Hero’s Journey

The real lessons in life are seldom the ones we want

When we learn the lessons in life that we think we need to learn, we generally learn nothing at all. The real lessons we need to learn are the lessons that life has in store for us. You know when you’re due for your next lesson: it’s when you’re resisting some or other change. You find yourself stuck, defending your position, trying with all your might to hold on and control what should happen next.

When you’re driving a car, the sooner you react to a sudden change in circumstances, the less likely you are to crash. When you’re slow to react – because you’ve been driving too fast, had your attention elsewhere, or the obstacle has arisen suddenly – then there’s a chance that once you react, your car will go into a slide. In a real slide, the correct thing to do is to point the front wheels in the direction you want to go, and keep your foot off the brake. And wait. It’s when you touch your foot on the brake that you’re likely to spin and roll. There’s nothing else you can do, but wait until it’s all over, then check for damage, and deal with the fallout.

Change is truly exciting if you have an attitude of faith and trust

In life, when you’re in a state of flux, it’s a situation with many variables that you can do nothing about. Instead of trying to control everything, keep your mind fixed on where you want to go; give up trying to control or stop the things you cannot control (like what he or she thinks or feels), and wait. See what’s left when it stops, then pick up the pieces.

When we emerge from the wreckage of change we have the lesson that life wants us to learn. It’s seldom the lesson we wanted to learn and that’s why it took a crash to get us to learn it. Some of the greatest inventions and discoveries happened quite by accident. We can never predict what beauty or genius comes out of a new set of variables that follows change. Change is truly exciting if we have an attitude of faith and trust. Do you trust life, or only yourself? If only yourself, then please make more trees grow, and stop global warming while you’re at it!

I’m learning to listen. To really listen. Of course, coaching is all about listening and so I could say I’m a trained professional listener and that’s the end of it, but then I wouldn’t be listening anymore – listening for what there is to still listen for.

The movie Tornado is a story about a guy who learns to sit through the night, listening to a horse, and through his listening, he becomes healed, and heals the horse. I’ve been practising this, with my son, with myself – sitting up, not all night, but some of it, and listening, really listening. It’s amazing what has come up. Most of us are so busy trying to solve the problem that we don’t listen for the solution. Coaching has taught me that we all know the answer to every problem, we just aren’t listening to ourselves.

They measure the depth of the ocean by dropping a sonar beam, and measuring the time it takes to hit the ocean floor and return. The way to listen to yourself is to drop a question, let it fall all the way down to the bottom, and see what comes up. Repeat, until you have your answer, or your next question.

Listening requires courage, and the willingness to face what comes up. When we’re afraid to hear, we actually turn up the volume of our own internal noise. So you first have to be willing to face what comes up. Then when you become still, and really listen, and then listen some more, the answers will come to you. Good coaching is about getting the client to hear himself. It’s the art of listening.

If you can’t hear yourself, and you want to, then find someone who can help you listen: find a good coach.

Being uncertain is the launching pad for personal power

If there’s anything you’re certain about, anything you’re 100% sure that that’s the way life is, that’s the way God made us, then you can be certain about one thing more: that you’re fooling yourself. What you take as the absolute truth is simply the current  limit of your world, of what you believe is possible. It’s your ‘flat earth’ statement, and you just haven’t sailed beyond the limits yet to test it.

Ne plus ultra is a Latin term that means ‘not further beyond’. It referred to the point beyond which sailors would not sail their ships for fear of being swallowed by monsters or falling off the edge of the earth. We each have a ne plus ultra in our minds, the point in our beliefs beyond which we’re not willing to go.

When you go beyond that point, you’re
left with nothing but pure possibility

Going beyond our ne plus ultra is the scariest thing. Beyond it lies nothing but pure possibility. When you give up certainty, you’re left with only you; you realise that you don’t run the universe and you don’t define God, and that’s pretty humbling for most of us. It’s also the launch pad for personal power, because you start facing the problems as they are – or rather, the problem as it is, the problem of you – instead of the problem being ‘out there’ somewhere. Just as the limit for sailors was never the earth, it was always what they held to be certain in their minds.

Being uncertain about the things you’re certain about will start to dissolve your limitations.

One of the greatest realisations that people get from attending workshops is the realisation that they’re not alone. For most of our lives we keep our cards to ourselves like poker players; the energy compounds, and we feel worse about our ‘situation’. Just sitting in a room with other people, hearing the presenter say something that applies to you and that you realise applies to everyone else in the room already halves your worries. The guardedness you arrived with starts to fall away. If the process has rules that make it a safe environment, then people open up automatically.

