I Can Do It! Conference Review (Blog)

[Savage]

Use this thread to discuss the following entry from Steve Pavlina's blog:

I Can Do It! Conference Review

[impaul99]

Wayne Dyer... Laid back, wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and barefoot... .yup, sounds about right.

[DanielBrenton]

Good review. A little peek "behind the curtains" for what it was like for a presenter.

I have to agree about Dr. Dyer. The "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them" paradigm seems so deeply ingrained in how ideas (and stories) are presented (in our culture, at least) that for someone to not keep that in mind strikes me as a bit of an oversight.

[Dan.Linehan]

Sounds like everything went really well! Congrats you two, on the conference being such a success. Especially on the standing ovation. Wow!

I want to know what the psychic experience was though! Tune in next time..

[carenkh]

Steve! Thanks for your review.

The Dragon Doesn't Live Here Anymore was one of the first "new age" books I read, when it was first published in 1990. I was speaking with a friend, and told him, "I was just singing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' to my nephew, and it hit me that life really is just a dream!" He said, "You're ready for this now" and handed me that book.

Alan is so joyous in his writing, and it was at a workshop of his that I realized what I wanted to do more than anything at that time was mother my then one-year-old son. Accepting that is what led us to unschooling and consensual living, which has, in turn, led to even greater self-inquiry and growth, and depth of life.

Reading that you met him -- and sat on a panel with him! -- is like something coming full circle for me. What a journey!

I'm appreciative of everything you've done, Steve, and it's no surprise to me that you got a standing ovation. I'm excited to see what your next step will be!

[Sentient]

I'm really not going to win popularity points by posting this in *your* forum, but I thought the post was needlessly long and pretty self indulgent. If the point of a review is to give other people an idea of what it's like so as to inform their decision making, then there was very little in there that accomplished that goal. If the goal was more to be a journal entry or diary, then I think it hit closer to the mark, but probably belonged among your personal offline writing. Ironically, the one thing I would have been fascinated reading about, your "intense psychic experience" at the end, is the one thing you left out! The fact that the Palazzo/Venetian have two Grand Lux Cafe's is a perfect example of what could be axed. It has no relevance to 99%+ of your readers.

Also, I agree with Steve that I am not particularly inspired by the change to laptop bag designing, but man, do you really need to write that in a public forum that gets 2million views a month or more? I thought that was pretty cold. The woman is really proud of what she did and she got up on a stage to share the experience. Shouldn't she be exempt from criticism especially given that criticism is unlikely to yield positive outcomes? If you think about potential upside and downside, what do you gain from expressing this opinion and what does someone else stand to lose?

[Phill]

I am enjoying the review and find even the small details interesting! Only about half way thru it. Other's reports are great too.

Although, isn't there what might be called an oxymoron here?

"I decided to go for a walk along the Strip at 5:15am to get some fresh air." That air could mess up the good of all that good food you eat, Steve.

Phil
Life from Phoenix

[tekomino]

Originally Posted by Sentient

Also, I agree with Steve that I am not particularly inspired by the change to laptop bag designing, but man, do you really need to write that in a public forum that gets 2million views a month or more? I thought that was pretty cold. The woman is really proud of what she did and she got up on a stage to share the experience.

Yeah I thought that wasn't thoughtful at all. I guess she would fair better if she was getting rich by telling other people how to get rich

[Savage]

We were told during Dr. Dyer's speech that the laptop bags were being sold in the back of the room, so it struck me as an incongruent sales pitch inserted into the speech. If this was a tech conference, no problem, but IMO it just didn't fit with the speech or the conference. I'm sure he was just trying to help out his daughter, but I don't think this was a good way to do that.

This isn't the first time Dr. Dyer has brought one of his children on stage with him to pitch their products. Sometimes it fits; this time I felt it didn't. When his daughter Skye went up to sing at a previous conference, I thought she was great, and I bought one of her CDs afterwards. Her singing meshed well with the message. But selling laptop bags is a bit of a stretch IMO. I thought it brought down the energy of the room. I'd rather have seen Dr. Dyer talk about his own books/products.

I guess the point is that if you're going to insert an ad into a speech, the ad should be context-sensitive.

[Radog99]

I would agree with Sentient that the ICDI post did seem to have a decidely first person-type slant, as opposed to the more "objective" reviews of conferences past. But I guess that is to be expected since Steve was actually a speaker this time, right?

I think what Sentient was trying to express is that like many others, he/she enjoyed the previous style, which covered the individual speaking presentations more thoroughly and in-depth.

On another note, it must have been a tremendously gratifying experience to find yourself on that stage inspiring people the way you were once inspired through that very same medium. Now that is what I call personal growth!

