economy is a justification for enslaving people. I did my best to make it sound convincing though.

When I checked the forums, I saw that the early responders immediately recognized it as a joke — as one person noted, the fact that I included it in the Humor category was a dead giveaway. However, at least one person seemed to consider it possible, so I took the opportunity to make some forum posts to stir up more doubt and get people wondering. I probably overdid it because then I had lots of people asking questions, so it turned into an April Fools week. As I see it, I cashed in my credits from previous Aprils Fools oppportunities that I missed.

I admit that I was intrigued by the discussion, wondering how something like this might actually work if I we tried to do it for real, so I tried to fill in the gaps as if I’d had it all figured out. When people asked me something I couldn’t answer, I ignored them or gave them a dismissing joke reply. Eventually the thread swelled to 200+ replies, and I finally confessed it was a joke and let people know I’d post a serious version soon. I’ve never done an April Fools blog post before, so I hope you’ll forgive me for milking this one as much as I did.

Regarding Domination and Submission

I also wanted to poke a bit of fun at some people’s public perceptions of me, especially those who think that D/s is akin to actually enslaving someone. D/s is nothing but role-playing where the participants temporarily agree to play roles where one side has authority over the other. If you have issues with D/s, then you have issues with acting, movies, plays, etc. Was Michael Douglas really being sexually  abused by Demi Moore in the movie Disclosure? Of course not. They were just playing characters. The actors probably enjoyed making the movie. I see nothing wrong with this as long as it’s consensual. Do you?

Is it so hard to imagine that people might actually enjoy playing roles where they get to be a slave, Master, etc? Millions of people willingly choose to play together like this because they enjoy it and because it helps them discover new insights about themselves and their partners. I would suggest that those who have issues with this sort of thing are probably being unconsciously triggered to project their own power struggles onto others. This often happens when people feel powerless. I can understand and empathize with that, so let me recommend that maybe it’s time to take a look at those feelings instead of lashing out at those who are engaging in conscious an deliberate explorations that are perfectly legal, entirely ethical, mutually consensual, deeply experiential, and yummy.

Moreover, may I point out that my “slave” is a playwright and professional actress with a university degree in theater/drama?

I’m sorry to disappoint those who thought the April Fools joke was for real. Perhaps it could have been a fun social experiment if enough people were actually willing to do it, but in terms of staffing I’m heading in a different direction. I’m afraid the reality will seem a lot more vanilla in comparison.

I did receive several applications as a result of that post, but it seems that those people saw through the enslavement part as my being playful and addressed the serious prospect of potentially working together in some fashion. I’ll make sure they see this post first just to be sure.

The Truth Behind the Joke

As you may have guessed, while the post was intended as a joke overall, there was a nugget of truth to it.

First let me clarify the joke parts. These include:

• having a bunch of people move in with me
• offering people free housing and food in exchange for their submission and obedience
• requiring that everyone works for zero pay
• all the D/s stuff, such as referring to people as slaves and requiring them to call me Master and act submissive
• pretty much the whole post except for the general idea of wanting to build a staff

So the true part is that I’m ready to start building a staff.

There was also a not-so-subtle personal growth aspect to the post. I wanted to get you thinking about your current work situation and to consider what important elements may be missing. Do you feel enslaved? Are you well compensated for your work? Would free room and board in a nice house be an improvement over what you’re getting now? Do you have great social support and feel like you’re part of a team? Are you encouraged and appreciated for your contribution? Are you doing meaningful, purpose-driven work? Do you feel you’re making a difference? Do you feel that your employer cares about you?

Are you happy where you are?

So the post wasn’t entirely a ruse. There were multiple layers to it. Since I had to wait 3 weeks to post it, I had a lot of time to refine it. Looking back I wonder if I went a bit too far with it, but I think that overall it did more good than harm, as most people seemed to appreciate the playfulness of it. It also got people opening up and considering new possibilities for what they might want to experience in their working lives.

If we seriously tried to do something like what I wrote in that post, it might be a fascinating growth experience for all involved, but I can just as easily imagine it becoming a mess. The core idea of getting a bunch of growth-oriented, committed people working in the same location is sound. As I think about it though, I wonder if it might actually work better with such strongly defined roles as opposed to giving it a looser structure.

Now I’ll share a more realistic (yet still evolving) vision of what I’d like to do in terms of creative staffing. I invite your feedback on this to let me know what you think, especially if working together in some fashion appeals to you.

The Idea in a Nutshell

The idea is too big to fit in a nutshell, but I’ll do my best to give you an overview.

The main reason I want to build a staff is that I see lots of opportunities to do a better job of fulfilling this business’ purpose of helping people grow, but it’s too much for me to handle by myself. I’ve already pressed down the time management road, dumping things like cable TV and Facebook, but it’s obvious that no amount of personal time management can help me complete several person-years worth of projects all at once. I’m sleeping biphasically now, so I have more time each day, but even if I try to devote it all to doing extra work, I still see that hard limit of not having enough time to get things done as quickly as I’d like.

There are many options for staffing up the business. I could hire a virtual staff. I could get an office and build a co-located staff. I could enlist the help of interns. I could combine any or all of these things. Intuitively I feel it’s best to focus on finding good people first and then evolve a structure over time that suits the emerging group’s dynamics.

I also have people practically begging me to let them do certain things for me because they’d really like to help. For example, people have sent me detailed mock-ups of new web designs for my site. Most are a lot nicer looking than what I have now — and probably more user-friendly too. They typically offer to give my site a facelift for free, as a way of saying thanks for the value they’ve already received. Several programmers have been eager to work with me to create some personal development software apps, especially for the iPad, iPhone, and Android platforms. Other people would love to help produce more original content for my site, like doing creative videos. But when I have dozens of offers like that for different types of improvements, it becomes overwhelming to look at it and sort through it, and I see it as this gigantic blog of “too much”. I’m always having to triage and pick the best opportunities to pursue, which means saying no to lots of good and even great opportunities. I can’t personally manage all of that and keep up with doing what I do best.

Another factor is that I enjoy working with people face-to-face on a daily basis. It’s rewarding to work with creative, talented people, and I miss having that in my life from my game development days. Doing live workshops last year gave me a taste of what that might look like for this type of work, since we had a small staff for each event. I can’t deliver good workshops all by myself — it’s very much a team effort. With a good team in place, we could be holding workshops in other cities and doing them more frequently, and there’s a clear demand for that.

There’s also a very personal factor. I turn 40 on April 14, so naturally I’ve been giving some thought to what I’d like to do with the next decade of my life.

How to Compensate People

I’m open to a variety of different compensation methods here. While I said I don’t want to hire employees in the April Fools post, that part was on the joke side. I’m already set up to handle payroll and such because I do it for myself. I’m also open to working with independent contractors, interns, or other creative arrangements.

Let’s explore some possibilities.

