An Inspirational Week (Blog)

[Savage]

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

An Inspirational Week

[Angela]

You've known the Vitales for about a year, since 1999? You time traveler, you!

[Kathe76]

Originally Posted by Angela

You've known the Vitales for about a year, since 1999? You time traveler, you!

Ya I was wondering about that also! This reminds me of an exercise I did once. Basically you give yourself permission to do something before you do it. Keeps you in the now. Seems to be what you are doing in a sense. FUN!! Like Yes Man!

[Savage]

Damned typo gremlin...

I WILL kill him!

[Angela]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

Damned typo gremlin...

I WILL kill him!

I can hear the inspiration!

[Zach M]

Great article, Steve. I can feel the changes you are describing.

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

Thanks for sharing that, Steve. I figured you were used to criticism. Well, you've got a ton of friends here.

Wish me luck!

Good luck with your 30 Day trial!

ps. I can't resist, or don't want to: Nice avatar, Kathe76.

[AGBourne]

Joe explained how he creates this content, which I recognized as essentially the same approach I use. When an inspired idea comes to be, I act on it almost immediately. I know that I have about a 48-hour window — maximum — to write and publish that idea. Otherwise the energy is gone.

The experience is like catching a wave. I might wake up one morning and get an idea for a new article, and I know I need to grab my laptop immediately and let it flow through me. In those situations I can write about as fast as I can type.

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

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

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

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

Duh. Duh. Duh.

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

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

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

This alone is worth gold.

I never paid conscious attention on being inspired, but now looking back, so of my best ideas and projects that I finished came from a short burst of inspiration that I took action on immediately.

This article came at the right time for me. Synchronicity? I believe so.

[supertom]

I am your inspiration, resistance is futile, you will go with the flow.

[Cochonette]

Originally Posted by Angela

I can hear the inspiration!

lmao, that entire post was full of typos.

Steve, that is a great idea. I kind of want to do that trial now... but I also want to continue what I'm doing until I'm sure it's going to fail... I dunno, in a way it sounds perfect, but at the same time so wrong. I don't think I'm ready for it yet. I mean, I was just reading Master Your Workday Now! which tells me that I should NOT act on things so impulsively because it'll result in not finish anything that is truly urgent. Hmm... but maybe this is the kind of trial meant for someone who's... already mastered their workday now.

[Savage]

Originally Posted by Cochonette

lmao, that entire post was full of typos.

Steve, that is a great idea. I kind of want to do that trial now... but I also want to continue what I'm doing until I'm sure it's going to fail... I dunno, in a way it sounds perfect, but at the same time so wrong. I don't think I'm ready for it yet. I mean, I was just reading Master Your Workday Now! which tells me that I should NOT act on things so impulsively because it'll result in not finish anything that is truly urgent. Hmm... but maybe this is the kind of trial meant for someone who's... already mastered their workday now.

I happen to know the author of that book, Michael Linenberger. He's not a TLC member at present, but his g/f Marci Shimoff is. I ran into them at the airport when I first arrived, and we shared a 40-minute shuttle ride together.

Michael and I have talked about following the inspiration of the moment, although we only talked about applying it to writing at the time since that conversation happened before I started this trial. Michael was keen on testing the idea of inspired writing as well, but he hasn't had the chance to do so yet. I think he'll find it amazingly effective when he gets a chance to try it out. So for now, assume that the jury is still out.

As for the typos, I got a typo report from my pretty slave after the article was published, so I fixed about a dozen of them. It appears that the universe takes care of such problems with ease. I wasn't inspired to give it a very thorough proofreading pass at the time.

[carenkh]

Originally Posted by Cochonette

Hmm... but maybe this is the kind of trial meant for someone who's... already mastered their workday now.

I think that's it. I've been thinking about this a lot, because I've been going through a phase of not exercising my self-discipline... and the result has been chaos. I never really even thought in terms of setting goals, making an action plan, etc., until fairly recently; those were so far outside of my experience. I pretty much always went with the flow and while it brought me aspects of my life I love (unschooling, connected parenting, meditation, etc.), I was living at affect, rather than cause.

I believe Steve's vast experience with discipline will make (is now making) going with the flow much more effective than it would have been otherwise.

I was just re-reading Steve's articles on self-discipline (a 5-part series - Self-Discipline. ) and I was wondering how different they would be if you wrote them today. (One of the examples given is that you're married with two children.) I know the principles are still the same - acceptance and honesty for example - so I imagine not that much would change. Self-discipline is still self-discipline.

I really appreciate your sharing this with us, Steve. I'm feeling very tenderly toward you, a result of your vulnerability in the post I think.

Much love ~

[cacheborn]

Very interesting. I could feel the energy coming through.

Just yesterday, I was thinking if there are any personal growth people who have not gone through tough times. All the leading persons have remarkable stories to tell. I don't think that's just a coincidence.

[Angela]

Originally Posted by Cochonette

lmao, that entire post was full of typos.

Yeah, that's my experience, too, sometimes of typing when I'm excited and enthusiastic and high on an wild inspiration -- the spelling, grammar, and sometimes even whole words fall by the wayside. Somehow people still get the gist and feel the inspiration, anyway.

