If creating your own modality or framework -- is it ok to copy from your teachers, mentors, coaches?
17 Mar 2025 · 11 min
A single speaker explores whether it's ethical to borrow ideas from teachers and mentors when building your own framework. They argue for a liberated view of intellectual property, offer practical advice on crediting sources, and suggest using AI to help reframe inherited ideas into something new.
When we're creating our own method, modality, maybe our own school or course, how much can we copy from our teachers? How much can we copy from those we learn from? Maybe our therapists, our coaches, our mentors, our healers? And that's a very good question. And I first want to invite you to comment below, actually, because I don't necessarily think I have the right answer. I have kind of an extreme answer, which I'll share, but you can comment below. What, what do you think is appropriate? And I think it's going to probably be. I think the right answer is going to be different for every industry and every relationship you have. So, for example, my extreme answer when it comes to me as the teacher is that I have consciously and purposefully uncopyrighted everything I do. Not only my free content, of course, my blog posts, my videos, anything you hear from my blog posts and videos, any ideas you can literally even copy, paste my entire book and publish my entire book and call it yours, not even mention my name once, which some people have done actually. And I don't care because I want the ideas out there. I'm very like, liberated in terms of my. I don't think ideas are. Are possessive. I don't think humans should be possessive of ideas. Like I said, this is an extreme view because most of the world is copyright this, you know, patent this, protect that. I think physical items should be protected because I can't just give up on my phone. I don't have a phone anymore, or my furniture. Right. But ideas are like. Ideas are ephemeral, you know, they can be created like this if you, if you believe it, which I do, and I do. I do create ideas just like this and this. And I'm sure I probably copy people without realizing I copied them because I have such a liberated view about it. And yet at the same time, I've never gotten anyone. I'm sure, like I said, I'm sure. I mean, whenever I remember someone, I'll try to credit them, but I'm sure I've said things that I heard. And because of my liberated mindset, I just forget to credit people. I've never had anyone come back to me and say, george, I said that before you, you should credit me. In 13 years, I've never had that happen. So is there some kind of law of attraction thing going on here? Maybe. Right. Maybe there is some kind of vibrational or sociological dynamic such that because I'm so liberated about my own stuff and Let me complete my sentence here, not only my Free stuff. My paid courses are also uncopyrighted. Please don't tell everybody I said this, right? Because everyone's gonna. One person gonna buy and then share my courses with all their friends for free. I don't, I'm not gonna come after you. I don't care if you do that. I don't, I don't want to know. Actually, if you do, you're gonna cheat on me. Don't tell me, you know, kind of thing like, I'd rather not know. Right? But the, the, the technicality is. I don't care. I don't care. You can take my paid courses and call it your own entire thing. All my ideas exactly in the same wor. Shorter. I don't care. Please don't tell me if you even do that or not do that. I still, I'm gonna have a great business no matter if people do that. And of course, every time I tell people this, people are, oh, for sure I'm gonna credit you. See, that's the law of attraction, right? When I say this stuff, people are like, extra protective of me. That's the irony of it. It's like people are extra protective of me. Now let me go back to you as the person who is going to create a method, borrowing from your teachers and coaches. Your teachers, coaches, and mentors are probably not as liberated in their view of idea protection as me, right? And so therefore, they're probably going to feel competitive. They're probably. Especially someone you have a relationship with, right? Your therapist, your coach, your healer, your mentor, your, Your direct teacher. Like, if they actually work with you personally and then they see you create a school or a method and you're teaching things that sound like them, the relationship is going to be strained because they don't have this kind of liberated mind. So what can we do? Because it's. You can't help. How can, how can you not naturally come through with some of the stuff they said, even if you tried not to? In fact, the harder you try, probably the more it's going to accidentally come through in some ways. Okay, there are a couple of solutions to this. One solution is if, if it feels appropriate to ask them if you think they're going to give you a good answer. Ideally you ask them, say, can I, Can I teach? I'm creating a new framework, but I'm going to be borrowing from yours. Is it okay? I'm going to credit you. Now, question is not whether you. This is several layers of question here. Does it make sense to credit them? Did they really come up with it or did they get it from Jesus or Buddha or somebody else? Did they get it like a lot of people claim, claim stuff as their own, which they shouldn't. And they go, oh you can. They feel competitive like, what are you talking about? You got it from somebody else that you probably don't even realize you got it from somebody else. Right now you're claiming credit for this. And that's why I think it's ridiculous. I think it's ridiculous. Everything comes from source anyway, ultimately. Even Jesus, right? Buddha, that came from source, right? Like they never. I don't think that Jesus would go, I'm going to sue you, right? Jesus and