Working for Free

I think it’s important to take advantage of free help when it’s practical to do so. Free help keeps costs low, it’s less risky (sometimes), and it makes it possible to get more done. It gives more people a foot in the door who might not otherwise get in. Then these people have the opportunity to gain real-world experience, to learn useful skills, to learn teamwork, and/or to prove themselves and make it easier to offer them a paid position.

Does this mean that everyone who wants to work for free gets an automatic yes? Of course not. There are still significant costs in terms of time and energy with bringing anyone new on board. Training and management require good focus. But if there’s no direct compensation, it greatly leans the risk factors in favor of saying yes. I would think this is mostly common sense.

With free help you also have to watch for “you get what you pay for” situations. Erin recently had an unpaid intern, and after working together well for a few months, the intern just up and left Erin hanging… stopped returning emails and phone calls with no explanation. Maybe she felt that since she wasn’t getting paid, it didn’t matter if she was irresponsible in how she chose to end her internship.

I have to be especially careful with this too. At past workshops we’ve had a staff of mostly volunteers to help us facilitate them, but I limit this to people that who’ve already convinced me they’re trustworthy and dependable. We can’t be doing workshops and have flaky people on staff who might not show up. So when someone I didn’t know offered to volunteer at a CGW, I felt it was too risky to say yes to that. I’d have to get to know you first.

For practical reasons, the no-direct-pay situation would likely be temporary for most people who go that route. If you do it for a while and love it and want to make it a more permanent arrangement, and we’re able to find ways that you can keep contributing to good effect, then we may be able to turn it into a paid position down the road. I don’t want to promise this up front for anyone though because it depends on so many factors — what skills you bring to the table, how much money the business is bringing in, who else wants to shift from free to paid work, and how dependable you are and how quickly you learn. Rest assured that I recognize the practical consideration that most people need to generate an income in the long run.

Short-term free help is usually no big deal for most people. It’s not a huge sacrifice to help facilitate a workshop for a weekend, especially since you get to attend the workshop yourself and hang out with all the attendees for free. I don’t expect I’ll ever have difficulty finding people to fill those roles.

What about free help that lasts much longer though, like some kind of apprenticeship for a few months? The apprentice learns about a real business, and I get some extra help without having to take too big of a risk. Personally I think this kind of education is potentially a lot more valuable than taking classes at a university, but in this case you only pay for the education with time, not with time and money. I’m open to this kind of arrangement with the right people, but I haven’t given it much thought yet. It really depends on the person and what they can bring to the table. We’d need to make sure it’s going to be a win for both of us.

For the long-term stability of the business, it’s more attractive to bring on free people that seem like they could be around for the long-term and upgrade to paid positions. High turnover might be okay for a turnkey business with lots of repetitive work, like a fast food franchise, but my business relies more heavily on creative work and long-term consistency. It doesn’t do the business as much good to invest time and effort bringing someone up to speed if they’ll only be around for a short while. I’m not saying we can’t find a place for those people, but I don’t think that’s the best situation. If someone just wants to help out for a couple weeks, and they’re largely unskilled and would have to be trained to do useful tasks, then I don’t see that as being worth the effort. I’d prefer to work with people who are seeking a 90-day commitment or longer. Otherwise I can’t justify the effort involved.

In my own life I’ve done a lot of work for free, and I see it as a good thing. It’s certainly not a form of capitalistic exploitation, especially since it’s completely voluntary. When I worked in the software field, I served as Vice President and then President of the Association of Shareware Professionals (now renamed the Association of Software Professionals). For two years I devoted many hours to the organization and was never paid a dime for it. I also wrote many articles and had them published in the ASP newsletter, also without pay. Much of the work was behind the scenes and thankless. I’m glad I did it though. I learned so much from the experience, and it’s nice to know that I was able to make a positive difference in some people’s lives.

I know from personal experience that investing time and energy in a cause you believe in, even for no direct pay, can still provide many benefits. If someone else had offered a free internship in this kind of business when I was younger, and it seemed practical for me financially, I could easily see myself wanting to jump on it.

Whether or not you think this is the right option for you depends on where you are on your career path. Do you have strong skills that are in high demand? Is it easy for you to get fulfilling paid work already? If so, then I wouldn’t recommend this option. But if you’re fairly young, passionate about personal growth, don’t need an income from this, think you’d gain a lot from the experience, and feel like you’re leaning towards working in this field, then I’d say it’s a good option to consider.

Virtual Contractors

Another possibility, especially if you don’t live in Las Vegas and don’t want to move here, is to work from your current location via the Internet. This could be done for free or for direct compensation, depending on your skills and the nature of the work.

A redesign of my website is a task that could be done anywhere, and if the work is of high quality and makes the website meaningfully better afterwards, then it could certainly be justifiable to pay for it.

There are lots of ways to work out the pay here. It could be done with a flat fee for each job, a series of payments based on milestones, or an hourly rate, for instance. It’s usually less risky to know how much a project will cost in advance, but I know that isn’t always possible for creative work.

For certain tasks I could use existing websites to find contractors, but as long as the costs are reasonable, I’d rather work with people who are already familiar with my content. I would think they’d have more motivation to see that the work is done well because they’re a part of the community that’s served by it, not an outsider who may not care as much.

My personal preference is to favor working with people that I can meet face to face, at least occasionally. I don’t like working with people via the Internet as much unless I’ve already met them in person and have gotten to know them. If I can never meet someone face to face and we can only connect via phones or the Internet, I’d be less inclined to work with them if there’s a local alternative. At the very least, I’d probably want to talk to each person via video Skype before considering working with them. If you’re a contractor who’s very private and prefers to remain shielded behind email, then I don’t think we’d be a good match for working together, even if you’re extremely talented. Tone of voice and body language are a significant part of communication when it comes to things like scoping out how a person feels about a particular task or idea. I’d like to avoid situations where someone says yes to an idea while their body language suggests they have serious doubts about it.

My friend Lisa Nichols (from the movie The Secret) has a virtual staff of people in different cities, but periodically she flies everyone to the same location for a weekend, so they can have an in-person pow-wow about upcoming projects. I think that would be too expensive for me at this time — I haven’t been on Oprah like Lisa has — but I like the idea in general. This wouldn’t make as much sense for short-term contractors, but if you have a virtual staff of team members that have been working together for years, I think it’s a good idea to get everyone to meet in the same location from time to time.

I can see virtual outsourcing being useful for some tasks, but I’m not looking to outsource everything overseas so I can check out from the business and do something else with my time. I’d rather bring people together and be actively involved in projects as opposed to distancing myself from them.

If you see yourself wanting to do something along these lines, I’d have to approach it fairly cautiously. I understand the benefits of outsourcing, but I’m not as drawn to grow a business that has the core people spread all over the planet where we can never get together face to face.

Revenue Splits

A revenue-split arrangement makes sense for projects that are associated with a measurable revenue stream where contributors share a stake in the financial results.