I was in the presence last weekend of men sharing themselves authentically and it was a privileged place to be. ‘The future is now,’ is a phrase coined by the guru Jiddu Krishnamurti. It means that you bring ecstasy into the moment as soon as you live committed doing the thing that would make you ecstatic. In other words, it’s the journey of commitment that brings you the ecstasy, not reaching the destination. It came alive for me last weekend while presenting the first Authentic Success Program for Men: I saw that there is nothing else for me to be doing. This is it. This is my purpose and what gives my life meaning. There is no ambition for wealth or for some option out there that will make me happy. This is it.

What a place to be, and boy have I been lost and unhappy and searching for long periods of my life. To see other men find that space, or the possibility of that space, was humbling and awe-inspiring, and I look forward to doing it with thousands more around the world.

Uncover your act, before life does it for you!

Riding a motorcycle at high speeds, climbing mountains, getting into a shootout – these are things that many men will do bravely. But ask us to expose ourselves – to drop our act – in an authentic workshop setting and it’s, ‘No way!’ A man would sooner drop his pants in public than drop his act. In fact, if he dropped his pants, he would turn that into an act!

Your act is the persona that you present yourself to be. More than that, it’s the persona that you believe yourself to be.

Let’s say you’re the lone ranger,  the one who arrives late for every party, perhaps unattached, or with a new girl every time, and everyone wonders where you’ve been; you leave early too, and dash off into the night, alone most times, and everyone’s left wondering what you’ll be up to, wishing it was them having so much fun.

Their imaginations are more fertile than the reality. For you it’s lonely out there; there’s not really that much going on. Still, you can’t drop the act, because it’s you, after all! Or is it? In fact, the act – your persona – is not really you, but has a life of its own. It’s a psychological construct that occupies you, that grips you by the scruff of the neck and leads you through life, presenting itself as the real you. Read on!

Life is designed to inevitably expose your act as an act

Trying to see the real you behind your persona is like trying to beat your own reflection in a mirror. The persona, like the reflection, moves with you, too fast for you to detach from it. It’s that tricky. So how do you know what’s your act and what’s you?

People have reported feeling separated from their bodies during trauma, like their soul lifted out of their body. There’s actually an ancient esoteric ritual designed to give the initiate the experience of falling to his death. During this short fall he is so convinced that he’s going to die that for a split second he actually has the experience of his soul separating from his body. He comes out of it convinced of the existence of the soul.

Life is filled with little mini-shocks, mini-falls, that are designed to expose your act as an act. The teasing of your mates, the little failures that show up your shortcomings, that ‘catch you out’. If you react by defending yourself, by going deeper into your act, by taking your persona – your act – more seriously instead of less seriously, sooner or later something big will happen to expose the truth of who you are. If your act is to pretend you’re the money guy when you’re really not, you’ll go bankrupt; if you pretend you’re the paragon of virtue when you’re really not, you’ll get caught with your fingers in the till and go to jail (‘The devil made me do it!); the philanderer will lose his marriage and the lone ranger will end up lonely and alone.

You can wait for that to happen and, when it does, pretend you’re the innocent victim, or you can jump ahead of the game and take a transformational workshop that’s designed to help you uncover your act and take a giant leap towards authentic being and self-mastery. (Yes, there’s one advertised below!)

Do it, before life uncovers you – in public!

There’s a great reality show on TV called Chasing Nature. Four engineering students are split into two teams and each team has to build gadgetry that will literally enable them to emulate a creature in nature. I’ve seen them try to emulate the sonar detectors of bats while flying in a harness, the tongue of a chameleon while crawling on a pole 10m above the ground, the suspension of a sloth from a bridge between two skyscrapers and, best of all, the 25km/h head-butting power of the ram.

Sometimes they’re successful, though most often not, but what I find most fascinating is how cumbersome the machinery is that gets created. You also know that with time it would be streamlined and the results would be improved, until the robot became as elegant a creation as the real thing. The modern motor car is a case in point. It can easily match the horse for elegance. (If we could only manage its cycle of use and decay better, but that will come too.)

The point is that every human creation starts out rather clunky, like computers 20 years ago, and we have the power to master and refine them until we achieve the utmost efficiency and beauty. What stops us, often, is that the first version looks so clunky. Behind this is the fear that people will laugh at us, like we were Noah, building an Ark.

Hey, maybe that’s the meaning of that story – that there’s a calling in every one of us, that when we follow it we get laughed at, but sooner or later the flood comes and the ones who do, the ones who are ready, are the ones who are smiling. Bill Gates will tell you so.

There’s a flood coming your way. I hope you’ll be ready with version 2.0 of your contraption, or your business model, whatever it is!