[Savage]

In the past we reviewed the conference as bloggers with press passes. But this year the context wasn't the same since I was attending as a speaker/author, and Erin was my guest. We missed the keynotes by Marianne Williamson and Gregg Braden, which I heard were excellent. We also missed some of the breakout sessions. So it didn't make sense to write the same kind of review as we did in 2006 and 2007.

[MasterD]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

We were told during Dr. Dyer's speech that the laptop bags were being sold in the back of the room, so it struck me as an incongruent sales pitch inserted into the speech. If this was a tech conference, no problem, but IMO it just didn't fit with the speech or the conference. I'm sure he was just trying to help out his daughter, but I don't think this was a good way to do that.

This isn't the first time Dr. Dyer has brought one of his children on stage with him to pitch their products. Sometimes it fits; this time I felt it didn't. When his daughter Skye went up to sing at a previous conference, I thought she was great, and I bought one of her CDs afterwards. Her singing meshed well with the message. But selling laptop bags is a bit of a stretch IMO. I thought it brought down the energy of the room. I'd rather have seen Dr. Dyer talk about his own books/products.

I guess the point is that if you're going to insert an ad into a speech, the ad should be context-sensitive.

I once saw a video where Wayne Dyer was talking about one of his daughters struggling with addictions. I thought; how on earth can the so called 'father of motivation' raise a daughter that struggles with addictions?

I think Wayne Dyer is a phenomenal guy; but he also misses something. I think he has lost some ground with the normal earthly life and thinks too much in terms of all the spiritual stuff.

Same with guys like Eckhart Tolle; they have all the peace in the world, but their entire focus is on getting more 'peace'. There is more and if you disregard it you will miss out on life and probably raise a daughter that can't handle herself very well in society. I think Eckhart Tolle could significantly improve his 'spiritual experience' if he would engage more in exciting and social activities and gets more in touch with his masculine core.

Though, still looking forward to read Wayne Dyer's new book Change your thought's, change your life and Eckhart Tolle's books are still my all time favourites; but I guess you have to be aware that they haven't 'figured it out' yet either.

[Savage]

You don't have to be perfect to help people. You just need to be willing to share a positive message.

One thing I love and respect about Dr. Dyer is that he doesn't try to be perfect. He incorporates stories about his personal failings and setbacks. At the conference he talked about overcoming his drinking habit -- he used to consume alcohol every single day and hasn't touched any in 20+ years.

I think people are more inspired by imperfect speakers than by those who appear too perfect. If any of us were perfect, we wouldn't be here.

[MasterD]

I think that is one of the issues that I became aware of. When I first started reading PD I thought 'these people know it all' (however they don't claim it). That's something I have overcome pretty much now and the only one I can really rely on in the end is myself. Everybody has to make the judgements for themselves (that's what they share :-)).

I think Wayne Dyer shares a great message and I love to listen to him. However, I am just wondering, how can a man as Wayne Dyer with such wisdom still have such things going in his personal life, I would expect he would have figured out these basics (like knowing how to raise your children to give them the self-confidence that they don't get addicted to substance abuse).

Lol.. one story he told about his daughter that she asked him "I heard at school that you teach people how to raise their children; tell me that isn't true!"... At least he is totally honest about it :-).

[Savage]

Pretty much every time I see Dr. Dyer speak, he tells stories of his children poking fun at him or even ragging on him for his parenting decisions. I've seen no evidence that he tries to pass himself off as perfect (or even an expert) in that area.

[Holistic Star]

I liked the review. Yes it was different from the others but it was nice to see a few days in the life of Steve and Erin.

I'm so pleased you've met David Hamilton. He was speaking at a small event I attended in the UK last year (about 30 people). I really liked him. His experiements in proving the power of intention are really interesting and he speaks and presents really well.

John Demartini says that your children reflect the denied parts of yourself so while he goes around teaching love and gratitude to millions, his son is singing the exact oposite in Death Metal lyrics in a band! It doesn't make him a bad teacher.

[tekomino]

You clean your house first, before going out to find dirt in someone else house.

Your children are reflection of your true teaching. You are a fake if your children grow up unbalanced while you teach everyone else how to be good parent, live a good/better life, achieve something etc...

[Fullcrum]

Hey Steve! Sounds like an awesome time you had! I didn't know you met forum members just like that - that must be pretty cool to put faces to the people you talk to online.

[Sentient]

Originally Posted by tekomino

You clean your house first, before going out to find dirt in someone else house.

Your children are reflection of your true teaching. You are a fake if your children grow up unbalanced while you teach everyone else how to be good parent, live a good/better life, achieve something etc...

Not so sure about that. Some pretty traumatic things can happen out of the household. Though if we want to be geeky about it I'm sure parenting does have a high r^2 value and is probably the most important variable. I know for me personally though my biggest failures and successes have not been precipitated by my family. I am lucky that they've always been loving and supportive enough that I had the ability to pull myself back up on my own once I fell down, so I suppose even there you're right. Still, I hear from my family sometimes that I must've been switched at birth!

