Installment 13: Patterns

Moments of contemplation allow us to inspect and theorize. For me, that time comes at 4:30 a.m. daily and involves 3 candles, a yoga mat, a cup of chai tea, and a glass of water. My biggest areas of pain and discomfort prefer to be confronted in the darkness and stillness of that moment. They're not onto me yet. They haven't figured out I'm purposely flushing them out of the shadows at their most available level of vulnerability. They've come to enjoy the real talk each day. Those fears are going through daily therapy with me and they're becoming less and less of a liability with each passing day.

This is Installment 13: Patterns

Whatever you are doing right now is a routine. It's a program. The way you're approaching and planning your day and the way you're deciding what to eat and whom to spend time with today are all choices you're not consciously making for your current self. You've already made these decisions in the past and your trajectory is still on its usual course. You've already experienced these routines across countless iterations.

Be careful if you've talked yourself into thinking your routines ground you and provide structure. These efficiencies and levels of familiarity come at a cost. It's likely to affect your perception of reality in a way that confines your automatic, consistent actions into non-optimized outcomes. There is a force at play that keeps things neat and in place. It is invisible to the naked eye and its name is resistance.

All of us carry resistance. We don't, however, know how to feel it.

How can we work with our resistance? We lack the understanding because we lack the tools. We lack the tools because we lack the understanding. It's an endless loop of unknowing acceptance. Our apathy and ignorance toward it are not intentional, but rather a result of placing our heads in the sand in repeatable cycles of avoidance. We know fear. We know pain. We've just learned to hide it, ignore it, suppress it, and in so doing we inadvertently taught ourselves to despise it.

When we open ourselves up to address our ignorance of resistance, we can begin to heal, grow, and eventually leverage our own fear toward becoming an unstoppable force. This spring I met Kristen Ulmer. That link is her most recent TEDx Talk on fear, posted just a few weeks ago. It's a deeply relevant explanation of what I'm attempting to convey in this installment. She and I have had several conversations about fear and it's been one of the most profound leaps in growth I've made in years. I encourage you to begin your personal journey toward understanding and feeling your fear. It's the foundation for your future path.

Feeling our own resistance is the first step in creating a feedback loop mechanism. A deeper understanding of our resistance will reshape our belief system and open the door to unlimited and unrealized potential. Once you put it into practice, you won't need a guru to show you how to seek and find your passion and purpose. Instead, you'll have the tools to do the work on your own. Our misgivings regarding the trajectory and speed of our life's progress will diminish substantially with a daily and intentional recognition and alteration of the unconscious, repeatable aspects of what we think, say, and do.

Contemplation begins with awareness.

The trap we often fall prey to in moments of contemplation is to spend this time rationalizing the external world instead of redirecting that process toward a deeper intrinsic observation. And if we work toward connecting our actions, thoughts, and emotions toward resolving what is beyond our current self, we'll end up missing the point of this daily exercise. The shift we must make is to learn to utilize the tool of contemplation to continuously develop deeper levels of personal ownership, accountability, love, forgiveness, and understanding.

1. Give yourself the room, self-love, and forgiveness necessary to make these adjustments.
2. Own what you're doing and what you've done.
3. Become accountable for what you should be doing.

If you've kept up with the Challenge Your Leader installments, you already know my position on external motivation. It's a myth. It does not exist. It's a fake sequence we'll put ourselves through until we'll eventually hit the wall again. External motivation is the equivalent of a sugar rush to an athlete. It will provide an increased level of energy for a very short duration, followed by an unrecoverable crash in performance. The internet is filled with content focused on providing this short-lived sequence of fraudulent momentum. Don't get me wrong, it can be a catalyst for change if you learn to frame it up as simply that and nothing else. By doing so, you'll place less importance on it as a necessity and you'll seek it out less and less. That's where I want you to go. That's the reason for this conversation.

Ownership and accountability can never gain ground through extrinsic motivation. They are results, not mechanisms for activation. Beginning with ownership and accountability as your goal is a death sentence. You can certainly convince yourself that you're ready to change your pattern, but it must be accompanied by a daily contemplation practice.

Create incremental, daily progress by immediately documenting your thoughts and ideas that result from your daily contemplation practice and place them into an action plan for the day. Don't go to bed without having spent at least a few minutes working on shifting your daily pattern. As your new patterns emerge, challenge them forward by reimagining them and optimizing them at regular intervals. The constant awareness of daily pattern interruption will itself become a habit, and that's when you'll truly begin to understand the level of emergence within your reach.

Onward & Upward