Be honest with yourself first, then with others

It’s one thing to pretend to others. Then what we usually do is we pretend that we’re not pretending. We actually argue to prove a point that it’s not so. Of course I love you. Of course I’m not interested in other women. Never look at them, never would. Then comes the test – in the form of a raised eyebrow, perhaps – and we go, ‘No, I’m not just saying it, I really mean it.’

More astonishing than this, is how we actually try to convince ourselves that it’s true. I’m happily married, we’ll argue, inside the privacy of our own head, late at night. I love my staff and I’d be sad if any of them ever left. Actually, half the time it’s not true, or it’s not 100% true, but admitting that to ourselves would seem too terrible. Firstly, we tell ourselves, it would mean I’m a terrible person. Secondly, it could mean I’d have to do something about it. As to the first point, please check: who’s the embodiment of the voice in your head? The very person who you’re trying to cover up in front of? Or maybe it’s still your mother! If so, time to grow up, wouldn’t you say?

It is possible to be completely honest –
 if you can bear the consequences

Of course, when it comes to pretending and covering up, we ask, could life be any other way? In fact it can. It is possible to be completely honest, firstly with yourself, then with others. It’s a lofty level of being – it means being centred within yourself and willing to bear the consequences of your every utterance. One of the most powerful and liberating things a man can do is to admit his true thoughts and feelings to himself – and then, if he can find the courage, to act on them. 

Come on men, tell me this isn’t true: you avoid getting help because you’re ashamed of what you’re going through and you don’t want to tell anyone. You see it as some failure on your part. And God forbid you should have to attend a seminar and reveal your failings in front of others! Have you heard that old saying: A problem shared is a problem halved? (Those old sayings still work best, and this one is the best of the best.)

The fact is, when someone else shares their situation, you realise you’re not alone. You feel empathy, compassion – for the other person and for yourself. So by sharing you help others, but the benefit is even greater for you, the person sharing. You experience a tremendous relief because – even though it’s only for a moment, and with regards to that one thing –  you lift the ‘act’ that we all work so hard to uphold. Upholding the ‘act’ is an energy drain. Dropping it releases a tremendous surge of energy. The problem feels halved, and is, because we have more life energy to deal with it.

A hard fact of life is that if you want to be constantly motivated and energised, you have to make this a way of life. The sun doesn’t need motivation to shine, it just needs the clouds to be removed. The clouds in our lives are all the pretences that we uphold. So if you’re halfway down the chute, and not coping, then stop pretending. We’re all in the sh*t, it’s just a matter of how deep! Take a load off, and tell someone, today!

Your country needs you to lead!

Your country needs leaders, and talking about it doesn’t create them. ‘Be the change you want to see in the world,’ said Ghandi. Be the leader you want to see. It starts with you. The biggest wave cannot rise without all the tiny water molecules below it. The Taj Mahal relies on every brick for its beauty. It could not be without one of them. What if you were the building block for leadership in your country? Who would you have to be? What would you, leading, look like, right here, right now in your life?

Right now, where are you conforming to the mould instead of being extraordinary? Right now, where are you kowtowing to popular interests instead of leading the sheep away from the abyss? Right now, where are you serving your own survival in a situation instead of risking your position for the sake of something greater?

Being a leader means being willing
to be laughed at, criticised

Being a leader does not feel comfortable. Being a leader means risking being the butt of everyone’s jokes. You can say what you like about our leaders, but at least they’re willing to be laughed at, criticised. If you’re not, and someone else is, that person wins the game hands down, no contest. If you want to stop corrupt leaders from stealing your whole country from right under your nose, then you have to do something. It can be something small. Rosa Parks was one lady on a bus and she inspired a changed world. Would you step out like Rosa Parks, even for one day?

Hang on, I’m just tying my shoelaces!

When you arrive at yourself, your purpose, you’ll see that it’s been there all the time, you’ve known it, but been too ashamed to admit it, or could never have believed it was possible. The amount of time and energy we waste not doing something that we’d love to do, because deep down we don’t believe we deserve it, or that it could be possible – it’s insane.

The more I see of life and people, the more I’m convinced that every person has one thing, one single message that they’d like to give to the world. It may be big, it may be small; it may be a service, or an invention, anything, it doesn’t matter. Most of our efforts are spent avoiding giving that gift to the world. It’s for this reason that so many people feel unfulfilled and rushed off their feet.

When you’re doing what you’re meant to be doing, when you’re answering your calling, a vast universe of time opens up. You realise that you have a whole lifetime to do just this one thing, so what’s the panic all about, what’s the rush? You begin to feel its inevitability, that there’s a certain future pulling you towards it, and you sink further into being able to be in the now, with no worries.

If you want to feel less stressed about time, and less like you’re on a treadmill, give up doing all the things you’re not supposed to be doing, and start doing that one thing, living that passion, that dream…