A total of 52 submissions were received. Erin and I both read every single one of them. By the time I was done, I felt like I’d just completed a course in Women’s Studies. My head was swimming with ideas.

There were so many valuable ideas offered that it was extremely difficult to decide which ones we liked best. Erin and I couldn’t agree on our favorites, so we decided that we’d share our individual top picks instead of trying to force ourselves to agree. Our #1 picks are listed in bold.

Erin’s top picks:

1. Womanhood by Vicki
2. How to Be a Woman by Hayden Tompkins
3. How to Be a Woman by Hunter Nuttall
4. I Am Woman by Millionaire Mommy Next Door

Steve’s top picks:

1. How to Be a Woman by Suzie Fleming
2. How to Be a Woman by Squawkfox
3. How to Be a Woman by Emily Calle
4. How to Be a Woman by Lola

Here are the remaining submissions (in the order they were received):

1. How to Be a Woman by Turil Cronburg
2. How to Be a Woman - Her Three Stages by K.S. Yu
3. How to Be a Woman by Laura Thompson
4. How to Be a Woman by Noa Rose
5. How to Be a Woman by Helga Sombrofsky
6. How to Be a Woman by Apollia
7. How to Be a Woman by Rajbir Dhaliwal
8. Consciously Being a Girl by Andrea La Rose
9. How to Be a Woman by Nicholas Powiull
10. What Does It Mean to Be a Woman? by Tiny Jäntsch
11. How to Be a Woman by Shahnaz
12. How to Be a Woman by Liz Maher
13. How to Be a Woman by Myrlia Purcell
14. How to Be a Woman by Kate Hudson
15. How to Be a Woman by Romona Paden
16. How to Live Consciously as a Woman by Niki
17. How to Be a Woman by Sonya Sidky
18. How to Be a Woman by Rachelle
19. How to Be a Woman by Barb D.
20. How to Be a Woman by Tamas
21. How to Be a Woman by Mike Elias
22. How to Be a Woman by Gretchen Cawthon
23. How to Be a Woman by Avani
24. How to Be an Attractive Woman by Andrew
25. 5 Ways to Be a Confident Sexy Woman by Nancy Hayssen
26. How to Be a Woman by Jennifer Bingham Heart
27. Muliebrity by Rebecca
28. How to Be a Woman by Rachel Knight
29. How to Be a (Successful, Inspirational) Woman by Erica Douglass
30. Be a Real Woman by Cheryl Hochstettler
31. How to Be a Woman by Cathy
32. Undefined Refinement: How to Be a Woman by Nicole
33. How To Be A Woman (The Yin Warrior) by Candice Schutter
34. How to Be a Woman by Niamh
35. How to Be a Woman at Work by Karl Staib
36. How to Be a Woman by Sheryn Bruehl
37. How to Be a (Conscious) Woman by Carol
38. How to Be a Woman by Svetlana Ovanesyan
39. The “How to Be a Woman” Challenge by Lexi
40. The Beauty, Virtues and Strength of a Woman by SpiritFREE1
41. How to Go From Being a Girl to Being a Woman by Juanita
42. How to Be a Woman by Beth Patterson
43. How to Be a Woman by Monique DeBose
44. Being a Woman by Lin Cremore

Hundreds of different ideas were shared in these articles. I took notes on every article, and I noticed several recurring themes. If I were to write my own “How to Be a Woman” article to summarize some of the strongest and most frequent ideas, it would include the following 10 pieces of advice:

1. Get to know your authentic self.

Discover the real you. Don’t blindly accept the role you were conditioned by others to fill. You have your own path to follow. Be your own independent person. Don’t allow peer pressure to force you into an inauthentic role.

2. Own your power.

Accept full responsibility for your life. Don’t live as a doormat, a sheep, or a victim. Stop giving away your power. You must accept that you’re the creator of your life and that no one is coming to rescue you. Many women stressed the importance of taking responsibility for your own financial future instead of leaving it in the hands of a spouse.

3. Find your voice.

Build the courage to express yourself authentically. Speak your truth. You deserve to be heard. If others react negatively, that’s their problem. Ask for what you want; you can’t expect others to be mind-readers. You teach others how you want to be treated — not by dropping hints but by telling them directly. If you don’t speak up for yourself, who will?

4. Find your tribe.

Consciously build and nurture a supportive network of positive relationships, including family and friends. Drop relationships that drain you; maintaining them is self-abuse. If you don’t like your current relationships, it’s up to you to change that. Surround yourself with good people who love you and inspire you. You deserve the very best relationships.

5. Practice self-care.

Avoid overwhelm by taking time to sharpen the saw. Give yourself permission to do what you enjoy. Demands from other people can wait. Accept that you can’t do everything for everyone. You can’t give to others when you’re empty inside.

6. Express your creative side.

Cultivate outlets for creative self-expression. Explore music, art, writing, poetry, etc. Build a business. Be artistic. Put your ideas into physical form.

7. Embrace conscious sexuality.

You and you alone must decide the role sex will play in your life. There are no right or wrong answers. If you want it and enjoy it, let that be enough. Different women had widely varying opinions on what kind of sexual expression they personally preferred, ranging from waiting until marriage to having guilt-free one-night stands. But the commonality was that they consciously decided and accepted what was right for them, regardless of how other people felt about it.

8. Be beautiful.

True beauty comes from the inside. It can’t be found beneath a load of cosmetics and surgical alterations. Recognize that you’re a beautiful person on the inside, and you’ll broadcast that awareness on the outside. You are beautiful.

9. Keep your heart open.

Regardless of how badly you may have been hurt in the past, keep your heart open. You’re stronger than you think. The rewards of love outweigh the risks of being hurt again. You’re here to express love, not to live in fear.

10. Become wise.

You are highly intuitive, so work on deepening your ability to trust your intuition. Keep learning and growing. In the long run, your wisdom will become one of your greatest assets, both as a way to meet your own needs and to help others. (Many women placed a very high value on developing their wisdom.)

***

Reading all of these pieces was amazingly eye-opening. I offer a huge “thank you” to everyone who chose to participate.

The point of articles such as these isn’t to dictate how you’re supposed to live. The point is to offer you different perspectives to consider, so you can make more conscious and deliberate choices for yourself.

Being a man or woman isn’t about blindly following popular gender patterns, nor is it about rejecting such patterns out of hand and rebelliously embracing their opposites. Ultimately you must define what kind of man or woman you will become. This is a choice you must make for yourself as an individual, regardless of what anyone else thinks. What kind of man/woman do you wish to be? Life awaits your answer…

I must say that I’m in awe of just how incredibly beautiful and insightful the readers of this site are. Thanks again for sharing your voice!

© 2008 by Steve Pavlina.

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Here are 10 ways to live more consciously as a man:

1. Make real decisions.

A man understands and respects the power of choice. He lives a life of his own creation. He knows that life stagnates when he fails to decide and flourishes when he chooses a clear path.

When a man makes a decision, he opens the door he wants and closes the doors he doesn’t want. He locks onto his target like a guided missile. There’s no guarantee he’ll reach his target, and he knows this, but he doesn’t need such guarantees. He simply enjoys the sense of inevitability that comes from pushing the launch button.

A man doesn’t require the approval of others. He’s willing to follow his heart wherever it leads him. When a man is following his heart-centered path, it’s of little consequence if the entire world is against him.

2. Put your relationships second.

A man who claims his #1 commitment in life is his relationship partner (or his family) is either too dishonest or too weak to be trusted. His loyalties are misplaced. A man who values individuals above his own integrity is a wretch, not a free thinker.

A man knows he must commit to something greater than satisfying the needs of a few people. He’s not willing to be domesticated, but he is willing to accept the responsibility that comes with greater challenges. He knows that when he shirks that duty, he becomes something less than a man. When others observe that the man is unyieldingly committed to his values and ideals, he gains their trust and respect, even when he cannot gain their direct support. The surest way for a man to lose the respect of others (as well as his self-respect) is to violate his own values.

Life will test the man to see if he’s willing to put loyalty to others ahead of loyalty to his principles. The man will be offered many temptations to expose his true loyalties. A man’s greatest reward is to live with integrity, and his greatest punishment is what he inflicts upon himself for placing anything above his integrity. Whenever the man sacrifices his integrity, he loses his freedom… and himself as well. He becomes an object of pity.

3. Be willing to fail.

A man is willing to make mistakes. He’s willing to be wrong. He’d rather try and fail than do nothing.

A man’s self-trust is one of his greatest assets. When he second-guesses himself by worrying about failure, he diminishes himself. An intelligent man considers the prospect of failure, but he doesn’t preoccupy himself with pointless worry. He accepts that if a failure outcome occurs, he can deal with it.

A man grows more from failure than he does from success. Success cannot test his resolve in the way that failure can. Success has its challenges, but a man learns more about himself when he takes on challenges that involve risk. When a man plays it safe, his vitality is lost, and he loses his edge.

4. Be confident.

A man speaks and acts with confidence. He owns his attitude.