Morty Lefkoe wrote about the idea in his blog, too - very nice article! I loved what Jack Canfield said to him:

As much as he also loves being at TLC, he feels safe to experience and express his love wherever he is because he carries his safety inside of him; he doesn’t wait for the circumstances to create safety for him.

[AhremaneS]

I am really inspired to give a quick feedback after reading your post titled 'An inspirational week' although I am quite busy this morning to write this, but I'll keep writing.

First, I find your move of going inspirational for 30 days very brave and extremely inspiring to me. I am dying to know details of what you are doing during this month. Please keep posting.

I think an experience created by a mixture of attitude born from a mixture of left-brained and right-brained thinking and supported by courage and spiritual awareness is the most fulfilling of all. I believe missing or weakness of any of these elements leads to an unbalanced experiences and creates flaws, where we keep learning while we try to accept/fix them. Since you, me and 99.9% of the followers of your blog are left-brained (otherwise, who wants to spend hours on a web site with ancient design, dull colours and 1000+ long articles but NO pictures? heh heh! ), hence I think experiences based on right brain (like going with inspiration and having no plans) will have little chances to hurt us.

I've never acted on inspiration consciously, but I will definitely try it, most probably during the entire August.

[Cochonette]

Michael and I have talked about following the inspiration of the moment, although we only talked about applying it to writing at the time since that conversation happened before I started this trial. Michael was keen on testing the idea of inspired writing as well, but he hasn't had the chance to do so yet. I think he'll find it amazingly effective when he gets a chance to try it out. So for now, assume that the jury is still out.

Haha, interesting.

Originally Posted by Angela

Yeah, that's my experience, too, sometimes of typing when I'm excited and enthusiastic and high on an wild inspiration -- the spelling, grammar, and sometimes even whole words fall by the wayside. Somehow people still get the gist and feel the inspiration, anyway.

Yeah... a couple of my favorite vegan bloggers typically have multiple typos in their posts to the point where I've gotten used to it. It's always just small typos... I think they are just really excited and don't re-read after typing. But I am always impressed by their strong flow of good ideas. Why would they re-read when they still have more ideas coming at them!

[ellie]

I've implemented this a while back, going with waves of ideas. Best thing i ever did. I have never had so many creative ideas in my life, and they get better and better. I think when you are able to action things that are in the back of your mind, wether the idea is good or bad, you are able to release energies regarding it. So you either, go ahead and develop the idea and build upon it, or you let it go, learn something and move on to the next idea.

I would of never got to this point of knowing what I want, if I hadn't started doing this.

I wonder if this works for only certain personality types though? I have read other people trying this and finding it failing for the abysmally. It's interesting you say your a left brainer...I thought I was a right brainer, but tests I have taken (not sure scientific they were) indicated I was either 50/50 or left brained.

I learnt this process of going through waves, through watching a lot entrepreneurs and listening to interviews on their thought and working processes. Which was to essentially just do something, rather than nothing and use it as a stepping stone.

[ssandra]

I'm living my life basically following my inspiration, doing what I do feel inspired to and not doing what I'm not feeling inspired to.

And that last part particularly gets me into trouble at times

I love just flowing through life, going where I feel like going and doing what I feel like doing. It makes for a very interesting life, to say the least.

But... ONLY following inspiration (for a long time, not a 30 day trial) leads to chaos and unfinished projects, in my experience. Or maybe my inspiration changes to quick for me to catch up

There are some things that simply have to be done, inspiration or not. Things like doing the taxes (or sending the tax papers over to the tax person) and paying bills.

[Rachelle]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

Damned typo gremlin...

I WILL kill him!

You get him, Feyd!
... Why prolong the inevitable?

[Rachelle]

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

I wanted to point out that, had the eBay auction not been nuked, you would have had to schedule a 60-minute appointment at some time in the very near future, TBD by the winning bidder.

So in a sense, it seems like having the auction removed was actually a good thing for you in terms of keeping your schedule free and not having such an appointment get in the way of your inspired living/action trial.

<3

[theknightwhosaysni-NI]

Originally Posted by carenkh

I've been thinking about this a lot, because I've been going through a phase of not exercising my self-discipline... and the result has been chaos.

I agree that always going with the flow can be confusing. Maybe riding waves of inspiration is pretty similar to riding waves in the ocean : To catch a wave, you first need to paddle out and be in the right position, that's just behind the white water, at the point where the wave breaks. Surfers call this specific spot "the peak".

If you don't reach the peak first and get ready to catch a wave, you're going to stay in the white water and go where the waves and the current are pushing you...so that's not really riding the waves and enjoying the session.

Similarly, I think self discipline and maintaining a healthy lifestyle can help us "get ready" to act on waves of inspiration, just as paddling out is needed first to reach "the peak" and catch the waves.

[Lucidism]

This is quite interesting, Steve. Keep us updated.

[KateLouisa]

Wow. I read this entry and thought, hey, the real Steve is back! This 30 day trial is going to be fascinating, and inspiring