For instance, I’d consider a revenue split deal if someone creates a quality piece of software that would be a good fit for my readers. I have such an arrangement with the developer of The Journal. We met many years ago when I was a game developer, and since I’d been using his software since 2002 (and still do), I got in touch and suggested a joint-venture deal whereby I’d personally review his software on my website, and we’d split the sales revenue that came from that. This way it generates new incomes stream for us both. And to make it a better deal for my readers, I created custom journaling templates for the program, included as a bonus for no extra cost. We did that deal a few years ago, and it still generates monthly income for both of our businesses.

A quality journaling program is a very good fit for my website, and I could easily recommend it because I was a fan of the program long before I started blogging. I had also met the developer, and I knew that he was passionate about journaling, not the kind of person to crank out fluff just to try to make a buck. So this made the deal fairly easy to do.

Such deals can be tricky though, so I approach them cautiously. It’s actually more important to avoid bad deals than it is to find good ones. I don’t have time to wade through lots of different software, and there’s so much low-quality and very derivative stuff out there.

I give careful consideration to people behind the product or service. If I get approached for this kind of thing by someone I don’t know, I immediately see it as 10x riskier, and I’ll put a lot more onus on the developer to reduce that risk. I’d have to see something that looks like a super-strong fit for my readers, it can’t be a fluffy program where there are already much better offerings on the market, it had better not be something that I could see myself coding up in a weekend. And this should be a talented developer with a provably solid track record. Otherwise there are just too many unknowns, and I simply can’t touch it.

I’ve also done revenue splits for info products a number of times. That worked out well revenue-wise and has been my business’ #1 income generator since I started blogging.

The downside to opening the door to too many revenue splits is that when enough Internet marketers become aware that you’re doing them, you get hounded endlessly. People have sent me hundreds of products in the mail unsolicited, and they often follow up to try to get me to pitch them on my website in exchange for a cut of sales. They usually don’t care if I even look at the products. I won’t recommend something I haven’t thoroughly checked out though. So in the end, I feel it’s a bit too time-consuming for me to do these kinds of deals relative to how much value they provide to my readers. I think I’m better off shifting this time to my own product development.

Unless all the factors line up beautifully and a near perfect match comes along, I’m inclined to say no to most revenue split offers from people I’ve never met. Even for people I have met, I usually say no. But everyone once in a while, a really good match does come along. I learned about one this past weekend that looks rather promising.

Obviously this is a much looser arrangement than other forms of staffing, but I wanted to mention it because it’s something I already have a lot of experience with. The nice thing about revenue splits is that they’re fairly low risk. You have to invest some time, but you don’t have to pay out any money except as a function of sales. So if you do a deal like this and it bombs, it’s a disappointment but not a disaster.

Employees

For certain positions we can go the employee route. This is a bigger commitment both financially and legally, so I need to have a compelling reason to add someone to the payroll. Suffice it to say that I’ll be very selective.

Right now the business is financially sustainable. It’s been that way since it launched in 2004. I want to keep it that way.

In order to create the capacity for adding more employees, we’ll need to add more revenue streams. I’m not at the point where I can justify hiring too many people just yet except for fairly basic positions. The least risky positions to fill are those that help bring in revenue directly, that support and enhance existing revenue streams, or that save me time so I can do more revenue-generating activities.

For example, hiring an employee to handle the logistics for delivering more workshops, such as finding and booking venues, coordinating the room setup with the venue, getting badges printed, managing the registration table, coordinating with the audio tech, etc. would be reasonable. If we can schedule more workshops, we can start selling tickets right away (as soon as the venue is booked), and this should create a revenue stream to more than cover the salary and costs for that position. This would free me to focus on creating and delivering the content of the workshops.

One simple position I’d like to fill would be to hire a personal assistant, someone who’s local to me and who has a car, so they could run errands and handle a variety of simple tasks, freeing me up to focus on other things. It wouldn’t be like The Devil Wears Prada though.

Since I plan to bootstrap the business as we go, I have to pay a lot of attention to resource and risk management. I don’t want to add people and then have to lay them off a few months later. So for any paid positions, I’m going to be careful in scaling up gradually and building a sufficient cash reserve, so we don’t get ahead of ourselves by being overly aggressive.

I don’t have an assembly-line type of business, so for employees I’m going to look for flexibility and adaptability. Is this someone who can only perform a few types of tasks, or is this a quick learner who can wear a variety of different hats? Can this person perform multiple roles as needed, like an audio engineer that can edit and master our audio programs, help produce new podcasts, record interviews, and serve as the audio tech for our live workshops? The more flexible and adaptable someone can be, the more I’d want to hire them.

Employee positions are likely to be the most competitive, especially in this economy where there are a lot of people looking for work.

Fortunately this business has some awesome advantages. Having a consistent flow of web traffic means we don’t have to worry as much about marketing expenses. To date I’ve never spent a dime on marketing or promotion, not even for my book or workshops. I simply leveraged existing resources to get the word out. As long as we’re careful about it, it shouldn’t be a problem for this business to sustain and grow a paid staff.

Other Possibilities

There are other possibilities too, so if you want to suggest something different than what I’ve mentioned above, feel free.

My main concern is the cost-benefit aspect. What kind of value is being contributed, and how much risk does the business have to assume? Are people doing quality work, and can the business safely sustain them financially?

As far as rules and structure are concerned, I think it’s impossible to plan all of that in advance for this kind of business. We’ll have to see what’s needed as we go. When people work together in the same location and there’s a heavy amount of communication involved, then I think we’ll need a good bit of structure to keep things flowing smoothly.

How to Apply

In lieu of spelling out what specific positions I need to fill at this time, I think it makes more sense to invite people who might already have some ideas about how they see us working together to share their interest. This is a flexible and creative business, and I’m open to letting people define what kind of contribution they’d love to make. Then we can see if it’s realistic and workable.

The reason I’m doing this is that I think it’s more important to find great people to work with and then find a way to work with them, as opposed to defining fixed positions and looking to fill them. Ultimately I expect I’ll need to do both, but for now I have the liberty of remaining open to creative possibilities without needing to be so rigid.

It’s reasonable to expect that there will probably be a lot more people interested in working together than I can say yes to. So from the perspective of people who might apply, this is likely to be highly competitive. If you don’t think you have much to offer and you’re just looking for any sort of job, don’t bother. It’s pretty much a certainty that someone more qualified and/or more willing will apply. I value enthusiasm and motivation, but I also place a high value on talent and skill. I wouldn’t hire someone just because they’re really enthusiastic about working together.

Consequently, I want to discourage casual “what the hell, I might as well” applications. So for starters, I’m not going to accept any applications via email. I don’t want to check my inbox and find hundreds of resumes from people who have no business applying.

Also, I’m not going to accept any generic applications that look like they could have been sent to someone else. If I receive something that looks like it isn’t personally directed to me, I’ll simply toss it in the recycle bin. I don’t feel I need to consider someone who’s just fishing for a job.