Buddha today, are they going to sue someone or write a cease and desist letter? Can you imagine that? Can you imagine any spiritual teacher. True, true. You know, from the past especially, you know, if they had cease and even modern, would they write a cease and desist letter? Are you kidding me? They would say, please, my child, my student, please go on and call it your own. I don't care if you call it so anyway. But still, egos today, human teachers, they're going to feel competitive because they don't think it's enough. So we can either ask them and hope they say, you're welcome to. If you credit me, then I'm okay with that. Or some of them might even say, you can license some of my work, you can pay me some monthly fee to use these ideas, which then should push you to the next alternative. For you to create your own idea that is distinctive enough from them as to. Not that it's not recognizable because we all borrow from our roots. We all have a lineage, of course. And you can credit your lineage more generally in your about page, right? In your bio you could say I'm from the lineage of so and so and so and so. Great. But you don't have to. Every, every breath, every single time you say a sense. Oh, and that came from so and so. That's, that's onerous. I don't think it's necessary. But ideally you would create ideas that are separate enough. Name them. Especially the, the terminology and the phrases. That's really usually where people write cease and desist letters to people. They're using the same terminology, the same brand, the same words. You know, if I came up with, you know, it. I don't know. I don't know. I, I can't think of it. But, but let's say I can't think of one. But I'm sure there are phrases that people have branded and they call it. So how do you come up with something that's really distinct? Well, you either journal, sleep on it, you know, work with a friend, work with a coach to try to come, not borrowing from their ideas, but. Or these days, you can use AI chatbots. I know not everyone loves this, but it's true. You can use AI chatbots. Like ChatGPT is like unlimited creativity right there for you. Whether you use po.com or chatgpt or Bing Chat, there's so many chatbots. They have unlimited creativity. They have unlimited words for you. They have unlimited ways to combine words that have never been seen before. They can do that because they have all the database of everything that's been seen before right on the Internet. So you could say, hey, listen, I want to create this modality. Let me describe it for you now with, you have to learn how to use a chatbot. Some chatbots cannot. You cannot type so much. Some chatbots, you can type a lot, but you have to, you know, work with it. You have to learn to work. I have a course on anyway, how to work with these chatbots. Anyway, it doesn't matter. You, you work with these chat bots and say, let me explain this concept to you, okay? Can you re word this concept in a completely unique and unusual way that has never been seen on the Internet before? And then you see what it gives you, and then you work with it through a conversational format. You just keep saying, well, what about this, what about that? You know? And then finally, after it gives you something, some reworded concept or reframed, it's help me rethink this. How many. Rethink this. So that's distinct from this other modality, right? It'll help you and you'll be surprised. Like, wow, this is actually pretty damn good. And then you should, you should Google it. After you come up with the final result, you should still Google the name. At least the name or the phrase that you're going to name this thing or the key keywords or terms that you're going to use. Still Google it to make sure that it's not being copyrighted by somebody else. Now, just because other people are using it doesn't mean that you can't use it. But certainly if it's copyrighted or someone's as their brand, you know, you should probably tiptoe with, be careful around that. So I hope this is helpful and I look forward to seeing what your comments are below. And just one more thing. It's not just about rephrasing or using a different word from, from your teacher. It's also you being reasonably critical or being a, I like to say contrarian. But basically no teacher has the perfect method. No matter how much you revere and respect your teacher. They're only human and they're an imperfect channel of source. And by the way, source is unlimited abundance frameworks and you know, unlimited ways. Correct ways of thinking about it, right? So this teacher who gave you the seven step seems so perfect, but it's not. You can poke holes in it. In fact, like I said, you can either work on this with a friend, you know, some, some critical friend or, or with a chat bot to say can you poke holes in the logic of this seven step method? Come up with what you think are the gaps in logic. What, what could be added that would make it better? Like what could that, you know, and, and the chat bot or your, your, your human bot friend will come up with. Oh, you know what? Between steps two and three there really should be step two and a half. Like people don't. It's too, too high of a step, right? Or people, someone you're, you know, you might come up with, maybe step seven really should be step three. Like we should reorder these steps and you're going to be a contrarian. Be a critic to say if I were criticizing this. What's not perfect about it? I know I revere the person so much, but let me now take on the role of someone who's going to poke holes in this are in this argument or in this framework because there are always holes that can be poked. There's always ways that can be reformulated to be completely new. Because source abundance, there's unlimited ways. So I hope this is helpful.
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