I have heard a few people stress the importance of ideas and the fact that great ones can come from any source or person. I really really like this. Experts don't possess sole dominion over great ideas, and they also can possess a lot of pretty bad ones. I mean, the title expert isn't a like a lightswitch and you don't go common to expert overnight. It's always a learning process and I don't think anyone has really got it all figured out.

In fact, I almost prefer to get advice from slightly flawed people because it avoids the whole cult of the individual that often springs up around impressive gurus. Eventually people stop being critical and just accept it because Guru X said it. If I know I have to wade through the good and bad, at least I can be assured I won't fall asleep at the switch and allow an idea through that doesn't deserve it. To be honest, it's a bit why I decided to make a post that knocked Steve a bit at the beginning of this thread. I figure the criticism is more valuable to him than the ocean of praise that he (deservedly) gets.

[Sentient]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

We were told during Dr. Dyer's speech that the laptop bags were being sold in the back of the room, so it struck me as an incongruent sales pitch inserted into the speech. If this was a tech conference, no problem, but IMO it just didn't fit with the speech or the conference. I'm sure he was just trying to help out his daughter, but I don't think this was a good way to do that.

This isn't the first time Dr. Dyer has brought one of his children on stage with him to pitch their products. Sometimes it fits; this time I felt it didn't. When his daughter Skye went up to sing at a previous conference, I thought she was great, and I bought one of her CDs afterwards. Her singing meshed well with the message. But selling laptop bags is a bit of a stretch IMO. I thought it brought down the energy of the room. I'd rather have seen Dr. Dyer talk about his own books/products.

I guess the point is that if you're going to insert an ad into a speech, the ad should be context-sensitive.

I forgot about the handbag pitch during the speech. That *was* in poor taste. I liked Dyer's message a lot during that keynote, but I think he was actually my least favorite speaker because he seemed the least congruent. Being completely unfamiliar with his work, I wondered why people liked him so much because he came off quite self aggrandizing to me during that speech (celebrity name dropping, quoting the $ amount of his endowment, armani suits for the homeless, random mention of giving money to his ex-wife when saying he sold his house, etc).

[Sentient]

Originally Posted by MasterD

I think that is one of the issues that I became aware of. When I first started reading PD I thought 'these people know it all' (however they don't claim it). That's something I have overcome pretty much now and the only one I can really rely on in the end is myself. Everybody has to make the judgements for themselves (that's what they share :-)).

I think Wayne Dyer shares a great message and I love to listen to him. However, I am just wondering, how can a man as Wayne Dyer with such wisdom still have such things going in his personal life, I would expect he would have figured out these basics (like knowing how to raise your children to give them the self-confidence that they don't get addicted to substance abuse).

Lol.. one story he told about his daughter that she asked him "I heard at school that you teach people how to raise their children; tell me that isn't true!"... At least he is totally honest about it :-).

Last post I promise I seem to disagree with a lot of people so just throwing my 2 cents in to say thank you for your thoughts and ideas. I think a lot of them in this thread have been really great.

[impaul99]

I thought the review was good. I realize it was written almost like a journal entry and not an "objective" review of the conference itself, but I think that's what I liked about it the most.

Why? Because as someone who's on a similar path as Steve (just a few years behind), the whole time I was reading the review I was thinking "Is this what you want?".

Meaning, the review gives me a great model to follow for visualizations if I decide to follow the path of becoming a published author / speaker etc.

There aren't a lot of other places you can read about what it's like to get published, what's required of you, what the beginning steps are, etc. For example, I had no idea that as a speaker they would slap makeup on you. I mean it makes sense, but you never think of these things.

Great post Steve, thanks.

[Savage]

FYI there's generally no makeup for speaking engagements. The makeup was for a roundtable discussion panel that was being videotaped by 3 cameras and later for a photo shoot. The main purpose is to reduce the glare.

[Andreas]

I really enjoyed this writeup! It's nice to see the transparency, and it makes me that much more excited for the book!

Oh, I almost forgot, when can we expect a post about your psychic experience? That's the biggest cliffhanger you've ever left us with, Steve!

[The Wise Turtle]

"I don’t know of anyone else in this field who has attempted to uncover the deepest underlying principles from which all positive growth arises."

I am! :-)

I've based my work on Maslow's hierarcy of needs (for healthy development) moving from survival, to success, to transcendent stages, and Spiral Dynamics and Ken Wilber's AQAL. I'm curious to see how your theories correlate to these others, and will definitely try to get a copy of your book when it comes out.

The pattern I see for all life (including the "artificial" life of inorganic growth) is motivated by the inherent questions:

1. Who am I?
2. What can I do?
3. Who are you?
4. What can we do together?

And then the whole sequence repeats with a new, larger, more whole being that wonders what it is, what it can do, and so on...