If you want to apply, please do the following:

1. Write a personal letter telling me about your interest. You can say whatever you feel is important to share. What are you interested in doing? How do you envision us working together? Why does this appeal to you?
2. Include a resume/CV that lists your work history and education.
3. Include other resources you feel are relevant (optional).
4. Be sure to include your email address, so I can follow up, and the URL of your website if you have one.
5. Mail it to me at the address on my contact page.

Please skip the “Dear Mr. Pavlina” formalities. Just write to me as your normal self. Assume we’re already good friends, and go from there. Don’t be concerned that you might scare me off if you express too much emotion or that you might seem cold if you express too little. Allow yourself to express whatever comes through for you.

I might be opening Pandora’s Box here, so I’ll do my best to follow up with each person who applies, but I can’t predict in advance how many people that will be. So if you don’t hear back right away, don’t panic. I recognize that everyone would like a timely follow-up, but since I’ve never done this before and since I don’t have an HR department, I can’t guarantee much except to say that I’ll look at what you send, and if it excites me and I think we can do something together, I’ll follow up, and then we can discuss it further. Does this mean that if you don’t hear back within say, 30 days, that you should assume the worst? Probably.

Consider this an open invite with no deadline. Once I see how things are shaping up and go a bit further down this path, I may add a jobs section to the website and lock things down a bit more… or better yet, I may have someone do that for me.

But for now I’m using the Ready-Fire-Aim approach.

If you’re in a rush for employment and you need a job yesterday, this isn’t the right opportunity for you. It would be unreasonable for me to even suggest that I can provide a speedy turnaround. This is not a situation where I already have well-defined positions in urgent need of filling.

Rachelle and I are leaving for another road trip in a few days to celebrate my 40th b’day (we’re going to Napa Valley, Mammoth Lakes, and L.A.), so I won’t even be in town to look at anyone’s applications till late April at the earliest anyway.

There are some key factors I’ll be looking for in anyone I work with. Originally I had listed them out in this post, but I decided it was best not to share it because I don’t want people to try and game me. I need to find people who truly possess those qualities, not actors who can pretend they do. I hope you can understand that.

Consequently, I don’t recommend that you try to tell me what you think I want to hear. You could just as easily guess wrong and unnecessarily rule yourself out. Just focus on sharing who you are and what you want, and then we’ll see if we’re a good match. It’s not going to do either of us much good if we have to part ways after just a few days of working together.

Being Playful at Work

Incidentally, there’s another reason I wrote the joke post first. I wanted to make sure that anyone who applies for real has a compatible sense of humor and can handle a bit of joking around. This is a serious business that can deeply impact people’s lives, but against the backdrop of that responsibility, I think it’s important that we all enjoy working together. I’m certainly not known for my excessive reverence. I need people who can share in that same spirit of playfulness and still get things done, such as when we had a day of CGW where people wore Halloween costumes. I had a blast doing the workshop dressed as “Master” Obi-wan Kenobi, and the costumed workshop really raised the energy of the room and gave everyone reasons to socialize a lot more. This isn’t about foolishly messing around for no good reason.

If you have issues with this kind of playfulness in the workplace or if the whole D/s role-playing thing rubbed you the wrong way and you thought less of me for even suggesting it, then let’s accept that we’re incompatible and wouldn’t enjoy working together.

I’d rather work in a place where people jokingly call me Master or Captain or Your Highness instead of Boss or Sir. In my games business one guy used to refer to me as the Evil Overlord. And if you can’t handle being addressed as Slave, Minion, Number One, Third of Five, etc. then you probably wouldn’t enjoy working with me because I honestly love that kind of stuff. Just ask Rachelle how often I call her by her actual name. More often it’s Tasty Treat, Squish Bunny, Crazy Canuck, etc. I ran a game development business for 10 years, so I still have some appreciation for the importance of lightheartedness and play. That said, I’m totally against interactions that are truly degrading to people and that create a hostile work environment. That doesn’t serve anyone. But I don’t think we need to be so paranoid to the point of turning the business into a funeral parlor. Suffice it to say that if you do enter into this environment, and you truly find some aspect of the playfulness uncomfortable or excessive, just tell me about it, and we’ll take steps to fix it. Fair enough, Ensign?

Style and proficiency are two different things. I don’t see them as being in conflict with each other. I think a healthy sense of humor and lighthearted playfulness in our interactions will make for a much better workplace than expecting people to leave their souls at home. It fosters better bonding and teamwork and makes it more fun to come to work each day.

The reality of my staffing situation may seem a lot more mundane than the dramatic April Fools version, but I’m still excited about it. Let’s work together to create a more socially just, environmentally responsible, spiritually aware, emotionally honest, and mentally intelligent world to live in.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

1989 – arrested for misdemeanor petty theft
1990 – arrested for misdemeanor petty theft (2x)
1991 – arrested for felony grand theft
1989-91 – UC Berkeley, expelled
1992  - retail sales associate, $6/hour, fired
…

I tried to plug myself into a system designed to mold me into a regular job-wielding citizen. But for some reason that system didn’t work for me. It kept spitting me out with an error message.

If you’re able to conform to such an environment and be happy and fulfilled on that path, that’s wonderful. But if you’re struggling to fit into a system that keeps spitting you back out again, perhaps your path of fulfillment is elsewhere.

Does it make sense to keep embracing a system that doesn’t really want you?

If you can’t hold down a steady job, pay your bills on time, and stay out of trouble, it doesn’t mean you’re broken. Perhaps it simply means that the path you’re trying to follow isn’t a good match for you.

Your path of fulfillment is uniquely your own. You won’t get there by doing what’s expected of you. You can’t play by the rules you’ve been taught to follow. Those rules don’t work for you.

When you find yourself in a system where happiness and prosperity can’t coexist for you, you’ll sabotage yourself. Either you’ll hold back and do the bare minimum, or you’ll do something that gets you kicked out. So why bother?

Yes, you have needs to satisfy. But it’s a heck of a lot easier to pay your bills when you’re happy and fulfilled. It’s a lot easier to generate abundant income when you feel good — and it’s a lot more intelligent that sacrificing your health due to stress and overwhelm. Making money and being happy are not in conflict, although the system often makes it hard to enjoy both at the same time.

Stop asking “What should I do now?” That question only brings up what others expect of you. The shoulds are nothing but social programming.

Free people don’t have shoulds. They have choices.

Shoulds don’t create happiness and fulfillment, nor do they create prosperity. Shoulds are really good at creating stress though.

Instead ask yourself, “What kind of man/woman do I desire to become?” When you take the time to understand what this person is like, it’s easier to decide what to do. And you’ll be able to see plain as day why you and “the system” don’t get along very well.

If you wish to be a person who’s free, creative, abundant, caring, honorable, and generous, then ask yourself which choices will move you in that direction. Can you see why a part of you would sabotage the cubicle job?