A man doesn’t adopt a confident posture because he knows he’ll succeed. He often knows that failure is a likely outcome. But when the odds of success are clearly against him, he still exudes confidence. It isn’t because he’s ignorant or suffering from denial. It’s because he’s proving to himself that he has the strength to transcend his self-doubt. This builds his courage and persistence, two of his most valuable allies.

A man is willing to be defeated by the world. He’s willing to be taken down by circumstances beyond his control. But he refuses to be overwhelmed by his own self-doubt. He knows that when he stops trusting himself, he is surely lost. He’ll surrender to fate when necessary, but he won’t surrender to fear.

5. Express love actively.

A man is an active giver of love, not a passive receiver. A man is the first to initiate a conversation, the first to ask for what’s needed, and the first to say “I love you.” Waiting for someone else to make the first move is unbecoming of him. The universe does not respond positively to his hesitation. Only when he’s in motion do the floodgates of abundance open.

Man is the out-breath of source energy. It is his job — his duty — to share his love with the world. He must wean himself from suckling the energy of others and become a vibrant transmitter of energy himself. He must allow that energy to flow from source, through him, and into the world. When he assumes this role, he has no doubt he is living as his true self.

6. Re-channel sex energy.

A man doesn’t hide his sexuality. If others shrink from him because he’s too masculine, he allows them to have their reaction. There’s no need for him to lower his energy just to avoid frightening the timid. A man accepts the consequences of being male; he makes no apologies for his nature.

A man is careful not to allow his energy to get stuck at the level of lust. He re-channels much of his sexual energy into his heart and head, where it can serve his higher values instead of just his animal instincts. (You can do this by visualizing the energy rising, expanding, and eventually flowing throughout your entire body and beyond.)

A man channels his sexual energy into his heart-centered pursuits. He feels such energy pulsing within him, driving him to action. He feels uncomfortable standing still. He allows his sexual energy to explode through his heart, not just his genitals.

7. Face your fears.

For a man, being afraid of something is reason enough to do it. A man’s fear is a call to be tested. When a man hides from his fears, he knows he’s fallen out of alignment with his true self. He feels weak, depressed, and helpless. No matter how hard he tries to comfort himself and achieve a state of peace, he cannot overcome his inner feeling of dread. Only when facing his fears does a man experience peace.

A man makes a friend of risk. He doesn’t run and hide from the tests of fear. He turns toward them and engages them boldly.

A man succeeds or fails. A coward never makes the attempt. Specific outcomes are of less concern to a man than his direction.

A man feels like a man whenever he faces the right way, staring straight into his fears. He feels even more like a man when he advances in the direction of his fears, as if sailing on the winds of an inner scream.

8. Honor the masculinity of other men.

When a man sees a male friend undertaking a new venture that will clearly lead to failure, what does the man do? Does he warn his friend off such a path? No, the man encourages his friend to continue. The man knows it’s better for his friend to strike out confidently and learn from the failure experience. The man honors his friend’s decision to reach out and make the attempt. The man won’t deny his friend the benefits of a failure experience. The man may offer his friend guidance, but he knows his friend must fail repeatedly in order to develop self-trust and courage.

When you see a man at the gym struggling to lift a heavy weight, do you jump in and say, “Here… let me help you with that. Maybe the two of us can lift it together”? No, that would rob him of the growth experience — and probably make a quick enemy of him as well.

The male path is filled with obstacles. It typically includes more failures than successes. These obstacles help a man discover what’s truly important to him. Through repeated failures a man learns to persist in the pursuit of worthy goals and to abandon goals that are unworthy of him.

A man can handle being knocked down many times. For every physical setback he experiences, he enjoys a spiritual advancement, and that is enough for him.

9. Accept responsibility for your relationships.

A man chooses his friends, lovers, and associates consciously. He actively seeks out the company of people who inspire and challenge him, and he willingly sheds those who hold him back.

A man doesn’t blame others for his relationship problems. When a relationship is no longer compatible with his heart-centered path, he initiates the break-up and departs without blame or guilt.

A man holds himself accountable for the relationships he allows into his life. He holds others accountable for their behavior, but he holds himself accountable for his decision to tolerate such behavior.

A man teaches others how to treat him by the relationships he’s willing to allow into his life. A man refuses to fill his life with negative or destructive relationships; he knows that’s a form of self-abuse.

10. Die well.

A man’s great challenge is to develop the inner strength to express his true self. He must learn to share his love with the world without holding back. When a man is satisfied that he’s done that, he can make peace with death. But if he fails to do so, death becomes his enemy and haunts him all the days of his life.

A man cannot die well unless he lives well. A man lives well when he accepts his mortality and draws strength from knowing that his physical existence is temporary. When a man faces and accepts the inevitability of death… when he learns to see death as his ally instead of his enemy… he’s finally able to express his true self. So a man isn’t ready to live until he accepts that he’s already dead.

How to Be a Woman?

Now who will write “How to Be a Woman”?

I’ll tell you what. If you can write the “How to Be a Woman” article, go ahead and post it on your site, and email me a link to it. Next week I’ll make a post linking to all the quality submissions. Erin and I will select the article we consider the most insightful, and that link will be given special prominence at the top of the results post. So basically the prize is a permanent link and free traffic.

I’ll only link to new articles I believe offer genuine value to the reader (i.e. interesting, original ideas), so don’t bother submitting a sloppily written fluff piece or an old article just to get a link. I’d rather link to 5 thoughtful articles than 50 mediocre ones. If you can write reasonably well, you should be fine.

There are no requirements for how you format such an article (you don’t have to follow the ten-item format above). You can use any personal style you like, including writing a strictly humorous piece. The main consideration is how much value and insight you deliver.

Let’s give this a deadline of about 4 days, so all submissions must be received by 7pm PST (that’s GMT-8) on Tuesday, May 13. I’ll post the results as soon as Erin and I have had sufficient time to review the submissions. I’ve never done this before, so I have no idea how many submissions we’ll get, but I imagine it will be somewhere between 1 and 50.

You don’t have to be a woman to submit a “How to Be a Woman” article, but there’s a good chance it will help.

P.S. If you happen to be offended by all or part of this article, you should be able to find plenty more articles that offend you in the Archives.

Update May 14, 2008:  The “How to Be a Woman” challenge is now closed, so we’re no longer considering new submissions. 52 submissions were received - Wow! Erin and I will read through all of them, and I’ll make a summary post as soon as we’re done.

© 2008 by Steve Pavlina.

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First, it’s important to understand that the ultimate goal of a lightworker is basically the expansion and elevation of consciousness. Darkworkers have essentially the same primary aim, but lightworkers pursue a very different path to get there.

It’s helpful to understand the lightworker path by contrasting it with the darkworker path.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of people aren’t polarized one way or the other, so chances are you’ll recognize some shades of yourself in both paths, but their pure forms will likely seem too extreme to you. However, you can greatly accelerate your path of growth by consciously choosing one path or the other instead of mixing the two (incompatible) approaches.

The Darkworker Path

For a darkworker the elevation of one’s own consciousness is all that matters. Usually this is achieved via the pursuit of greater power and control of one’s life. Darkworkers ultimately want to be the kings and queens of their own universes. If you don’t deeply desire some form of dominance and control over your reality, you aren’t a darkworker.

Since the consciousness of others is viewed as either nonexistent or irrelevant, darkworkers are willing to do things that lower the consciousness of others, acting like energy vampires. They believe it’s possible to create a net gain for themselves at the expense of others.

With respect to the list in 10 Ways to Become More Conscious, a darkworker will often employ the exact opposite strategies in dealing with others if s/he finds it personally advantageous to do so. This includes lying, using fear and intimidation tactics, being cruel, squashing others’ dreams, keeping secrets, and manipulating others. It’s a very competitive mindset. Darkworkers often make the people around them more fearful, more apathetic, and less conscious. Treating others this way isn’t their goal; for darkworkers it’s only a means to an end. Socially it may be important for a darkworker to avoid being caught doing such things, but they don’t suffer serious inner resistance to such a path.

You can often detect the presence of a darkworker by the effect they have on your consciousness. For example, if you work for a company run by darkworkers, you may perceive that going to work at your job actually lowers your consciousness compared to if you just stayed home. Going to work is like entering an awareness-lowering cloud, inviting you to resonate with lower states of consciousness such as fear, greed, apathy, depression, and worry. When you leave work, you feel like you’re coming out of that dark cloud; it’s like you can finally breathe and be yourself again. If you recognize that you’re in such a situation and continue to allow yourself to be vamped because you feel too powerless to do otherwise, then you have first-hand knowledge of how effective darkworking can be. The weaker your independent will becomes, the more you empower the darkworker that’s using you. Think of this as energetic slavery.

The Lightworker Path

Lightworkers believe that everyone is part of a conscious whole, and lightworkers identify with that collective consciousness. They still have their own egos, but they regard their individuality as an avatar of that collective consciousness. So the expansion of individual consciousness is a tool of a greater consciousness rather than an end unto itself.

For a lightworker the notion of trying to get ahead at someone else’s expense makes no sense. It’s like your left hand is competing with your right. There can be no winners and losers in life. We’re all in this together. We’re all part of the same whole.

