PNTV: The Power of TED by David Emerald (#83)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got a great book, the Power of Ted, by a friend of mine named David Emerald. I was originally turned on to this book by a former coach of mine. Thank you again, Bert. And just fell in love with it. It's a simple fable, about 152 pages long. Read it in a weekend. Really transformative. I just loved it. I bought one for everyone on our team and then I think I wound up buying another 25 of them. And I went to a weekend workshop that David runs and sent it to everyone I know or some select group of people I know for a holiday gift. So, great book, highly recommend it. And I'm excited to jump into a few of my favorite big ideas and tell you about the construct. So the book is about something that David Emerald calls the empowerment dynamic. And he juxtaposes that with something he calls the dreaded drama triangle. So we want to imagine a couple different triangles here. We've got one triangle and then we've got another triangle over here. One triangle is all about the dreaded drama triangle. That's ddt. It's not good for you, just like DDT isn't too good for us. That one has a victim in its primary spot at the top, right? And the orientation of a victim leads to this DDT dreaded drama triangle. We juxtapose. I'm going to get into detail on that and the other two positions. The other triangle is the empowerment dynamic. At the top of that, we have a creator, victim, creator. This dynamic is all about choosing empowerment. Really powerful stuff. So as any good triangle has three points, this one has three points as well. So in the DDT dreaded drama triangle, we've got the victim, and then we have a persecutor, and then we have a rescuer. So victim, persecutor, rescuer. We're going to go into detail on the empowerment dynamic. We've got a creator, and then instead of a persecutor, we have a challenger. And instead of a rescuer, we have a coach. Right? Three different Personas, if you will, in the two different orientations. So in the book, he goes off in a really fun way about what happens when we live from one orientation or the other. When we're in victim orientation, we tend to see things, we focus on our problems, and we tend to feel persecuted by people and things and events in our life, whether it's an earthquake or a bad economy or a relationship that isn't going the way we want. We're a victim to the persecutor. Right? Interesting stuff. And then we look for rescuers. When we're in victim mentality, rescuers can be people who come and save the day for us, or it can be alcohol or drugs or TV or Facebook. Whatever it is, we use to numb ourselves. Right? Victim, persecutor, rescuer. The major question that the victim asks is, well, they focus on problems, right? They're always complaining, criticizing, blinding. They're in victimhood. Now we juxtapose that with the empowerment dynamic, where we have a creator in the lead. The creator still has problems in their life, but they don't see them as persecutors. They see it as challenges. So they have challengers in their life, challenging people, challenging situations. Same stuff, just a different lens. They're looking at it from a different lens. And rather than focusing on their problems like the victim does, the creator focuses on their ideal vision. What purpose can they see in these challenges? What do they want to see in their lives? And very simply, what do they want? Right, I'm going to talk a little bit more about the details here, but just to finish off the two triangles, we've got victim, creator, creator, and has challenger instead of persecutor. And they don't look to rescuers like the victim does. They have coaches. So they have different. You know, whether it's this PNTV episode or for me, all the stuff that I study, I've got great coaches. That's why I spend my life getting paid to read this stuff, is I realize there's so much value in having great coaching. So they have coaches in their life, supportive people who know that they're strong, they're not trying to rescue them and save them, but are giving them some support, some powerful stuff. So that's a really quick look at the two different triangles. We can play in DDT or the empowerment dynamic, ted, which is why the book is called the Power of ted. The power of the empowerment dynamic. So. So let's see what we can do here. We will talk briefly about how we make switches between these different Personas. If you're caught in victim mode, you're focusing on your problems too much. What you want to do, David says, is focus on what you want. Focus on what you want. When things aren't going the way you want, ask yourself, what do I want? If things were going ideally right now, what would it look like? That's such an empowering way to change your focus if you're in persecutor. Because what we tend to do is we bounce around different places. Right. So if you're in persecutor, which is a place that I can go to often when I'm not really empowered, I can get chirpy and I can persecute other people. Now, the question to ask to shift from persecutor to challenger is what's my intention? If I'm not feeling good about myself and I'm projecting my shadow everywhere, then as a persecutor, really, I'm just trying. I'm supposedly trying to help someone or point out their shortcomings or whatever, but I'm really doing so from a place of anger and spite, not from a good place. Right. The shift I can make if I find myself in persecutor is what's my intention. Is my intention truly to help and to challenge someone in a creator role, or is my intention to kind of vent and just be a bit of a weenie? Right now, if I'm in the rescuer mode, essentially what I'm doing is I don't think this person can save themselves. I've got to do it. So the shift is, do I think this person is capable of taking care of themselves? I shift from DDT to ted, right? From rescuer to coach. A coach knows the person's fine, they're a creator, but I'm going to help them if they'd like and not do so from a vantage point of a rescuer, we can talk about this for a weekend. David does. Check him out@powerofted.com I attended one of his weekend workshops with Alexandra a couple years ago. We loved it. Great coaches they have. As part of the weekend seminar led by David and his team. Awesome stuff. Highly recommended. So that's a quick look at the model. I go off in more detail here, but I want to go into another part of this deal that I think is just extraordinary. It's one of the most powerful things that I've learned that I talk about all the time. I got it from this book. He talks about rubber bands and your ideals. I just grabbed a couple of little rubber bands. You can do this at home if you like, but take a couple rubber bands between your fingers, right, and then kind of stretch them like that. So you've got. On this side, you've got your current reality and then stretch away from there up to your ideal situation, Right? So your left finger. My left finger right now is pulling away to my ideal. And I've got my right here. And there's a tension there in the Rubber band, right? David calls that dynamic tension. Right. So we've got tension between our current reality and our ideal. Really cool stuff. Now most people, when they feel that tension, they don't feel too comfortable, right? And they do one of a couple things. They manically try to pursue their goal and then burn out or they kind of reduce their goals. They can't handle the tension, so they just give up on their goals. Right? He makes the important point that what we want to do is have a clear and inspiring vision for our lives, have a really honest look at our current reality and then hold that tension, notice it, hold it, and then honor it by taking baby steps in the direction of our dreams. It's a huge part of my life practice. Right now I have a clear sense of what my highest goal is and who I want to become in my life in terms of my being sense. I want to connect to and express the divine. And as I have fun giving my greatest gifts and greatest service to the world, that's the first thing I write down in my journal every morning. And then I say I want to live with joy, optimism, love, courage, creativity, kindness, generosity. That's my highest goal. And then I set my number one now goal. Right now I'm working on these episodes and something called optimal living 101. Really excited about it. I'm focusing all my energy on that. Then what I do is I hold the tension between my ideal I'm focused and and I take baby steps every day. I'm incredibly productive when I say I'm going to do what I commit to do creatively. Before I check the Internet, before I schedule a business appointment, my time from waking up until I complete my creative work at 2pm Right is all mine. I do this work. I do whatever I'm going to do that day. Today I've done five of these episodes. I'm doing five to 10 a day. So I can really focus over the next three months and get to Bali for point being for a four month little sabbatical. Point being, what we need to do is hold the dynamic tension and take baby steps. So what's your ultimate vision? What's your near term goal and what baby steps are you taking? You do that consistently and you can hold the tension and feel unbelievably alive. I feel so good when I create as I know I'm sure you do as well. So there you go, dynamic tension. Super cool stuff. As you can tell, I get excited about it. We're going to talk about this a lot more because I think it's a key component to living our greatest lives. Finally, David says it's impossible to invest your soul in a compromise. You can't invest your soul in a compromise. So what do you really want in your life? Come from a creator mentality and go out and rock it. Hope you dug it. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Check out David and his work@thepowerofted powerofted.com all right, have fun. Talk to you soon. See you.