If you desire freedom and flexibility, then avoid situations that trap, confine, or limit you. Choose a path that allows you to keep your options open.

If you want to experience abundance, then don’t choose a path that ensures scarcity or limitation. Choose a path that has a shot of leading to prosperity. Say no to non-prosperous choices like a job with a fixed paycheck.

If you want to express your creativity, then don’t choose a path where someone else tells you what to do and how to do it. Choose a path where creativity is rewarded, not punished.

If you want to be more courageous, then don’t choose a “safe” path. Choose a path that will push you to stretch beyond your comfort zone. If the path won’t build your courage, it’s not your path.

You won’t have clarity about your path until you resolve what kind of person you wish to be.

Now you may look at your path and say, “That is NOT an easy path.”

No, it’s not an easy path at all.

If you want the easy path, follow the system. How has that path been working for you so far?

On one side we have the easy path. On the other side we have the path of happiness, fulfillment, prosperity, and all the other yummy stuff you desire.

If you don’t totally commit yourself to the fulfilling path, you’ll find yourself on the easy path by default. The easy path is automatic. The fulfilling path can only be consciously chosen.

To choose the fulfilling path, you have to be ready to leave behind the comfort of the safety-in-numbers path and embark on a journey that’s uniquely your own. You must be willing to visit places where there are no teachers, no mentors, no bosses, no parents to guide you, knowing that you’re perfectly capable of guiding yourself.

The easy path is someone else’s path. It looks easy because it’s been done before. For the same reasons, it’s also incredibly boring. If you dislike boredom as much as I do, you’ll sabotage yourself each time you try to follow that path. You’ll realize just how pointless it is to spend your precious life doing what’s already been done. Do you really want to live a rerun? Why bother?

As you can see by my resume, it didn’t take me long to realize that my path didn’t look like that of my peers. The benefit of this kind of resume is that I didn’t have the option of pretending that I could still succeed within the system. I had to choose some other path. It hasn’t been easy. It’s been AWESOME!

Of course my resume looks a lot nicer in recent years, but in all honesty I take more pride in how it began. My past screw ups helped me realize that I can’t play by someone else’s rules. I can’t be happy doing what society might expect of me. I have to follow my own path and do what I believe is best. If I try to follow the system, I get really bored and listless, and when I try to compensate for its shortcomings, it spits me out as a criminal, a reject, a defective person.

As it turns out, the system does this to millions of people. So is it really the people who are the problem?

Being a savage isn’t so bad once you get used to it.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

The first method is to define your outcome and then dive right into massive action. Adjust your approach along the way, and keep going until you get there. This approach is easy to begin, but as Robert points out, you’ll typically run into serious resistance down the road. Very often such goals get derailed long before they’re achieved. Sound familiar?

The second method, and the basis of Robert’s book, consists of 5 steps:

1. Ask and answer the question Who am I?
2. Ask and answer the question What am I intending to attract?
3. Ask and answer the question How will I feel (when I experience what I intend to attract)?
4. Let go of attachments
5. Take inspired action

With this second method, you don’t set an intention or a goal until the second step.

Who Are You?

What I like about Robert’s method is that it begins with deepening your sense of self.

When it comes to setting new goals or defining their desires, lots of people struggle to figure out what they want. They focus on the external aspects of manifesting or goal achievement, and they get stuck because they don’t know how to choose between the limitless possibilities of what can be created in the external world.

One reason people struggle here is that they don’t have a very strong sense of self. So they latch onto desires that come mainly from external influences, but those desires may not align with the person’s best self image.

Earlier this month I attended a 3-day conference for entrepreneurs. As I expected for this kind of event, it was heavy on the product pitches and upselling. After each speaker finished presenting, some attendees would go to the back of the room and buy whatever the speaker was pitching. But how many of the people who bought those products are really going to follow through?

If they were to ask the question Who am I? and answer it seriously, would part of their answer truly be, “I’m a successful real estate investor”? If not, then why did they spend $500 on a real estate investing program?

For a fraction of those purchases, perhaps there is a strong alignment between the product and the customer. But the rest of those people were most likely acting on impulses that don’t align with their inner selves, and the result will be predictable — a year later that same info product will still be in the shrink wrap.

The worst part is that some of those people will beat themselves up for lacking the discipline to follow through on their purchases, when their real mistake was that they made a bad purchase that didn’t align with who they really are. Instead of making a conscious and intelligent choice, they got sold. Their desire was dictated by an outside influence.

How many bad decisions of a similar nature have you made over the years? What’s piled up in your closets, garage, hard drive, etc?

External Influences

It’s very easy to set goals and intentions that don’t align with who you are. This is a very common trap, so don’t feel bad if you’ve been stung a lot. There are certainly plenty of marketers who will influence you to make unwise decisions. Just turn on the TV, and there will be people trying to influence you one way or another. Or simply go out and talk to people. You’ll be subjected to external influences automatically.

Not all of them are profit-driven or sales oriented. Even friends and family can influence you to do things that don’t really align with who you are.

Those influences aren’t going away. They’re always going to be present in your life to some degree. But when it comes time to set some serious goals and intentions for yourself, this is when you need to step back from those influences and be present with yourself.

Even though you can’t entirely escape external influence — short of moving to a deserted island, that is — you can take steps to limit your exposure by turning down the volume, so to speak.

This is one reason I decided to shut down my online contact form last year, and it also played a role in my decision to quit Facebook last month. I wasn’t trying to run away and be anti-social. I love interacting with people, especially the growth-oriented people who tend to reach out to me. However, things got to the point where so many external influences were urging me to go in different directions (write about this, speak about that, help me with this) that I began to feel like a pinball in a pinball machine.

I felt that I was inviting in so many external influences that I was losing touch with my inner guidance. It became difficult to listen to myself and to make good decisions because my mind was constantly cluttered with thoughts injected by other people. I felt busier than usual but less productive at the same time.

Some external influences can be very positive, but the total summation of lots of disparate influences isn’t usually harmonious. It can be quite discordant in fact. Imagine what your life would be like if you tried to say yes to all the external influences that request something of you. Your mind would be overwhelmed with shoulds.

Often we soak up these influences subconsciously without even realizing what’s happening. Then when we sit down to get clear about our goals and intentions, we end up regurgitating some of those external influences as if they’re our own goals. Our intentions become cluttered with too many items that aren’t a good match for who we really are on the inside.

How Do You Feel?

Step 3 of Robert’s process is to ask yourself how you’ll feel when your intention becomes a reality. This takes some careful thought. The surface impression may be, “I’d feel happier.” But if we consider the full range of consequences of the intention, the true answer may not be so rosy.

When we make a mistake, then we usually discover the truth of our feelings later on — when we try to take action. We may also suffer from mixed feelings that lead to self-sabotage and procrastination.

Our feelings can be a powerful guide to our true selves. They can be very difficult to decipher, but overall they do a pretty good job of pointing us in the right direction, if we stop and take the time to listen to them carefully.