Lightworkers feel very connected to other people. They regard others as extensions of themselves. The basis for that sense of connection is unconditional love. This includes love and acceptance of darkworkers as well. Lightworkers recognize that darkworkers are also aspects of the greater unfolding consciousness.

A lightworker uses the ideas in 10 Ways to Become More Conscious internally as well as externally. This includes discovering and sharing truth, being courageous and encouraging others to do the same, and favoring compassion over cruelty. Lightworkers strive to raise the consciousness of those around them. They don’t intentionally vamp off other people.

If you work for a company or organization run by lightworkers, you can expect it to be a consciousness-raising experience. Going to work is like entering a cloud of light. You look forward to it and almost hate to leave. You know you’re performing a valuable service that helps others. At the end of the day you feel great about your job and the people you work with. You may even want to extend the work into your personal time. Going to work gives you feelings of peace, joy, love, contribution, compassion, and connection. Working feels like breathing love — an energizing experience.

One of the interesting ways in which darkworkers and lightworkers can get into a bit of competition with each other arises from how they treat other people. Lightworkers are constantly trying to raise the consciousness of others, especially by sharing ideas, truth, attention, and positive intentions. When lightworkers do this to pawns of darkworkers, it can threaten the darkworker’s power base. Darkworkers don’t like it when their slaves are made aware of their slavery and offered the choice to be free. It’s like stealing their food.

Conscious Lightworking

Now let’s get into the details of lightworking. What does the path actually look like?

In order to raise the consciousness of others, a lightworker must commit to living consciously. A lightworker serves as an example of conscious living. This doesn’t necessarily mean becoming a teacher. It means that a lightworker makes very conscientious and deliberate choices about how to live.

Lightworking requires that you accept full and complete responsibility for your life. You have to wean yourself off socially conditioned habits that don’t serve you and replace them with deliberate, conscious choices.

Living Honestly

Lightworkers embrace the truth and live honestly. Lightworkers often spend a lot of time on introspection, always looking for deeper truths. They’re very considerate of the meaning behind their actions.

Lightworking requires that you rid your life of falsehood and inauthenticity. This is one of the first activities new lightworkers undertake. It’s a process of shedding lower energies that are incongruent with the new path. This may include quitting jobs, leaving relationships, dropping friends, or moving to new places. The lightworker looks to get rid of anything that would likely lead him/her astray.

In truth this process can be very difficult. It may even feel like a part of you is dying. But it’s important to realize that inauthentic attachments aren’t the real you and can’t help you on the path of lightworking.

A good mantra for lightworkers during this time is: Simplify.

My personal experience of this process was challenging but not nearly as bad as some people have had it. I came to this path very gradually over a period of many years. What I still find challenging is keeping the lower energies from coming back into my life and getting re-attached to them. Due to the nature of my work, I have a lot of people and ideas swirling through my life — feedback from readers, business opportunities, products to review, phone calls to return – all at varying levels of consciousness. Some of these ideas are very authentic; others are clearly coming from a place of fear or greed. It’s tough to keep some of the lower energies from sticking to me. What actually helps me most is writing about them and sharing these challenges. That serves as a way for me to loosen those attachments and raise my thoughts back up again.

Incidentally, if you think the word energy is too new-agey, don’t get hung up on it. I use the term to refer to anything in that has a consciousness-altering effect on your thinking, including people, places, experiences, objects, and activities. If spending time with one person makes you feel depressed, while another person makes you happy, we would say that the first person is of a lower energy than the second. The word energy is just a way of describing how people, places, and circumstances affect your thinking.

Once the lightworker has shed enough of the old energies, new energies can be invited in. This means making new friends, pursuing new work, and basically creating a different type of life. It’s also possible to shed lower energies while adding higher energies at the same time (like dropping negative friends while replacing them with positive ones). I think it’s a bit harder to do this, however, since the lower energies often prevent you from attracting the higher energies (i.e. bad relationships repel positive new relationships, a stressful job prevents you from committing to a more empowering career).

If you find yourself going through this process, try not to get stuck. If you feel that your life is filled with incompatible energies that are dragging you down, consciously shed them. Even if you have to drop down to a pretty bare bones lifestyle, it’s worth it. Once you’ve shed the old energies, you’ll probably feel better, but you’ll have a desire to crank up the volume again on the other side. That’s when you need to reach out and start adding new elements to your life that resonate with lightworking.

If you’re intimidated by how overwhelming this process of change can be, take baby steps. One of the first things I did was to box up all the old books on my bookshelf and replace them with new books that were more consistent with my new path. At first my bookshelf was mostly empty. Now it’s overflowing. A few small steps like this can help reinforce your new direction.

Do something each day to shed lower energies and replace them with higher energies. Change the posters or pictures on your walls to ones that really inspire you. Attend a new club meeting as a guest. Restock your kitchen with more conscious food choices. If you make some small change each day in the direction of lightworking, it starts to add up, and soon you’ll find yourself in a very positive environment that reinforces your new path.

Staying Connected

Since a lightworker sees everyone as being part of the same whole, sharing is an integral component of that path. Share the lessons you learn to help others make more conscious choices. Share encouragement and appreciation for others. Give yourself away.

I notice than when I draw back and don’t share as much, I feel disconnected from other people. When I start to open up and share again, that feeling of connected oneness with others returns.

It takes a certain mindset to connect openly and honestly with people. Communication can serve many purposes, but for a lightworker the primary purpose of communication is to elevate consciousness. Communication creates connection, and connection can be used to elevate consciousness. Connection brings a sense of wholeness and unity. For lightworkers this is a very blissful state.

Lightworkers really thrive in the presence of other lightworkers. They function well as a team. For example, Erin is a key member of my lightworker team. She and I both encourage the heck out of each other. We also help keep each other honest, and our relationship has a certain energy to it that attracts other lightworkers to us. If she feels down, she knows she can count on me to help bring her back up again, and vice versa.

The doing part of connection is to consciously reach out to others. On the one hand, lightworkers like to build a support structure around them to help them stay centered and energized. On the other hand, they also reach out to help and inspire others, either directly or indirectly.

Empowering Others

When you polarize on the side of light, you’re taking on a big responsibility. Your consistency will eventually drive a lot of energy into your life. Helping others is inspiring and motivating, at least once you’re actually doing it consistently and seeing results. It’s hard not to go big on this path if you really commit yourself to it.

Going big doesn’t mean building a huge enterprise, although it could manifest as one. Going big is an internal sensation. You start feeling really, really good, and your motivation to help people soars. Your connectedness becomes a key source of strength. Since you’re so motivated, taking action becomes much easier. You don’t have to drag yourself out of bed in the morning.

Interestingly, I find that when I’m writing or speaking or just conversing about personal growth one-on-one, I feel absolutely incredible. I love this kind of work so much, and it’s self perpetuating. The more I write, the more I want to write. But by doing something I enjoy, I also help other people. Today it’s hard to say whether my primary motivation is to feel good or to help others — they’ve essentially become the same thing.

A big issue for many lightworkers is being willing to embrace what I’d call a higher state of being. Lightworking is like taking a quantum leap to a new experience of living. Life takes on a very different quality than it does pre-polarization. When you follow the path of lightworking, it feels like your life’s tempo increases quite a bit. On one level life gets easier, so it isn’t hard to survive. But you compensate by taking on bigger challenges. The unwillingness to face those challenges often keeps would-be lightworkers from fully committing themselves. They allow fear to hold them back.

If you really want to engage in lightworking, you must be willing to upgrade the level of challenges you’re willing to face. This means taking on tasks and projects that go beyond your personal goals. You have to start plugging into bigger goals that will positively impact others. If all of your goals are personal, your motivation will be weak. When you tap into goals that affect lots of other people, your motivation will increase dramatically. Of course this only works if you stay connected to the people you want to help; if you disconnect from them, you’ll lose the sense of caring that would have deepened your motivation.

The Work of Lightworking

What does lightworking look like once you’ve gotten through the initial transition period and you’re now humming along?

The actual work can take many different forms. Basically you’re committing to a path of raising and expanding consciousness in yourself and others. Your motivation and drive come from your sense of connectedness, so it makes sense that your work involves other people.

The aim of your work is basically to raise everyone’s consciousness. This means helping people shift to higher states such as joy, love, compassion, and peace and away from lower states such as guilt, anger, depression, fear, apathy, and shame.

I can’t tell you what to do specifically because the path of lightworking requires that you make this decision for yourself. What can you do to raise consciousness?