And what we need as we seek the answers to those four Universal questions, are:

1. Energy Balance - input and output of the various types of energy (heat, light, oxygen, water, food, sensory stimulation)

2. Freedom - opportunities to make deciscions what to do with oneself and to express oneself

3. Community - a diverse range of other healthy individuals to observe

4. Leadership - opportunities to work with and help others

These terms I use here are all fairly human centric, as I've found that the human-centric language tends to be more meaningful to the sorts of individuals reading stuff on the internet. (If any non-humans are reading this, let me know what terms might be more meaningful to you!) But the basic pattern of growth can be more generally described as:

1. Contraction into self.
2. Expansion of self.
3. Contraction into other.
4. Expansion of other.

For some pretty pictures, you can see some of this work here: Human Hierarchy of Needs, and the Spiral Growth theory.

And on a slightly different note (though pretty much right at the bottom of the hierarchy of needs!), I''m glad the conference had a lot of raw food. In my experience "doing it" is a heck of a lot easier with whole fresh living food nourishing your mind, and the rest of your body. :-)

Peace, Love, and Bicycles,
Turil

[Savage]

Originally Posted by The Wise Turtle

1. Energy Balance - input and output of the various types of energy (heat, light, oxygen, water, food, sensory stimulation)

2. Freedom - opportunities to make deciscions what to do with oneself and to express oneself

3. Community - a diverse range of other healthy individuals to observe

4. Leadership - opportunities to work with and help others

Based on your description, energy balance arises from the principle of love (connecting to various energy forms). But some of the examples you give aren't universal. For example, you won't need food or water after you're dead, so this sounds more like application that's rooted in the physical universe and less like a universal principle of consciousness.

Freedom derives from the principle of power.

Community derives from the principle of oneness.

Leadership derives from the principle of authority.

There are some important gaps in your model, however, such as a means of discerning truth from falsehood.

[The Wise Turtle]

Thanks for your thoughts Steve, those forms of energy are simply the examples I gave. Each individual has different, unique, needs for a sense of wholeness as an individual. Living and biological things have different needs from non-living and non-biological things. And, once a biological entity is dead, it no longer is whole. Entropy is the opposite of wholeness. Which is why I say that all of the four stages of growth are a form of love, since they all contribute to creating more wholeness.

And you're absolutely right, my theory does have gaps, from what I can tell all models of reality (theories) can never be absolutely complete and must have gaps. If it were a complete map of reality, it would be reality itself. :-)

I'm intrigued by your comment about a model of consciousness, and not just physical nature. I'm curious as to your own theories about including it in a theory. I myself do include consciousness in my model and call it the "emotional" realm (though some might equate it with the part I call the "intellectual" realm or maybe even the combination of the two, depending on how you define "consciousness"), and it refers to the combination of matter and energy, where awareness lies.

And I saw those other relationships (freedom = power, community = oneness, and leadership = authority) as well. There are an almost infinite number of ways to describe these most elementary ideas, aren't there? Seeing how similar things that on the surface seem so different are at a deeper level is one of my favorite pastimes!

I'm definitely still very much interested in discovering more of these patterns, so I'm definitely interested in feedback, and yours was most useful for leading me in another direction. So, yes, thanks muchly.

Peace, Love, and Bicycles,
Turil

[The Wise Turtle]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

...a means of discerning truth from falsehood.

Steve, what do you mean by this? From what I can tell, judgment is an inherent trait of consciousness. Something that we, by our very nature, do, whether we want to or not! :-)

Do you think judgment is a motivation that we have to get externally? Do you think we're not born with the ability to decide what works and what doesn't work?

In my experience with non-attachment, impermanence, and the idea that our brains work via metaphors, the dichotomy of "true/false" has been less important to me than the dichotomy of useful-to-me-right-now/not-useful-to-me-right-now.

Peace, Love, and Bicycles,
Turil

[Savage]

The ability to discern truth is an aspect of consciousness, but it's also a skill. Clearly some people have developed this aspect of their consciousness more than others. Some people can invite and accept a great deal of truth into their lives (including unpleasant truths), while others succumb to falsehood and denial more often than not.

The more truth you can accept into your life, the faster you'll grow as a conscious being. The more falsehood and denial that creeps into your being, the more you stagnate.

There are many blocks that hamper our ability to discern truth, including social conditioning, media conditioning, false learning, and secondary gain. Secondary gain is what happens when you get some kind of reward for clinging to falsehood, such as career advancement, money, or the preservation of a relationship.

[Bing Wu]

Hey Steve, that's the first time I've formally heard of the concept "secondary gain". Do you suppose you might write an entry about it? It's intriguing because it's the reason why I've made many of my own decisions, the same holds for a number of my friends who have referred to "golden handcuffs" as the reason why they can't abandon a situation that's not congruent with their true desires.