Socially I love to interact with people who read my work, but when I had so many communication channels open for people to contact me (my online contact form, Facebook, Twitter, our discussion forums, live workshops, in-person meet-ups when traveling), it got to be overwhelming.

The external influences mostly pushed me in the direction of being more accessible. You should have a Facebook page. Add a fan page too. Have more meet-ups. Post more inspirational tweets. Write another book. Do an interview with me. And so on.

That seemed like a reasonably positive direction at first. Accessibility is a good thing, isn’t it? Surely it’s better than inaccessibility, right?

But when I actually followed this path, my feeling about it became less and less harmonious.

Sometimes I liked it. It really is nice to connect with so many cool people. But sometimes I felt poorly about it. The communication seemed endless and overwhelming. I didn’t like having to perform so much triage just to keep up. I felt conflicted. Was I on the right path with all of this accessibility, or was it a mistake?

I couldn’t really make sense of those feelings because the volume of the external influences in my life created so much mental clutter that if I tried to tune in to my true self, I’d most likely hear other people’s thoughts playing back to me. It was hard to tell which thoughts were really my own.

Do you have any situations in your life right now where you’re suffering from mixed feelings? Are you facing a difficult “Should I stay or should I go?” type of decision? It could be that the reason you struggle to find clarity is that you’re being bombarded by discordant external influences, making it nearly impossible to discern which thoughts are really yours.

Is This Really Who I Am?

When you notice that some part of your life doesn’t quite feel right, I think it’s wise to pause for a moment and get in touch with your true self. But in order to do that, you may need to turn down the volume of external influences.

When I finally turned off enough of the external input that was coming at me each day, a wonderful thing happened. First, I felt relieved. After a few weeks, I began to experience much greater mental clarity about my goals and intentions. Planning ahead became significantly easier. My workflow sped up.

As the noise died down, I could clearly see which new goals and intentions were congruent with my true self and which were more like thought injections being pushed upon me from the outside in.

I often like to do a simple meditation where I visualize a room with two chairs facing each other. I imagine myself sitting in one chair, and I invite my highest and best self to sit in the other chair. Sometimes I invite my future self, the version of me that’s 5 years older. This works well either way, but lately I’ve been getting the best results by tuning into an alternate-reality version of my present self. His reality is the one in which I’m the happiest and most fulfilled. The most important element of this meditation is that I’m consulting with another version of myself that I feel is wiser in some way.

Then I imagine having a chat with my other self.

The main value in this exercise isn’t about getting specific answers to questions. The value lies in connecting with my true self and getting a better sense of who he really is. What kind of a man is he? What does he value most?

When I understand who my best self is, then I have a clearer sense of the man I wish to become. This understanding makes it easier to set good goals and intentions. When I set goals with this level of understanding, I’m more likely to follow through on them because they’re well aligned with the kind of man I most desire to be. They may be very difficult goals, but I’m less likely to experience self-doubt about my desire for them. I just know they’re right for me.

An example of such a goal was when I decided to quit the computer gaming industry in 2004 and start a new personal development website. Obviously that turned out pretty well. Because the goal was aligned with my best self, I didn’t suffer from self-doubt. I knew it was the right path for me to pursue.

My lower self likes to ask What should I do? But each time I ask that question, I get different answers, depending on which external influences happen to be the loudest or most infectious at that time.

I find that a better question to ask is: What would he do? where “he” refers to my best self.

When considering different possible paths, I can ask myself, Does this help me align more closely with my best self? If the answer is no or probably not, then I know it’s a path I should reject. If I pursue such a path, I won’t feel good about it, I’ll doubt myself often, and I’ll encounter a lot of resistance along the way. But if it’s a path that does align well with my higher self, then I tend to experience wonderful flow and fulfillment.

The key idea here is to set goals and intentions very carefully. You can waste a lot of time and suffer unnecessary frustration if you try to pursue a path that doesn’t align with the person you most desire to be.

Embracing Paradox

When I imagine my best possible self, I love what I see. He has all the qualities that I value most. He’s strong, disciplined, confident, and brave, but he’s also loving, caring, compassionate, and gentle. He’s tenacious but flexible. He’s brilliant but intensely curious. He’s focused but spontaneous. He keeps his life simple, but he gets a lot done. He prefers a lifestyle far from the norm, but he can still connect well with people.

In my present day reality, I often struggle to balance these different aspects. My best self, however, is able to blend them harmoniously into a perfect whole. The more I take the time to understand who he is and how he’s able to integrate all these seemingly paradoxical qualities, the more clarity I have about my own path of self-development.

A while back I was hanging out with a good friend who’s a successful tech investor. At one point during our conversation, he said to me, “Steve, you’re a bit of a paradox. I mean… on the one hand, you’re a successful entrepreneur, and you’re also very smart. But on the other hand, you’re not an asshole like many other entrepreneurs and smart people I know. You actually care about people, and in-person you’re very friendly and easy to talk to, but most people who are like that can’t build a successful business that makes money.” Then he went on to explain how he considers himself a paradox as well, and he explained how it helps him to embrace these seemingly conflicted elements.

I think the real truth is that the paradox is only an illusion. External influences condition us to believe that we have to be one way or another. Fictional characters such as what we see in movies and TV are often depicted in ways that make us think that if we develop some positive qualities, then we must sacrifice others. Real human beings are richer and more complex than any fictional character, no matter how well developed that character is.

If we aim to be strong and powerful and successful, then supposedly we must be less loving, less caring, and more cold-hearted. If we want to be heart-centered and loving, we must be less ambitious. If we want to be very disciplined, we can’t be impulsive or spontaneous.

Have you ever bought into such nonsense? I certainly have.

For example, if I post a tough love article, then according to the feedback, I must be a hard-ass kind of guy… since obviously only that type of man would write such an article. It amuses me to think there are people who actually believe that’s the kind of person I am, as if I go around every day trying to do everything in a tough-guy manner.

If I post a compassionate and heart-centered article, then the feedback tries to get me to believe that I must be a very sensitive man… since obviously only such a man would write something like that. But to those who’ve already concluded I’m a hard-ass, then I must be having an off day.

I think the apparent paradox isn’t really a paradox at all. The truth is that good qualities can blend together beautifully, just like different instruments can be used to create delightful music. You don’t have to choose between being a percussion instrument and a string instrument. You can be both at the same time.

After my last blog post about the survey, someone posted in the forum discussion thread, “Who are you, and what have you done with Steve?” Apparently my character isn’t allowed to conduct surveys. I apologize for going against my programming.

This really is the sort of programming that gets injected into our minds, often without our conscious awareness. Others expect us to behave a certain way, and they communicate their expectations to us, either directly or indirectly. Over time their expectations mesh with our dominant thoughts, and their expectations become our expectations of ourselves.

At some point it’s a good idea to back away from all these influences, clear your mind, and get to know the beautiful paradox that is your true self. The more you understand that person, the easier it is to set goals and intentions that are achievable — and enjoyable — for you.

