Wake up and do your thing.

IGNITE YOUR PRIMAL POWERS

Excerpted from Wake Up and Do Your Thing ??

We come into this world hooting and hollering and bursting with enthusiasm. From your first breath, your natural-born curiosity began sensing what was going on around you. Pretty soon after that, you learned about feedback—when you cried you got a response. Lying there in the hospital nursery with all the other newborns you figured out that one-day-old babies cry when they hear other babies cry. Wow! Talk about empathy. And from the moment you’re born, your imagination takes its first steps alongside you like a lifelong companion ready to stir dreams and explore things your rational mind may not be able to understand. This inner world of imagination gives you the opportunity to explore without boundaries—to create without limits. To take a journey without leaving the comforts of your home and experience life beyond yourself.? Imagination shapes your future, starting with the initial glimmer sparked at birth, ever-growing and never dissipating no matter how old we get—true evidence that the sky’s the limit when our four Primal Powers are evenly balanced.?

Curiosity: the ability to continually learn about the world around you. Without curiosity, there is no knowledge, no education, no exploration, and no growth.

Feedback: curiosity is great but without the ability to process feedback it is useless. Without feedback, there is no innovation, no progress, no research, and no ambition.

Empathy: the ability to listen to other people’s opinions and understand their experiences. Bundled with feedback, empathy allows us to look after people and be good role models. Without empathy, we have no capacity to care, no courage, no compassion, no community, and no love.?

Imagination: the greatest power of all. Empathy is great but if you can’t imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes it amounts to nothing. Anything is possible if you can imagine it. Imagination is the power to create mental images of things not currently present to your senses, or never before perceived in reality. Without imagination, there is no empathy, no culture, no dreams, no crazy ideas, and no fresh starts.

If you ever question the impact your Primal Powers have on your life, look no further than social media.?It has had a profound impact on the way we communicate. In many ways, it has made the world a smaller place, enabling us to connect with people from all over the globe with just a few clicks. When used responsibly, it can be a great way to research and promote your fresh start. However, the dark side of social media is designed to hijack our Primal Powers and turn us into addicts.

Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok arouse our curiosity by showing us things we may not have otherwise seen and making us want to come back for more. They satisfy our drive to process feedback by constantly engaging us with likes, comments, and shares. They trigger our empathy by showing us things that stir up our emotions, be it a heart-wrenching story about an animal in need, a gruesome traffic accident, or a video of a couple getting engaged. And they capture our imaginations by teasing our senses with tantalizing glimpses of exciting opportunities we might be missing out on, so we can't help but keep coming back. This compare-and-contrast game feeds into people's insecurities by constantly bombarding them with ads and content that tell them they need to look a certain way or have certain things in order to be happy. It promotes the survival of the fittest.

Of course, this is not really trickery: Primal Powers are prime elements of a FlowPath, and social media has learned how to hijack them and use them against you. When dishonored in this way, they are demons of distraction: honored, they are sentinels of synchronicity and serendipity.

A FlowPath is a big self-correcting feedback loop balancing our flow for the beauty, nourishment, and flourishment of life. Inside the flow one thing always leads to another and everyday miracles appear out of the blue. It’s what the Ancients called a FlowPath, and it’s unique in every person. Inside your FlowPath you will always be supplied with what you need; that’s its job. But it’s your job to supply yourself with what you want.?

While there are certainly many benefits to using social media, it is also important to recognize the seductive powers that these platforms can have. One of the most seductive aspects of social media is the sense of validation it can provide. When we post a picture or update and receive likes, comments, and shares from our friends and followers, it can feel like we’re being recognized and appreciated in a way that’s often difficult to achieve in the real world. This validation can be addictive, leading us to constantly seek out more likes and followers as a way of boosting our self-esteem but it’s not great for making a fresh start. Unless your Primal Powers can distinguish between what is real and what is vividly imagined you won’t be able to open a FlowPath.

Over the years our Primal Powers can take a buffeting and get knocked out of whack; some even fizzle out completely. For some people, their childlike curiosity shuts down when they think they know everything, or when they’re told repeatedly by their parents, teachers, or authorities to stop asking so many questions. The ability to process feedback and deal with life's inevitable changes erodes when our horizons become obscured by habits. Empathy gets numbed by the nightly news, and imaginations end up fueling fears instead of fresh starts, leaving us unable to reach for the stars no matter how strong our need for change or escape is.?

Such is the might of Primal Powers when they work against you. Just imagine what you can achieve when turn this around and make them work for you.