Here are some examples of how you might physically express the path of lightworking:

• Communicating a message of conscious living through writing, speaking, music, video, and/or other media (this is essentially my approach)
• Building a business that performs a consciousness-raising service (even feeding people is helpful at shifting people away from lower states, so they needn’t worry so much about survival)
• Working for a lightworker-driven organization or enterprise (you don’t have to run the show to contribute)
• Helping to create more freedom in the world and ensure human rights (perhaps by volunteering or participating in government)
• Creating art, music, or other expressive forms that inspire and uplift people
• Teaching and educating people (as long as you’re teaching truth)
• Healing people (such as via modern or alternative medicine)
• Counseling or coaching people (lots of different forms of this)
• Raising highly conscious children
• Being a scientist or researcher and sharing your results (truth elevates consciousness)
• Being an explorer (discovering and sharing new truths)
• Being a whistleblower (exposing falsehood and corruption and raising awareness of problems, thereby bringing light to darkness)
• Conscious investing (investing in lightworking is also lightworking)

The above list is far from complete. There are countless ways to express lightworking on earth.

Your intention is important, but so is your effectiveness. If you have great intentions, but your work isn’t making much of a difference, you’ve probably chosen a poor medium for your message. Feel free to experiment with different outlets until you’re feeling a strong flow of energy going through your life.

For example, suppose you decide to express lightworking by creating beautiful handmade jewelry for people. If this is really the right path for you, your operation will do well. People will be inspired by your jewelry, feeling empowered when they wear it, and you’ll see a strong flow of referrals. But if you find that you’re struggling month after month, can’t pay your bills, and no one seems to care about your creations but you, then perhaps you’ve picked the wrong medium. Maybe you’re playing it safe instead of living consciously and courageously.

Courage

You’ll never succeed as a lightworker if you don’t build your courage. Courage is an essential part of this path.

Without sufficient courage there’s a tendency to fall back to a position that’s too timid for you. Perhaps you opt to work at a New Age bookstore when deep down you feel called to be an actor. Or maybe you start blogging because you’re afraid to start writing your novel. Give yourself a solid gut check. Have you been playing it safe? Or are you following the heart-centered path and pushing through your fears?

I know it’s hard to be brave. It’s hard to speak your truth when everyone seems to disagree with you. It’s hard to choose the path of conscious living when the world seems intent on seeing you live as a zombie (or as vampire bait). Every lightworker has to deal with such issues.

What helped me push through this resistance was facing the fact that my physical body will die someday, and for all I know, it could be today. A million people die on this planet every week. One of those weeks will be mine. One will be yours. I realized that if I wanted to live consciously, I had to live in such a way that I was ready to die each and every day. If I don’t feel ready to die, I know I’m doing something wrong. Specifically, that wrongness is the act of pushing my dreams and desires into the future, thereby stealing power from the present and driving myself into a lower state of consciousness. If I consider that today may be my last day on earth, I can’t give in to fear. I have to summon my courage to push through that fear.

Lightworking is a very challenging path. You can’t stumble into it by accident. It must be chosen consciously. Every day you must renew your commitment to raising consciousness instead of lowering it. Lightworking isn’t a perfect path. There will be plenty of obstacles, mistakes, and setbacks. What makes you a lightworker isn’t some external measure of success. What makes you a lightworker is your inner recognition that you have a choice to make and that you’re choosing this particular path deliberately, including its potential hardships.

© 2008 by Steve Pavlina.

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I recall a similar experience while running my computer games business. People would send me their ideas for new games, asking me what I thought the ideas were worth. Some wanted me to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) just to hear the idea because they were worried I might steal it. I still get a few NDA requests today. I simply disregard such requests. If people are paranoid I might steal their ideas, it’s best they keep the secret to themselves.

I generally tell people that their ideas are worthless. Good ideas are a dime a dozen, and even that price is too high.

Generating Good Ideas

Coming up with good ideas is easy. This includes ideas for new websites or businesses. Anybody can generate good ideas.

One technique you can use is to simply brainstorm a list. If you write down 20, 50, or 200 ideas for anything, chances are you’ll come up with a few gems. You probably have a decent flow of good ideas popping up at random times too, such as while showering or exercising. You certainly don’t have to be a genius to come up with good ideas.

Do you honestly suffer from a shortage of good ideas in your life? It’s more likely you have the opposite problem. If you had to decide between gaining 5 great new ideas vs. successfully implementing 5 ideas you already have, which would you choose? I’d much rather have the implementation.

If you truly feel deprived of ideas, you can get as many as you want for free. Just ask other people. Post some requests in the forums, and you should get plenty. In January I asked for suggestions for future 30-day trials and got more than 100 suggestions, far more than I could possibly implement. If you want more ideas, just ask around. A small percentage of those ideas will be useful.

The Value of Implementation

The real value of any creation is in the implementation, not the idea.

Do you really bemoan the fact that you didn’t think of some great idea before someone else did? Would it have made any difference if you did? You’re probably sitting on lots of great ideas that someone else is already implementing.

In the gaming industry, I saw several companies do quite well with ideas that were totally unoriginal. They succeeded because they had great implementation of those ideas. There are a lot of Galaga and Tetris clones on the market. I remember that many developers were disturbed by the success of these cloners.

I had an original game idea that I thought was pretty good, but it didn’t generate any income by itself. It just sat there on paper. It took months to turn it into an actual game, and the final product sold quite well. Some people assumed it was the idea that caused the game to sell well. No, it was the implementation of that idea.

Ideas are easy. Implementing ideas is hard because that’s where things get complicated. The devil is in the details. Turning something mental into something physical is often quite a challenge.

Sure there are exceptions, but even when people value ideas, solid implementation is still required to extract the value.

Making Ideas Concrete

Part of implementing an idea is making it more concrete, such as by creating a design doc or business plan. A structured document is more than an idea — it’s part of the implementation process. This is where you begin working out the practical details. If you do it correctly, this kind of work can really make you pull your hair out. But it also creates a lot of value.

For example, writing a 25-word, high-concept description for a new movie is pretty easy. Erin recently took a screenwriting class at UNLV, and she and I had fun cranking out several high-concept movie ideas in a matter of minutes. Even her instructor (an accomplished screenwriter) liked some of our ideas. But those ideas aren’t worth much by themselves. Turning an idea into a complete script is hard. Getting an agent is hard. Selling the script is hard. Revising the script is hard. Filming the movie is hard. Cashing the six-figure check is easy.

I usually have at least 100 good ideas on my “to blog” list. I add ideas to the list from time to time, and people send me more ideas every week, so the list never gets depleted. Keeping a good bank of ideas is trivially easy. Turning those ideas into helpful articles is the hard part. In the time it takes me to actually write one article, I could generate at least 200 new article ideas. It would take me about a year to implement the article ideas I could generate in a single hour. If these were books or computer games instead of articles, one hour of idea generation could occupy me with a lifetime of implementation.

Even when you’re dealing with flexible content like, software, music, or video, it still takes a lot of work to turn a high concept into something you can actually implement. A general idea for a new web service is largely worthless. But a few documents that include the technical requirements, market analysis, and high-level software and database design do have some value.

The more concrete your ideas become, the more valuable they are. The ultimate value, however, isn’t delivered until your idea is in some kind of physical form that can be shared. You might be able to find an intermediary who will carry your implementation the rest of the way, but you still need to take a few steps beyond the idea phase before such people will want to listen to you.

Focusing on Implementation

It’s easy to get stuck on the treadmill of idea generation (i.e. analysis paralysis), mistakenly assuming that ideas themselves have value. I often get caught in this trap myself. I keep trying to find more optimal solutions to problems when it would be faster and easier to just implement a mediocre solution and deal with the consequences. I have to remind myself that getting some value is better than none.

There are some situations where advance planning is critical, such as the $8 billion City Center project being built on the Las Vegas Strip (the most expensive private construction project in the world). If they screw up the construction, that’s a pretty costly mistake. For that kind of project, you have to make sure your plan is very concrete before you start pouring real concrete.

In many situations, however, mistakes can be easily corrected. If you make a mistake in building a website, you can reprogram it to fix the mistake. If you move to a neighborhood you don’t like, you can move again. If you get in a bad relationship, you can break up. If you quit a job and later regret your decision, you can find employment again. If you write a bad draft of your book, you can rewrite it. Sure there are consequences, but in many cases it’s not the end of the world if you jump to implement a half-baked idea. At least your implementation will still provide some value, and sometimes that’s good enough.

If perfectionism and obsessing over finding the right idea or the right approach keeps you paralyzed indefinitely, but you have a mediocre idea you could implement right now and start enjoying the results, that’s basically a no-brainer, isn’t it?

If you’re not sure if you’re stuck in the idea phase, give yourself a deadline to start implementing your idea, regardless of how good it is. Deadlines are a necessary evil in many creative fields like movies and game development. Creative people typically hate deadlines, but without deadlines they’d rarely finish anything. They’d remain stuck in an endless loop of pondering new alternatives. What you release may not be the perfect implementation, but at least you’ll get it out the door.

For example, my website has a fairly basic design. I put together something simple and functional in order to get the site launched without worrying about perfecting it. If I were starting from scratch today, I would have done a few things differently. That’s okay though. At least I got the site launched, and I was able to adjust course along the way. The value is being delivered. Lots of people will look at my site and say, “I’m sure I can create a better-looking site than Steve has.” I’m sure they could, but did they already do it, or are they stuck in the idea phase? Are they already enjoying good results?

If an idea doesn’t quickly lead to its own implementation, maybe it’s not such a great idea after all. Maybe you’re overcomplicating the idea to the point where it actually becomes demotivating. Can you define the idea in simpler terms, so simple that you can actually start working on it today?

If you implement a lot of so-so ideas that aren’t perfect, you’ll gain experience. You’ll probably learn a lot more than you would if you spent all your time perfecting ideas instead of taking action.

Action Time

If you find yourself lost in a sea of ideas while lagging behind on the implementation side, work to shift yourself to the action side and see what happens. One of my favorite techniques for doing this is to have Action Hours or Action Days. I set aside a block of time such as an hour or a day to do nothing but implementation.

To kick off this period of action, I create a quick Action List. An Action List is a specific type of to-do list. It doesn’t include any items that involve planning, high-level decision-making, communication, or discussion. Every item on the list must be geared towards moving some project forward to the point of value delivery. This means each item on the list must shift a task or project further along the spectrum from mental idea to physical action.

Once I begin working, I tackle tasks in order, and I don’t stop to second-guess myself. I trust that the decisions I made earlier are good enough. If things don’t work out so well, I can hopefully fix them later.

What good ideas are you sitting on right now? What can you do to shift one of those ideas from your imagination into physical reality? Do you realize that your very best ideas are worth less than a single mediocre idea you actually implemented?

In the forum discussion, consider sharing your best methods for moving from idea to action. How do you get yourself to implement your ideas? How do you know when you’re ready to move beyond the incubation period and start taking action?

© 2008 by Steve Pavlina.

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First, from a spiritual perspective, darkworking and lightworking are both paths to greater awareness, greater motivation, and greater power. Darkworkers and lightworkers are similar in many ways, their main difference being how they direct their focus and energy. Darkworkers direct the flow of energy inward, while lightworkers direct it outward. A darkworker consumes; a lightworker creates. Both are in alignment with forces of nature: push and pull, action and reaction.

However, from a physical, earthbound perspective, darkworkers can indeed have a destructive effect. They build their power by draining it from others. To a darkworker this form of destruction is a good and natural act. Harming another person is morally no different than eating a meal.

The Darkworker Mindset

Here’s another way of looking at it. What do you think about eating animal flesh? Does your conscience nag at you while your teeth rip into the flesh? Do you concern yourself with the animal that had to suffer and die for your gustatory pleasure?

To some people eating animals is viewed as a completely immoral act. It cannot be justified except perhaps when one’s own survival is truly threatened. To rob an animal of its life in order give yourself some momentary pleasure is an act of pure, unadulterated evil.

To other people eating animals is viewed as something completely natural. Animals are a lower species, so their needs are of no real consequence. Man is smarter and can easily turn animals into food, so therefore he might as well enjoy it. If a few billion animals suffer every year as a result, who cares? The point isn’t to torture the animals — just to gain pleasure by feasting on their tasty flesh. If an animal tastes good enough to be turned into food, it’s fair game. If it can’t defend itself, too bad.

Most people can probably relate to these different attitudes towards animals, regardless of which side they lean towards.

Now if you take those attitudes towards animals and apply them towards human beings, you basically get the lightworker and darkworker polarities.

To a true darkworker, the life of another human being is as inconsequential as the life of a food animal. The energy of other people is nothing more than a meal or a snack. If the darkworker drains or harms other people on the path to his goals, it’s considered no big deal. The darkworker has to eat, right? Other people are valued only in terms of their ability to bring the darkworker pleasure.

I realize that some people have a hard time imagining that anyone could think like this. The same lack of understanding comes up regarding people’s attitudes towards animals. Some people find it unfathomable that anyone could be so cruel as to reduce a chicken to a drumstick. Others have a hard time understanding how anyone could have feelings for an animal.

Most people aren’t polarized when it comes to animals, so they fall somewhere between the extremes. They’ll happily wolf down cows, pigs, chickens, and fish while regarding cats and dogs as beloved pets. If you ask them if they oppose animal cruelty, they might say yes… at the same time willingly funding the slaughterhouse as long as it brings them pleasure. They simply play follow the follower without really thinking through to a consistent philosophical position either way.

Most people aren’t polarized when it comes to human beings either. They’ll be kind to some people and apathetic towards others. They’ll verbally support one ideal while contributing to its opposite through their actions. They’ll claim to believe something is wrong (lying, cheating, hurting people, etc) and then do it anyway. They’ve never taken the time to push through to a consistent philosophy about how other human beings should be treated, or if they’ve tried, they don’t believe it strongly enough to actually implement it.

Lightworkers and darkworkers are people who’ve consciously chosen the extremes in their attitudes towards other people. The lightworker chooses one extreme. The darkworker chooses the other. Because the extreme philosophies are the simplest and most consistent, this choice gives both lightworkers and darkworkers a lot of power to generate results, more than most people are capable of. The notion that power increases with consistency is basically common sense if you give it a little thought. By power I’m not referring to power over other people; I’m talking about power over self here, including self-control and self-mastery.

Since most people aren’t polarized, they experience a mixed morality. That mixture reduces their power because the two polarities are incompatible. If you’re selfish but hold back because your conscience tells you to, you limit yourself. If you’re selfless but succumb to greed now and then, you also limit yourself. The purer you can be one way or the other, the greater the flow of power through your life. The most powerful people on earth are those who can express either fear or love as purely as possible, but not both.

The Darkworker Conscience

Most of us have been socially conditioned to believe that harming others for personal gain is evil. But to a true darkworker, whether others are harmed or not is largely irrelevant. Hurting others isn’t seen as a sacrifice. The conscience of a darkworker is very different from the conscience of a lightworker. To a darkworker, passing up the opportunity for personal gain would be regarded as evil or negligent. It’s like turning down a delicious meal.

The main frustration for darkworkers is that darkworking isn’t regarded as socially acceptable, so darkworkers must overcome a lot of social resistance to achieve their goals. Consequently, most would choose to keep their polarity secret, just as a hunter doesn’t advertise to all the animals in the forest that he’s coming to eat them. While honest with themselves, darkworkers are generally not open and honest with others about their attitudes towards people. Being honest just creates resistance in others and makes it harder for the darkworker to advance.

Are there really people on earth who think like this? Absolutely. Many of them are in positions of great power. Occasionally we see one of them fall from grace, taken down by whistleblowers with lightworker tendencies or perhaps undone by Darkworker Syndrome. Then we ask incredulously, “How could someone do such a thing?”

Do you really think scandals like Enron, the manufactured War in Iraq, or the sub-prime collapse are just the result of a few people exercising poor judgment? Hardly. Such occurrences are the modus operandi of darkworkers. To a darkworker the greatest good is to seek power at any cost. The only thing that holds them back is the fear of losing what they’ve gained. Darkworkers seldom regret what they’ve done, even after a major downfall. They do regret being caught. If they’re really committed, however, they’ll get back in the game and try again, this time more cautiously. Often the biggest problem for a powerful darkworker is being publicly exposed as such. Darkworkers aren’t ashamed of who they are, but they can get pretty upset when other people get in their way. Usually it isn’t lightworkers that expose darkworkers but rather other darkworkers.

Even though darkworkers tend to be a competitive lot, they often team up to achieve their goals when it makes sense, but they’ll turn on each other when it’s advantageous to do so. The perceived benefits must outweigh the bad blood they’ll create, however.

Sometimes darkworkers find themselves in a field where they have some freedom to express their true selves. They won’t do this to the general public, but they can be themselves with their darkworker buddies. For example, they may tell stories about the suckers they scammed in order to get ahead.

Are Darkworkers Evil?

Is a darkworker evil? From the perspective of a lightworker or from non-polarized people, you could say yes. From the darkworker’s perspective, there are basically two possibilities.

First, the darkworker might say, “No, I’m not evil. I’m pursuing my own good, which is the highest good there is.” Darkworkers are Machiavellian and expedient. They recognize that running over people is often more efficient than working with them. If you have to treat a human being like a slice of bacon now and then, so be it.

The second possibility is that the darkworker identifies with evil and consciously embraces that role: “I’ve decided to be evil, and I like it.” (See For Love of Evil.) In this case the darkworker identifies with the social consensus about evil and recognizes himself as having those qualities. However, he doesn’t see this as anything bad or problematic. Evil is equated with freedom and power. The darkworker views non-evil people as weak and sometimes stupid. If the darkworker identifies with the role of the villain, it’s because the villain is the smartest character in the game.

Either way the result is the same. The darkworker’s conscience is aligned with self-service as the highest possible good. Physical reality is a playground for the darkworker’s personal pleasure, and other people are merely tools to be used.

Making the Choice: Hero or Villain

Darkworking is a choice. It’s not a choice I’m willing to make for myself. Nevertheless, it remains an option for conscious growth. Most people never make the decision to polarize as a lightworker or darkworker in their entire lives… not with a real 100% commitment. But it’s only when this commitment is made one way or the other that real power begins to flow through one’s life.

In your life story, you can choose to be the hero, the villain, or an NPC (i.e. non-player character, someone passive who watches the story unfold from the sidelines). Most people live like NPCs, but the hero and the villain have far more power to direct how the story unfolds. There are lots of heroes and lots of villains in this story, but there are orders of magnitude more NPCs.

In the Rise of the Lightworker article, the main point was that an increase in the number of villains actually induces more NPCs to become heroes. In case you haven’t noticed, this planet is becoming increasingly polarized, meaning that more NPCs than ever are giving serious consideration to choosing sides.

If you don’t choose to be a hero, and you don’t choose to be a villain, then you’re an NPC by default. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being an NPC. Just be aware that if you’re an NPC, your fate is largely at the mercy of the heroes and villains. NPCs end up spending their lives riding the waves created by the heroes and villains, often serving one side or the other without realizing it. When you act from love, you help the heroes in this tale. When you act from fear, you serve the villains.

© 2008 by Steve Pavlina.

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I’m going to use the cell-in-a-body analogy to clarify the difference between two different kinds of people: lightworkers and darkworkers.

Both lightworkers and darkworkers are highly conscious. They each recognize the existence of the larger body of humanity, and they know their actions affect others for good or ill. Those who act without much awareness of how their actions affect the larger body (i.e. the vast majority of people) are neither darkworkers nor lightworkers. If you aren’t sure which one you are, it’s safe to say that you’re neither.

Lightworkers

A lightworker is a cell that believes its primary role is to serve the greater good of the body. It considers this task so important that it would even sacrifice its own life in such a pursuit if it thought it was necessary. This is because a lightworker identifies more with the larger body than with the individual cell it controls. Lightworkers see themselves as avatars of humanity (or spirit); the individual ego identity isn’t as important.

In order to be effective in its role, a lightworker cell must pay attention to its own health and survival to the degree that its continued existence benefits the body. It does what’s necessary to protect itself from anything that might disrupt its mission. It tries to preserve its well-being without harming the other cells, but when a lightworker encounters other cells that actively work against the good of the body, conflict can certainly occur.

Your own physical body works via a similar mechanism. If certain disease-producing cells get out of control and threaten the health of your body, your body responds by attacking those cells.

The lightworker’s duty is to serve the health of the body. Lightworkers strive for a healthy, sane humanity. They’re like white blood cells fighting diseases such as cruelty, apathy, depression, disempowerment, dishonesty, and cowardice. Such diseases damage the health of the body. The #1 disease lightworkers battle is fear. Wherever there is fear in the body of humanity, lightworkers are driven to respond.

One goal of many lightworkers is to stimulate the creation of more lightworker cells. This may happen directly, but more often it occurs by cultivating the conditions under which more lightworkers will be created. Because of the influence of lightworker cells, other cells become lightworkers as well.

It isn’t necessary for every cell in the body to become lightworkers. The body only needs enough lightworkers to counteract current threats to its health. You could say that collectively the lightworkers are humanity’s immune system.

Lightworkers are active cells, not passive ones. These aren’t people who sit around and meditate all day, although meditation may be part of their practice, especially during the transition period when the lightworker role is gradually accepted. Generally speaking, lightworkers aren’t people who spend their lives dressing in flowery robes and selling handmade jewelry. Lightworkers are people who make it their personal duty to get humanity back on track by countering fear, falsehood, and cruelty wherever they find it. They do this by bringing light to dark situations. They empower other people to shed fear and to be strong once again because strong, empowered cells yield a strong, healthy body.

A passive or inactive lightworker is an oxymoron — that would be equivalent to a white blood cell that ignores disease, saying to itself, “Not my problem.”

Darkworkers

A darkworker is a cell that denies all responsibility for the health of the body. The darkworker says, “I’m responsible for my individual life alone, and the rest of the body is merely a tool for achieving my own pleasure.” Darkworkers are essentially cancer cells. They have no qualms about damaging the body to further their own aims since the health of the body is of little consequence to them.

To a darkworker, most other cells are expendable. The other cells and the body as a whole are merely pawns of the darkworker’s pleasure. The darkworker’s rights and privileges are paramount, and human rights in the broader sense are irrelevant. A darkworker cares only for personal gain. The consequences to other cells are of little or no concern. Darkworkers have no empathy for what other cells experience. If others must suffer for the darkworker’s pleasure, so be it.

Darkworkers love power. Increasing their power is their primary aim, since that is the means through which they achieve more pleasure for themselves. Darkworkers commonly create and utilize methods that exploit others for personal gain. The suffering of others is meaningless. As long as the darkworker gets ahead, that’s all that matters. Darkworkers are very competitive. Winning for themselves is far more important than helping someone else. A darkworker only helps others to the extent that it furthers their personal agenda.

There are primarily two ways a darkworker will manipulate others: fear and greed. For example, if you work in a company that conditions and controls your behavior with fear-based incentives (threat of punishment or disciplinary action) or greed-based incentives (more money, power, authority), it’s a safe bet you’re a pawn of one or more darkworkers somewhere upstream. If such systems seem normal to you, you’ve been effectively brainwashed as a slave. You probably aren’t even aware of the high-level agenda you serve, since an intelligent darkworker won’t reveal it publicly. If you work for a darkworker, your real agenda is to increase the darkworker’s power, despite any flowery speeches or mission statements to the contrary.

Dishonesty and deception are popular tools of darkworkers. These enable the darkworker to build power while supposedly embracing other values. Most cells don’t question authority much, so darkworkers generally have an easy time building power if they’re semi-intelligent. If you don’t care what happens to other people, you can gobble up a lot of power, since most cells readily yield their power to any perceived authority. Darkworkers exploit this fact for personal gain.

By their actions darkworkers toxify the body of humanity, creating the conditions that give rise to more darkworkers. Darkworkers thrive in a climate of fear. Fear is the tool of their trade. The more fear they can create, the more powerful they can become. Fear creates willing and obedient slaves who submit to the will of the darkworker. Crafty darkworkers use deception to make submission seem like an intelligent choice. This approach can be quite effective. When fear is ineffective, darkworkers use greed instead.

The best darkworkers are often surrounded by armies of slaves who willingly sacrifice their freedom for a paycheck and a false sense of security. Fear and greed can’t control or motivate highly conscious people, but such methods work extremely well with those who’ve been conditioned to be slaves.

Darkworkers love obedience. In their fantasies they wish they could control or dominate other people. If you work in an organization where obedience is rewarded more than honesty, you’ve got a darkworker at the helm. It’s been said that obedience is the first milestone on the road to freedom. The person who said that was Adolf Hitler. Those who obeyed him gained greater control for a while but certainly not freedom.

While I personally would never choose to become a darkworker, there are human beings who have chosen this path deliberately. They’re well aware that their actions are destructive to the body, but they simply don’t care. They believe that self-service is the highest expression of their identity. They don’t identify with the larger body of humanity. It’s merely a tool to be manipulated at will.

I’m not quite doing darkworkers justice here because I’m admittedly lightworker biased. From the darkworker perspective, looking out for number one is seen as a common sense lifestyle choice. The world is viewed as a competitive place, so to a darkworker the strategy of self-above-others doesn’t create much of a moral dilemma.

The benefit of darkworkers is that they gradually help the body become stronger, just as getting sick can strengthen your immune system over time. Consequently, darkworkers can indirectly serve the greater good, as long as they don’t kill the body in the process.

The Body of Humanity

In the body of humanity right now, there is an unhealthy excess of darkworkers. The body’s health has been declining for a while, largely due to the influence of too many darkworkers in positions of power. The compromised health of the body is also damaging the health of individuals, causing many of them to feel disempowered, weakened, fearful, and depressed. Other times darkworkers directly kill off otherwise healthy cells.

Presently the political leadership of the USA consists largely of darkworkers. Simply listen to their words. They use lies and deception to push their agendas and to cultivate a climate of fear. This causes many people to feel disconnected from the larger body of humanity. Then those people drop into survival mode. Instead of focusing on service to the greater good, they fear for their own security. This is exactly what the darkworkers want. The more fear that’s generated, the more powerful the darkworkers become. When fear isn’t effective enough, greed is used as a control mechanism instead.

When someone opposes those powerful darkworkers, the darkworkers often respond with violent force to silence them to the degree they can get away with it. They use fear and intimidation to get new laws passed in order to increase their ability to silence opposition and to increase their power. This is not accidental. It’s very much deliberate. This is simply the modus operandi of darkworkers.

These darkworkers are not real leaders. A better word would be controllers. They’re only able to lead slaves who submit to control by fear. Highly conscious people see such darkworkers as agents of disease, not as genuine leaders.

In this climate of fear, more darkworkers are being created. More people are concluding, “Screw the rest of humanity. I’m going to live entirely for myself and get ahead as much as possible.” This further enriches the soil of fear and greed.

A protracted war, a down economy, and manufactured threats are great conditions for darkworkers to increase their power… not unlike the conditions in Germany when Adolf Hitler came on the scene. 9/11 was basically a modern day incarnation of the Reichstag fire, an excuse to curtail human rights with the promise of greater security. It’s unreasonable to expect such a situation to improve as long as darkworkers remain in power. Asking a darkworker to relax such controls is like a white blood cell asking, “Mr. Cancer Cell, would you kindly stop multiplying?” All you’ll get is a deflecting response at best.

So the basic problem we have right now is that darkworkers have been getting out of control. This problem hasn’t gone unnoticed by the larger body of humanity, and the immune system is kicking in rather strongly.

The Rise of the Lightworker

The collective consciousness of humanity is well aware of its condition. It knows the body is unhealthy and is headed downhill. It knows that left unchecked, the darkworker threat will take the body down with it. While this climate gives rise to more darkworkers, there’s also a strong counter-reaction on the rise. The presence of disease is triggering the body’s immune system to increase the white blood cell count. Those white blood cells are lightworkers.

The result is that many people are now hearing this call. It actually began decades ago, but it’s particularly strong today. The body of humanity is acting in its own defense by calling more and more lightworkers into action. Some people are born with this inclination, some have had it for many years, and others are currently waking up to it.

This call creates a feeling like, “Whoa… we’ve really gotten off track here. This isn’t how the world is supposed to be. Someone needs to do something about it. Damn… I think that someone is me. How the heck am I going to take on something so big?”

I suspect only a small percentage of readers will resonate with the statement, I think that someone is me. If you have a lot of fear and/or greed in you (which unfortunately most people do), you won’t likely hear this calling since it isn’t broadcast on those channels. But if you endeavor to move beyond the consciousness of fear and greed, eventually you’ll start feeling a vague inclination to do something “good” that helps the world in some small way. Over time that feeling will become stronger and more specific.

If you do hear such a calling, your first inclination will probably be to suppress it. I’d rather live in the matrix — life outside will be too hard. Go ahead and try if you must, but once you get the call, it’s too late for you. You’ll never be content living as a slave again, no matter how hard you try. You’ll feel more and more disconnected from other people who live like slaves. You’ll feel a strong desire to find your tribe (i.e. other people who can see what you are now seeing). The tugging of your conscience is the collective consciousness of humanity summoning you to act in its defense. Your duty is to be part of the solution. That duty cannot be ignored except to the extent you drown yourself in fear. The bright side is that you aren’t alone.

Do you have any sense of humanity’s call for help? How do you feel about the War in Iraq? How do you feel about China’s decision to systematically wipe out the Tibetan culture? How do you feel about a country governed by leaders who are caught lying repeatedly and who boast about their violent supremacy over those who oppose them? Do you feel this planet has gotten just a wee bit off course? Do you feel a sense of personal responsibility to do something about it?

If you don’t hear any special calling and have no real concern for the larger body of humanity, or if you don’t feel personally compelled to do anything about it, then just keep diligently working on your own personal growth. The body will summon you when it has need of your services. If it summons you, it knows you’re strong enough to contribute, even if you have serious doubts.

It’s been very exciting to see more lightworkers awakening to the sense of global responsibility. The transition can be very challenging, since it requires shedding so much of the past. It can be painful for people to watch their previous dreams implode, but this is necessary to make room for the much larger purpose ahead. The upside is that working on the goals of the larger body of humanity is much more rewarding than working on the goals of an individual cell.

© 2008 by Steve Pavlina.

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A life coach is someone you hire to help assist you with your personal development, especially in the area of setting and achieving specific goals. Typically this involves paying a few hundred dollars per month to speak with a trained coach by phone for 30-60 minutes per week. Pricing and service offerings vary tremendously. Your life coach may share advice, offer guidance, help you make plans, and hold you accountable for taking action. You can hire a health coach to help you with health and fitness goals (like a virtual personal trainer). You can hire a business coach to help you build or grow a business. You can hire a productivity coach to help you get organized and increase your productivity. Every life coaching situation is unique, so there’s a great deal of flexibility here.

At two different times in my life, I hired a life coach, each time for about six months. The first time was in 1993 while I was in college. The second time was around 2001 when I was running my games business.

Life coaching experience #1

When I hired my first life coach, I thought it might be useful in helping to increase my productivity. This coaching program began with a very thorough personality assessment test, so ostensibly the coach could use this info to make the coaching more personal.

My results with this particular coach were mixed. I hired him during the time I was going through college in 3 semesters, and I liked that he helped hold me accountable to getting certain things done. Unfortunately he decided to use my test results to try to improve what he considered some of my personality flaws, so he would sometimes coach me to work on his goals for me instead of my goals for me. Today this practice is largely considered unethical by the coaching community. Most coaches now know they must work on their clients’ goals, not their own goals for their clients. Some coach training and referral organizations have written standards of ethics to clarify this.

This particular coach wasn’t a great fit for me. He wanted to mold me into a more well-rounded person, whereas my goal was to become sharper in a few key areas. For example, he determined that I needed to improve my social skills, so he gave me assignments like, “Smile at 10 people today.” As a computer science and math major, I thought that was a stupid assignment, so I didn’t do it. I think his heart was in the right place, and later in life I did put some serious effort into developing my social skills, but as a coach it really wasn’t his place to set goals for me. This caused me to lose respect for him, and it made our relationship less productive than it could have been.

This coach worked as part of a larger coaching operation, and they had a very generous money-back guarantee. I paid about $900 for six months of weekly 30-minute phone coaching sessions. The guarantee was such that if you weren’t satisfied for any reason, you could get a full refund on your entire six months of coaching. That guarantee was one of the reasons I signed up; I figured I had nothing to lose. In the end I did ask for the refund, and to their credit they promptly refunded the full fee. I was excited about the coaching at first, and even at the halfway point it seemed like it was going somewhere, but in the end I realized it didn’t meet my expectations. I felt bad asking for the refund, but I would have felt worse if I didn’t. I did get some value from the six months of coaching, but it wasn’t worth $900 to me, and the terms of the guarantee made it clear that I should have been delighted, not disappointed. On a scale of 1-10, I’d rate this coaching experience a 4.

Life coaching experience #2

The second time I hired a coach was during a period when my games business, Dexterity Software, was growing nicely. I thought it would be good to have a coach to help me sort through all the projects on my plate and to solve some tricky problems.

This time I hired an independent coach instead of going with a larger organization. Most independent coaches offer a free session (try before you buy), so you can decide if they’re a good fit for you. I tried 3-4 different coaches and picked the one I liked best. I paid $70 per 60-minute weekly phone call. I also had the opportunity to do simple follow-up emails with this coach throughout the week.

I liked this coach, and I was happy with the service he provided. He was an experienced programmer like me, but he was also a very right-brained person. He taught me some creative problem-solving and visualization techniques. He was also very intuitive, so he would often detect the unspoken problems behind my spoken words. This made our conversations very efficient because he was able to get to the core issues quickly. We worked mostly on business challenges but also on some personal goals. My sales increased during this coaching period, so that was certainly nice.

This coach especially helped me understand the importance of intuition in business. When I first came to him, I was extremely left-brained, and he helped me integrate more right-brained qualities into my decision making. In the long run, this was very beneficial to me.

After about six months, I decided to discontinue our coaching, not because it failed but because it succeeded. This coach helped me achieve a higher level of performance, but after a while I was so familiar with his style that I didn’t need the weekly phone calls anymore. Eventually the law of diminishing returns kicked in.

On a scale of 1-10, I’d rate this coaching experience an 8.

I should also mention that this second personal coach was in the same time zone as me, but the first one wasn’t. Being in the same time zone made it easier to schedule appointments. Usually we’d speak at the same time every week, but that wasn’t always the case.

Life coaching lessons

Life coaching can work nicely. The skills and ideas you gain from your life coach may endure well beyond the paid coaching period, so you aren’t just paying for your time on the phone or for short-term benefits. Ideally you’re paying for a permanent shift to a higher level of performance. For example, if a life coach can help train you to become an early riser, that gain is yours for life. Even though good life coaching isn’t cheap, the results can easily make it worthwhile.

When it comes to selecting a life coach, it’s important to shop around to find someone compatible. You want a coach you like and respect. You want a coach that is knowledgeable and experienced. And you especially want a coach that will help you achieve the results you desire. This doesn’t necessarily mean hiring a coach who’s just like you, only better. It may mean hiring someone who’s very different from you.

When you identify some coaches that seem like a good fit for your needs and your budget, request a free trial session. I don’t recommend hiring a coach who doesn’t offer a free trial session — it’s too much of a gamble. Try several different coaches until you find one you feel confident will help you. If the free trial leaves you feeling doubtful or hesitant, definitely pass.

After the free trial session, ask yourself, What do I honestly expect will happen if I hire this coach for several months? Pay attention to your honest predictions. If you don’t think you’ll achieve your desired results, you probably won’t. If you’re excited that this coach can surely help you succeed, that’s a good sign.

Understand that a coach is your helper, not your boss. You must be the one to decide what you want out of each session. You’re always in command. My coaches began their sessions by asking, “What would you like to work on today, Steve?” It was up to me to share my goals, challenges, and problems and to request help where I felt I needed it.

If you aren’t clear about what you want to work on, a good coach can help you gain clarity and set new goals. Just be sure that the emerging goals are your goals, not your coach’s goals for you.

Life coaching relationships are usually short-term. Partly this happens due to saturation. Eventually you become so familiar with your coach’s style that your coach isn’t challenging you as much, or perhaps you’ve achieved the major goals you wanted to achieve, such as losing a certain amount of weight or starting a business. On the other hand, greater familiarity can also create a stronger bond that increases accountability. You’re less willing to disappoint your coach by dropping the ball. You’ll have to decide if your coaching is generating sufficient results to justify the ongoing costs.

If I were to work with a life coach again, 6-12 months would probably be my limit with any one person, and 12 months really seems like a stretch. The exception would be if that person was growing and improving very rapidly, always learning fresh ideas and techniques that could be applied to our coaching sessions. Otherwise it’s like taking classes with the same teacher year after year — you eventually reach the point where you’ll grow faster by learning from someone new.

Life coaching can be especially fruitful for self-employed people and independent professionals. When your income is performance-based, a good coach may be able to help you boost your performance at least enough to pay for the coaching. I’d say that was true for my second coaching experience. I paid about $300/month for the coaching, but I ended up boosting my income by many times more than that.

If you have your own business, and you hire a coach to help improve your business’ bottom line like I did, you can deduct your coaching fees as a business expense. I was able to do this with my second coach but not my first. If you generate income from blogging, you should be able to justify deducting personal coaching if you blog about the experience as a service for your visitors or if your coaching experience benefits your business.

My first life coaching experience involved 30-minute sessions, but with my second coach they were 50-60 minutes each. I preferred the longer sessions. A 30-minute session would probably be okay for most people, but I had a lot of complex business issues that took a while to work through. Longer sessions are generally more expensive though.

How to find a life coach

Finding a decent life coach is fairly easy. Lots of independent coaches who’ve gone through formal training programs can be found online. One good site is FindACoach.com. That’s where I found my second coach. I don’t have any financial interest in whether or not you decide to hire a coach from there.

You can also find a coach via personal referral, but you’ll still want to get a free trial session. You need to determine if the coach’s style is compatible with your goals.

Many coaches specialize, so if you have a specific area you want to work on, consider hiring a specialized coach just for that area. For example, if you want to build or grow a business, you can hire an experienced business coach. Often these are people who worked in business for decades and then retired, later starting a coaching practice to share their hard-earned wisdom with others.

Why life coaching works

The main reason life coaching works is that you’re hiring someone with greater experience than you in a certain area. Your coach can quickly identify patterns that may not be clear to you. Then your coach can help you devise and implement solutions. When this works well, it’s a very high-leverage relationship. It’s one of the fastest ways to solve challenging problems. Businesses often hire outside consultants to help solve important problems, and life coaching is basically the individual equivalent of business consulting.

While I’ve never done any formal paid coaching myself, I’ve done plenty of informal coaching sessions with friends and family members and also online with visitors to this site. In addition to my own growth experiences, I’ve read about 1,000 personal development books, I’ve communicated with thousands of people regarding their growth challenges, and I’ve talked with many others who work in this field. Consequently, I have a lot of experience recognizing patterns. There are many problems people are working on that I’ve (1) already solved, or (2) know how to solve in a variety of different ways.

Similarly, a good life coach will have superior knowledge and experience in the area(s) in which you want to improve. A coach can use all of this expertise to help you solve specific problems efficiently. This is essentially a variation on the principle of overwhelming force. A problem that may seem daunting to you might be a fairly simple matter for an experienced coach.

The real challenge of life coaching is for your coach to help you implement the solutions to your problems. Coming up with solutions is easy. Your coach will probably identify some good solutions during your free trial session. Implementing those solutions is the hard part. That’s where good life coaching really shines. Your coach can work as a guide to help you stay on track, leading you safely through the quagmire of mistakes, blind alleys, and delays.

When you work with a life coach, your coach’s mindset will gradually rub off on you. This is a great thing when you find a coach whose mindset already contains the solution to your problem. For example, this year I decided to become a raw foodist, and one thing that helped me achieve this goal was to communicate with other raw foodists, some of whom are professional raw food coaches. Through osmosis I gradually adopted enough of the raw food mindset to make the change.

When to hire a life coach

A good time to hire a life coach is when you have a fair idea of what you want to be doing, but you’re having an unusually hard time getting it done. Perhaps it seems like you’re getting bogged down in obstacles instead of making steady forward progress. Also, you can imagine that there exist other people who’ve already solved your problem or at least know how to solve it. Would it be worthwhile to pay someone a few hundred dollars to help you solve this problem once and for all? Consider the lifetime benefits before you decide.

Perhaps the most important factor in successful life coaching is the willingness to change. If you aren’t willing to change, a life coach can’t force you to grow. You need some motivation and drive to work with a coach, something you care about deeply enough. Think about how the coach of a professional sports team would respond to an unmotivated, underperforming player. The coach might try some pep talks and motivational techniques, but if those don’t work, the player will likely be cut from the team, replaced by someone else who’s more motivated and driven to succeed. You must provide the drive, and your coach can help you steer toward your goals.

I don’t think it’s necessary (or wise) to use the same life coach indefinitely, but something in the range of 3-6 months can certainly generate some positive results. With a good coach, I’d say you should be getting noticeable results within the first month. If you’ve gone a whole month and have nothing to show for it, cut your losses.

Since I know people are going to ask me, I’m not personally interested in offering life coaching services. I enjoy doing occasional sessions with people I know, but formal one-on-one coaching doesn’t appeal to me right now. I think I can have a more positive impact through other media. While blogging isn’t as deep and personal, I know the articles on this site are effective at helping people, and I can reach a lot more people via blogging than I could ever reach via coaching.

If you think life coaching could be helpful to you, give it a try and see how it goes. If it doesn’t work out, you can always quit and try someone else.

© 2008 by Steve Pavlina.

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I first learned about the raw food diet in 1997, shortly after going vegan. Erin and I went to a vegetarian potluck one day, and someone there was eating a completely raw meal. Before then it just never occurred to me to try eating 100% raw. With no background info other than the bare idea, I decided to try eating raw for a while. I lasted only 3 days. I had no clue what I was doing, so I ate mostly salads. I wasn’t getting enough calories and was very hungry by the third day. I put the notion of raw food on the back burner for a few more years.

Down the road I did several other raw food trials with different variations of the diet, ranging from a few days up to 45 days in duration. The most recent was my 30-day trial of the raw food diet in January. I actually got the best health results from my first 30-day raw trial several years ago. That trial was the most balanced and varied one in terms of the types of foods I ate, but it also required the most work to maintain.

Mental Acceptance

I read a great deal about the raw food diet and agreed with the logic behind it. It made sense to me that it was simply healthier to eat food raw vs. cooked. I won’t go into those details here because the info is enough to fill a book. My personal trials backed up my reading, so that gave me further evidence that I should seriously consider going raw. There were only two things stopping me. First, I didn’t know how to make such a diet practical and sustainable. Secondly, I lacked the willpower to push through all the obstacles and make the change permanent. The notion of going raw for life seemed too overwhelming.

Because I could see that eating raw was a more intelligent choice than eating cooked food, I knew that my path of growth would eventually lead me to adopt a 100% raw diet. Five years ago if you asked me if I’d eventually become a raw foodist, I’d probably have said, “Yes, I expect I will at some point.” I didn’t know how long it would take, but I thought I’d eventually discover how to make it work.

Overcoming Obstacles

Little by little I picked away at the obstacles of ignorance and lack of experience. I kept reading and experimenting. I bought raw food cookbooks and tested many different recipes to discover raw meals that were (1) easy to prepare, (2) delicious, and (3) satisfying. I had to learn a whole new set of dietary staples. This was very difficult because it meant abandoning favorite foods I’d been eating for years. While going vegetarian and vegan were significant changes, going from vegan to raw was by far the biggest and most radical change dietary change I’ve ever made.

It took many years to overcome all those obstacles. The biggest step was doing my 30-day trial in January. That was the most restrictive form of the raw diet I ever attempted. I eventually realized that if I could manage to eat like that for 30 days and feel generally better, I should be able to permanently switch to a less severe version of the raw diet. While it wouldn’t be perfect, it would be enough to finally get me across the cooked-raw border.

Dealing with Social Issues

One of the major challenges with dietary change is that the direction of improvement takes you far away from average because the average diet is pure crap. This creates a risk of disconnecting from other people as you continue to grow in order to avoid succumbing to social drag.

Here’s how I look at this situation. If I eat a crappy diet in front of other people, I’m subtly encouraging them to do the same. That does a real disservice to people who share a meal with me. I don’t want to be the kind of person who lowers the standards of everyone I eat with (or who reinforces pre-existing low standards).

If I put myself in the position of eating a healthy diet when I’m with other people, then I subtly influence them to improve their own eating habits as well. I don’t need to discuss what I’m eating to have this effect — I know from experience that it happens automatically. Try it for yourself by sharing a meal with someone whose diet is much healthier than yours, and see if you don’t feel slightly more motivated to make some improvements. We&#