The Practical Benefits of Self-Knowing

When you deepen your connection to your higher self, you gain many real-world practical benefits. One very powerful benefit is that you can get yourself unstuck where you’ve previously felt stuck.

For many years in my marriage to Erin, I struggled with the decision Should we stay together or break up? No matter how much I thought about it, journaled about it, or sought advice, I couldn’t get to a place of clarity about it.

Why couldn’t I get clear? Perhaps the main reason was that I was paying too much attention to what other people thought. My mind was cluttered with input from Erin, from friends and family, from authors I’d read, from people whose opinions I respected. Some of that was direct feedback, and some was just a general impression of how the other person would likely react.

But those external influences were incongruent. Some said stay. Some said go. It was impossible to weigh them against each other or find peace among them. They could never agree. Since these outer influences had infected my thinking, I couldn’t achieve any real clarity within my mind. I always felt internally conflicted, when the truth was that I was infected with too much thinking that wasn’t my own.

What got me past this place of stuckness was to pull back from allowing outside influences to get into my mind. I took time to deepen my connection to my best self. I didn’t ask him whether Erin and I should break up or not. I knew that would be a bad question to ask that would just bring up all the mental clutter again.

Instead, I took the time to understand the kind of man he was — the kind of man I desired to become. Fortunately, this was relatively uncluttered territory because I didn’t have many external influences telling me what kind of man I should be in great detail.

Once I understood who my best self was, I set a new intention from that base of clarity. I intended to attract into my life relationships that were congruent with my becoming my best self. I remained open to the possibility that my marriage might be transformed into that kind of relationship, and I also accepted that I might be guided to pursue a different path.

This led to some tumultuous changes, and the outcome wasn’t what I expected, but it certainly took me down a path that helped me do a better job of aligning with my best self. I didn’t achieve perfection of course, but it’s definitely been a step forward, and I’ve been happier and more fulfilled as a result.

Taking Action

When you really get to know yourself, and you set goals and intentions from that place of knowing, it’s easier to take action because you’ll feel a positive pressure to get moving. If the action part seems unreasonably difficult or if your intention seems to be lost in limbo with no signs of manifesting, perhaps you picked a bad goal to begin with.

What’s the point in setting a goal anyway? Why bother to invest so much effort into it?

The point is to use goals to more fully become your best self.

When I look back on all the goals I’ve set and achieved, the real gain is how my goals sculpted me as a person. Those are the best payoffs. If I didn’t set and pursue goals vigorously, I’d be more fearful, timid, shy, and socially awkward. I’d be less energetic. I’d be lazier. I’d be less confident in myself. My self-esteem would be much lower. I wouldn’t care about people as much. I’d be more focused on survival than contribution. I’d be a hell of a lot less happy.

Take a look at your best self. What is s/he like? Can you clearly describe your best self’s character, personality, attitude, and beliefs?

Do you notice the contrast between your current self and your best self? When you see the contrast, use it to set new goals and intentions that will help you align with your best self.

If you see that your best self is braver than your current self, set a goal that will compel you to face your fears and build your courage muscles.

If you see that your best self is more friendly and social than your current self, hold the intention to develop better social skills. Go out more. Set goals that will compel you to socialize more. Join a club.

If you see that your best self enjoys great abundance while your current self wallows in scarcity, ask your best self how s/he got there. What goals could you set to create more abundance in your life? What bad habits could you release?

The answers are inside you. But sometimes in order to hear them clearly, you have to tell the rest of the world, Shut the hell up!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Actually it’s neither.

Ironically I found that having such values on my list didn’t help me much when making decisions. They seem like good values to have, and I agree that they’re important, but in practice they served to obfuscate a deeper truth.

Does It Help to Focus on Focus?

Focus on what? Discipline yourself to do what?

What if you apply these values to the wrong pursuits?

When I was 19, I was very focused on shoplifting. I thought about it every day, kept improving my game, and disciplined myself to take action. And I got pretty good at it. Was that a wise choice?

Later I focused on running a computer games business. That focus gave me good results in some areas of life, but it also slowed me down in other areas. When I’d write an article to help people on the side, sometimes I’d chastise myself for it because writing articles would dilute my focus, drawing me away from publishing games. But I still felt motivated to write. I didn’t know I’d someday become a blogger, author, and speaker and end up writing more than 1,000 articles, having a book published in a dozen languages, and doing live workshops. Blogging didn’t even exist back then, at least not like it exists today. So even though it seems like a good value to have, if I’d clung to the value of focus more tightly than I did, I might still be writing computer games, ceasing all article writing as an unjustifiable distraction.

Look at your own life and ask yourself if focusing on becoming more focused has produced positive results for you. Is it paying off? Might it also be holding you back in some areas? Are you certain that your focal point is the best one for you?

In my case I would say there were some benefits to trying to become more focused and discipline as ends in themselves, but those results weren’t as strong as I’d hoped. I intuitively sensed that something was off. I’d do things that seemed more focused and disciplined, but often that made me feel more stressed and overwhelmed, which ironically make it harder to focus. Some part of me was resisting, and it wasn’t due to laziness.

I eventually realized that my resistance had to do with feeling disconnected. Often I would focus on actions that left me feeling unfulfilled, even though I initially expected to feel really good about the results. The deepest levels of drive and motivation weren’t coming through.

What’s Your Best Focal Point?

This got me thinking. Is there a better place to focus my attention, such that I’ll experience less resistance, feel more motivated, and be more fulfilled?

Eventually I figured out the focal point that works best for me. That focal point is caring.

That value has been present in my life for many years, but it wasn’t till recently that I became consciously aware of just how important it is to me.

The main reason I started this personal development website is that I care about helping people. You don’t succumb to writer’s block when you care. The words always flow. I’d find it harder to discipline myself not to write. I don’t have to discipline myself to write because I care about the topics I write about, and I care about the people who read my work. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t write anything.

Caring is why I’m a vegan. I have a deep sense of compassion for animals, and it breaks my heart to see them suffer needlessly. So I strive to keep reducing the amount of suffering I contribute to, and I keep holding the intention for us to co-create a more compassionate world. Perfection may not be realistic in such an inter-connected world. Nevertheless, I do the best I can. I’m not going to close my heart, even if it stings now and then. I know that joy and sorrow are a package deal.

Something that non-vegans are rarely aware of, but which many vegans know quite well, is that your relationships tend to improve significantly when you go vegan, partly because you feel much more connected to your fellow human beings. Even if you go vegan mainly for health reasons, as I initially did, a side effect is that your heart becomes less clogged (both physically and metaphorically). This allows you to feel and express love more strongly. After several years on this path, you look back to your past self and shudder to realize how cold and dark you once were. It generally takes years for this effect to play out, but a lot of vegans experience it. You can’t close your heart to animal suffering without also closing part of it to human suffering. When you open your heart more, and you behave more compassionately, initially it may seem more difficult to attract a decent relationship because your standards will be higher, but when you do connect with someone who cares as much as you do, the connection can be more intense than anything you’ve previously experienced.

Caring is the primary value I use in my relationships. I love to care for someone deeply and to express that caring — through affection, attention, playfulness, etc. I like making people feel good. This is why I resonate more with polyamory than monogamy. It doesn’t feel right to me to label caring for more than one person as cheating. Making love physically is one way among many to express caring, but for some it’s a powerful channel for giving and receiving love. If I’m going to discipline myself, then I might remind myself to give Rachelle a nice massage or to tell her how grateful I am for our connection. Or I might post some encouraging words on a friend’s Facebook page, or come up with a Twitter update that might help inspire people.

On the other hand, caring made it very difficult for me to separate from Erin. The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt her. Our connection couldn’t be transformed until I realized that it wasn’t enough that we cared about each other; we also needed to feel cared for. Since Erin and I give and receive love in very different ways, it was a struggle for us to express caring in ways that the other would receive it. So we had to let go and allow each other to seek out more compatible partners. We continue to care about each other, but now we express it differently.

When I see other people who haven’t opened their hearts, and they struggle to find something to care about, I see that they suffer for it. I’ve seen how much happier people are when they finally open their hearts and begin to care. Often that begins with giving themselves permission to turn and face what breaks their hearts — and to stop holding back the tears. What is it that makes you cry? What would happen if you allowed yourself to care about it every day?

A New Level of Clarity

My new list of values does a better job of clarifying what I want to focus on.

Focusing on making more money or on achieving more success doesn’t motivate me to do my best work. Often it just makes me feel more stressed. But when I focus on caring about people and when I enter into that place of knowing that we’re all part of the greater body of humanity, everything flows beautifully. I feel stimulated even if I might otherwise be a bit tired or drowsy. There’s just enough tension to drive action but not so much to make me feel stressed or overwhelmed. My mind feels sharp and alert, and my thoughts become clear and focused, like I’m flowing down a river with the current. I’m able to concentrate well. And I have this warm and powerful feeling in the center of my chest. When I write from that place, people seem to resonate with it, and my words are often coincidentally synchronous with events in their lives. A greater level of harmony is achieved.

When I focus on values like caring and oneness, I feel more fulfilled. I become stronger and more disciplined because caring is intensely motivating. If you don’t care about what you’re doing, it’s very hard to discipline yourself. But when you really care, it’s actually harder not to take action. You’d practically have to be restrained.

Interestingly enough, isn’t that what society does to us sometimes? When certain activists go out and express how deeply they care about certain issues, you’ll sometimes see them being physically restrained by those who’ve been conditioned to keep their hearts closed.

What kind of world would you rather live in? Would you be happiest living in a very focused and disciplined world? What kind of imagery that does bring up? The Nazis perhaps?

Or would you rather live in a very caring world? What would it be like to live in a world where everyone cared about each other and about the planet as a whole? Wouldn’t this make us more focused, disciplined, and efficient too — and in the ways that matter?

I choose the latter. I understand the importance of becoming the change we wish to see in the world. I think that what our planet needs most at this time is for more of us to wake up and care, not just through feeling but through action. At this time in our history, it’s more important that we learn to care about each other than it is that we produce a new iThing.

When I listen carefully (= care fully) to what tugs at my heart strings, those strings begin to play music. That music is very beautiful.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

The new life purpose statement I created is:

to care deeply, connect playfully, love intensely, and share generously;
to joyfully explore, learn, grow, and prosper;
and to creatively, brilliantly, and honorably serve the highest good of all.

I may continue to tweak this over time, but overall I feel it does a good job of encapsulating what’s important to me in life.

A life purpose statement is a very personal thing, so when you read someone else’s life purpose, it won’t necessarily mean much to you, but it has a special significance to the person who created it.

If you want help crafting your own life purpose statement, a good place to start is the article How to Discover Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes. If you have a copy of my book Personal Development for Smart People, you’ll find an updated version of this process along with some additional tips in the Career chapter in Part II.

My new values list, in order of priority, is:

1. Caring (compassion, kindness, generosity)
2. Oneness (unconditional love, connectedness, harmony)
3. Devotion (passion, loyalty, intensity)
4. Intimacy (honesty, openness, sharing)
5. Exploration (curiosity, learning, adventure)
6. Brilliance (genius, creativity, style)
7. Honor (humility, gratitude, class)
8. Playfulness (fun, humor, play)
9. Prosperity (abundance, richness, wealth)

I found it easiest to clarify and then prioritize my values first, and then I used that list to help craft my life purpose statement. It took hours to clarify my values list, but once that was done, it took less than 30 minutes to come up with the new purpose statement.

Creating this list gave me some fresh insights about what’s most important to me.

The first 3 values (caring, oneness, devotion) involve creating a strong core of love, support, and connectedness. These values help align me with the principle of Love. When these values are fulfilled, I feel very happy and inspired, which is a great foundation for a purpose-driven life.

The next 2 values (intimacy and exploration) help me align with the principle of Truth. Once I have a strong base of Love, I’m motivated to reach out, share, and learn.

The 6th value (brilliance) is about expressing myself creatively. What unique value can I contribute to others? What’s the very best I have to share?

The last 3 values (honor, playfulness, prosperity) are about how I wish to enjoy and experience the game of life.

I was amazed to see how much my core values have changed. This is a very different list than any I’ve created in the past 20 years. Values that used to be near the top of the list include focus, discipline, and efficiency. Those aren’t nearly as important to me today. Now I feel it’s more important to lead with my heart.

If you want to update your own values list, I encourage you to take advantage of this extensive list of values as a brainstorming aid.

A shift in your values can cause you to shift your decisions and actions as well. For example, a few years ago when I removed all third-party advertising from my website, which caused my income to instantly drop by more than $100K per year (passive income to boot), some people thought I was nuts. But that decision was consistent with my values. As you can see from my current values list, it’s more important for me to care about people and make honorable choices than it is to increase my personal wealth and abundance. For someone with different values, however, the same decision might not have made them happy. I have no regrets about it though.

Much like a life purpose statement, a values list is a very personal thing. Someone else’s values might not mean much to you. It’s only when you see your own values written out that the benefits of having such a list become clear.

Some decisions in life can be quite tricky. When you have your life purpose statement and values list to consult, however, these tricky decisions become much easier, and your decisions will be more consistent.

Should you quit your job to start your own business? Yes, if you value growth and learning over stability.

Should you break up with your current relationship partner? Yes, if that relationship leaves your most important values unfulfilled and another relationship would do a better job of fulfilling them.

Should you eat pizza for breakfast instead of a fruit smoothie? No, if you value vitality and alertness over satiety.

When you can quickly remind yourself what’s most important to you and in what order of priority, you not only gain clarity about the right decisions, but you also know why they’re the right decisions for you.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina