Firedance 1-28-23: Energy and Behavioral mod

Happy. I don't want to forget something as basic as that. Welcome back, everybody. It's just great to see your faces. Just so wonderful. And so let's kind of start this by unmuting yourselves and saying hi to everybody. This is our tribe. This is the tribe of people who are trying to take some control of our lives so we can change. I love you guys.

Greetings.

Hello, everyone.

Hi, everybody. I feel like I almost know some of you besides Steven T. Exactly.

Exactly. That's exactly. That's the whole hope of the idea. Ross is 100% correct. I want you to talking to each other in chat. I want you exchange. If you have common interest, exchange emails, start supporting you. They're saying, hey, support me in doing my morning ritual. You know, what kind of support do you need? If you support many of us, how many of you find it easier to keep promises to other people than you do promises to yourself? Yes.

Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. That is natural human nature. I want you to use human nature to help yourself stay on the path. Okay, so let's see. My name is Stephen Barnes for those of you who said might be some new people coming in here. I'm creator of the Life writing system and finance. I'm a husband and father and a martial artist and a writer and a life coach. And basically all I'm sharing with you some 30, maybe even 40 years ago. Oh, God. I realized I was going to need an extraordinary amount of endurance to be able to accomplish my goals in life. I needed to literally wait for the culture to change in some important ways. And I asked myself the question, how do I do that? How do I do that? How can I survive? How can I survive emotionally long enough to get the things that I want in life? Because I refuse to lose. You know, life might beat me, but I will not beat myself. What do I do? And so all I'm sharing with you are the techniques that I use to stay on that path to find love and health and success. I'm going to share with you as honestly as possible everything that we've been doing. And there are people on these calls who have known me for. For more than 30 years. And so I can't lie about what it is that I'm doing, what it is that I think. And I want you guys who have known me in real life or via the Internet to hold me responsible, to know that it matters to me that I be as honest and open and positive as I can possibly be so that I can help you guys only, you know, I'm Going to give you the things that I see and you will take what is useful and discard the rest. But I have to start with a commitment to the three gates. Is it honest? Is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful? So there are several strictures that I use that have been given to me by extraordinary men and women over the years. And the things that I have tested in my own life, tested in my relationship, the things that I talk to myself about, the conversations that I have with my wonderful wife, Tananarive Due, and my family, those are the only things that I give you. They have to go through the filter of our experience so that at the very least we can say, this seems to be true to us. Would you please experiment with it? That's what science is. Science is experimenting. Science is you observe. The scientific method is you observe a phenomenon. You formulate a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon. You create an experiment to. To test your hypothesis. You perform the experiment. If you get the results that you expected, you publish your results. You tell other people, this is what I did. This is what happened. This is why I think it happened. Will you try this and see too? What Tinanarive and I are doing in our lives seems to have broken us through to an entirely new level of success, of health and happiness. It is not that these things are perfect. Tananarive can tell you we were just talking this morning. I know I ain't easy to live with. I know I can be too dogmatic. I know I have areas where I need to grow. But I also know that my wife is magnificent and I will never do better. I know that. That I have to try to understand that as deeply as possible. In terms of our relationship, in terms of our family, things are going so well there. In terms of physicality, things are going beautifully there. My martial arts instructor wants me to take more responsibilities in the organization, which will mean traveling around the country and teaching techniques. And this scares me. Anybody who's been on these things knows that I dealt with a lot of fear about certain aspects. Even though I'm. Today I got this certificate saying I'm a grandmaster. That's nice. I appreciate that. But I'm still the same human being, a different version of that human being. I sprouted a little bit differently, but it's the career stuff and Tananeri, would you be kind enough to just spend a couple minutes saying whatever you think is appropriate to say. We have to be careful, but I also want to. When things are going well with us, I want to celebrate with you. Guys, I really do. So, Tina, would you talk just a little bit about what's about to happen?

Well, it's not exactly a huge secret. If you listen to our podcast, which is lifewritingpodcast.com or if you're on my newsletter@tamanarive list, I'm assuming, Steve, you probably mentioned hints, at least in your list. But it looks like next week we're going to be starting in our first television writers room. Like our first traditional writers room. We've each written and had produced, like, freelance television scripts, but we've never been a part of a writer's room. Super brain. For a show that has been sold and will be on a major streamer. So it's. I can't say the show. The show has been announced. If you know us and you know who's in our circle, you could probably guess.

I will probably figure it out.

It's genre and it has been announced and it involves a showrunner that we.

Know we have spoken of.

Yeah. So all I'm gonna say, but we're very, very excited about it.

The little gray cells could probably figure it out if you like. But it shouldn't be more than a week or so before we'll be able to say, and by the way, this is why we might be shifting the show to Saturdays. So that will be Monday. I guess we will. So next I'll be sending out emails next. So our show will be on Saturday. We'll also constantly be putting this on YouTube and we'll be reposting it to Facebook. So if you're on the list, you'll absolutely be able to get as much notification as you want and be able to interact as much as you want, as much as is possible, because it is critical to us to continue this. I have made a promise that all the way through 2023, we're going to be doing this and we're going to be sharing with you everything we're doing, the highs and the lows and then showing how this, this engine, this thing we created, where we took emotional flooding and incantations, which are affirmations combined with movement and the ancient discipline of Tai Chi chuan, that we have united these things. And something happened when I took the magic formula and inculcated it into. Into these things. Something happened. Something clicked. I don't totally understand it. I don't totally. I can't totally say that I'm sure, because there's always coincidence. But what I am saying is, please, please, please try this. See whether or not you can get the same results. And so what we're going to do is we're going to share with you and we're going to workshop with you. You bring problems to us and we'll. That's right, Dennis. Dennis Dickens said kinesthetic reinforcement and mental programming. That is absolutely true. If you change your body, you always change your mind and your emotions always. You can go to therapy for years and still be just as messed up. But if you learn how to move differently, if you have a different relationship with your body as manifested in motion, that always changes the other things. So if you start with that realization, then by actually having a period every day where you are engaging with your body, your emotions and your mind, that's real. That's real. And if you choose the activity so that it represents excellence, what I call a kinesthetic template, a perfect template. If I could move that way, if I could do this with my body, if I could look this way, I will have reached a different goal. So you choose the physical activity for something that represents success to you. If I could do Tai Chi chuan in this particular case, I would have. And then you go to. If you. If you want to understand why this is so powerful, you look up Tai Chi chuan benefits or qigong benefits, and you will come to some government websites where experimental as well as observational practices have shown a vast array of positive benefits, from dissolving sensory motor amnesia, to recovering from chemotherapy, to joint mobility and arthritis. And. And just. Just a huge list of potentials that I would not put on my website. I would not put on the ad I sell for this stuff because it would sound like I'm lying. There's. The list is too long. But I think that when. So we're. We're talking about things here that go beyond my conscious understanding of it. Well, it sounds like method acting. Yeah, you bet. So what do you think would happen if you spent all day with your head down, talking as if you're depressed and saying bad things about myself? I'm nothing. I'm nobody. I've never accomplished anything. Everything I've ever done has turned crap. If you did that for 20 minutes a day, what do you think would happen to your life? Conversely, what do you think would happen if you spent 10 to 20 minutes a day walking with power, with a positive expression on your face, giving in energy to the world, talking as if you believed in yourself, associating with positive people, making commitments to be positive, to take control of your emotions. It's not that there is not horror in the world and bad things that happen in the world, we all know that's the truth. But what is true is that if our families are to be safe, if the children within us, that creative spark within us is to have an expression, we have to create a safe home for our hearts. We have to create a safe home for our families. And there is a part of us that can be the warrior at the gate, the lion or lioness at the gate, and say that Gandalf thing you shall not pass to the negativity that just for a few minutes a day, if you will step into a creative, energetic place and you just demand for yourself, I will move, I will think. I will speak as if I was that powerful person I want to be. If it's. Yeah, it's fake it till you make it. It absolutely is. But. But every champion I know of in any field I've ever looked at had the point where they said. Where they began to pretend to be the person that they wanted to be. Muhammad Ali was saying, I am the greatest. A long time before he ever got there. Part of that was to deal with his own fear because he was stepping into a place where huge men were going to hit him in the face and try to break his skull open. How much conf it take to be relaxed enough to access your genius in a situation where a split second error could kill you? So, yeah. Is there false ego about people entering into that arena? You bet there is. Anybody who knew me in college will tell you that I had a certain, you know, kind of cocky. I could do this. I can do anything. You know, I'm going to make it. I would tell everybody about how rich I was going to be and how successful I was. Was going to be. Why did I do that? Because I was terrified. Because everybody told me I could not. And I'm not just talking about, you know, racists or stuff like that. No, no, no. I remember sitting in front of the auditorium. Oh, no. In front of the cafeteria one day. I'm working on a story. I did that a lot. And this big black guy, he's an upperclassman. I was probably my first year of college. Upperclassman comes by and says, you know, hey there, little brother. You know, what are you doing? I said, I'm writing a story. He said, is that for a class? I said, no, I'm just writing a story. He said, did you see it on television? I said, no, I'm just writing a story. Read it in a book. No, I'm writing a story. And he stopped and he said, black people don't write. I got that everywhere. My mother was terrified that I would fail. My father had been a singer with Nat King Cole and had failed in his career dreams, and it had damaged our family. And my mother was terrified that this would happen to me. And she would. If she found my stories, she would tear them up, she would burn them. I had no reinforcement in my family or in my community for the dreams that I had. When I managed to find a friend who would let me tell them stories, man, did I ever cleave to that friend. Did I try to build tribe with that friend? And my first wife was one of the first people who really believed in me. And I needed that. Like roses need rain. Roses need rain. So if you have dreams, how many of us have had people mock their dreams, mark their goals, their ambitions? Who told you that you couldn't do it? Absolutely. So you need to tell yourself. You need to tell yourself every day. And the more negative the environment, the more critical it is that you spend some time every day fighting back against the demons. Every single day fighting back against the demons, if you will do that. And then you come here every week and let us talk to you, let us workshop to show you how these basic principles work. And please, please, please create a morning ritual. And please, if you would like me to be able to coach you, join the fire dance program at firedance tai chi.com so that I can coach you precisely. We're going to see some of that today because there's somebody who had a question. But before we get to that question, let's take a look at qigong, because I think that every day we're going to be talking about energy today, because energy is critical. And so the first thing I want to do is. Let's see. One of the best things that you can do to wake yourself up is joint mobility. In some ways, Tai chi is nothing more than a complex joint mobility drill. So I want you to start, and I will back up. You can probably hear my son yelling on his video game in the background. My office is in the midst of my life. So please understand that at some point we may have a separate studio for these things. But right now, I don't mind sharing my life with you guys. I think you can understand life is messy. In my office most certainly is a mess. So let's take a look at this. Push back this tray. God, I love my office. And I just like to tell people that I have my office because of my wife. Thank you again. Tanari, for finding this house and helping me create this office, I could not, could not do this without you. So joint mobility is a way that you can warm up your entire body in a relatively short period of time. So we're going to start. You can start sitting down where you are, or you can stand up.

If you can.

If you can stand up, that's great. Otherwise, sit down. We're going to start with our fingers and make sure that you're breathing smoothly. Remember, it all starts with breathing, diaphragmatic breathing. So make sure that you're breathing the whole time and that you never do anything that makes you hold your breath or interrupt your breathing. Anytime you're straining your breathing, you're going too far. So this breathing, we're going to start with the fingers. And if you want to, you can isolate individual fingers. So this finger, small finger, second finger, third finger, fourth finger, thumb, thumb, finger, finger, finger, finger. Okay, you can do that. And then I could go backwards around that. But let's move on to our wrists. And once again, you stay within the pain. Okay? Your pain shouldn't. Your discomfort should never go above a 3. On a scale of 1 to 10. I like keeping it down around a 2. You know, I don't mind just a little feeling of intensity, but learning how to calibrate so that it's intensity and not pain and pain, but not damage. Being able to tell the difference between pain and damage, that's the championship zone. We're talking about the health zone. Not performance, but health. Ok, so now let's go to the elbows. So you straighten your arms out, turn your thumbs down, bring your arms all the way in, and you do this. Make sure you keep breathing. You can do it like five times in each direction. Probably only do it about three times in each direction. Make sure you breathe. Air is free. And if I stuck your head in a bucket of water, you would give all the money you own for another breath of air. So you are wealthy. If you can just breathe and just feel how wonderful it is to be part of the world and have another day of life. Billionaires on their deathbed would give it all for one more day of life like you have. You're rich. You're rich beyond belief. All the way up, all the way back, all the way down, forward. Just feel your back stretch. Ah. Feel your chest stretch.

Yeah.

God, I love this. Put your arms out like this. You're gonna roll your shoulder over. Other way you're feeling it. I feel like you have ropes on your hands pulling you in different directions. Just really feel it. Ah, okay, that's great. Now your head is just a little bit different. It's a little bit different. I want you to listen carefully. You can lean to the side, forward and side, but don't lean your neck, your head back. The reason is if you lean, if I lean my head backwards, if I'm not careful, I'm going to compress my vertebrae and grind them together. We do not want that. You do not have permission to hurt yourself in my class. So stay within that. So you go sideways, front, side, side, front, side. And reverse it. Side, front, side, side, front, side. Okay. Okay, now put your hands on your waist. Okay? And what we want you to do is go side, front, side, back, side, front, side, back. Reverse it. Side, front, side, back, side, front, side, back. Now just freelance that just a little bit. Just feel yourself being just a little funky here. I mean, if you did this and you put on some bluesy music, something that's a little. Little sexy, a little sassy, a little naughty, it's really nice. It's really. Kind of feel that energy moving around, you know the energy I'm talking about. We're all adults here. Just feel that life, life energy. Just really kind of feel it. Let yourself feel it just a little bit. This one. We're all together in the same room is one of the most fun things to watch. Okay, shake that out. Now put your hands together and you're going to lean forward and circle back, circle. And you stay within the circle where you keep your balance and you're not hurting yourself. Listen to your body. If the circles have to be very small, that's okay, because what matters here is regularity. Those of you who cannot stand up do, you know, go back to your arms and shoulders and elbows and be sure to give thanks to your body for doing what it can. It is not your body's fault if it can't do more. Give it credit for having carried you so far. Love your body and look at movement as a way of saying to your body, think, thank you, thank you so much. And your body will open up and give you more. Okay, last one. We're going to bring the knees together. Roll out, roll onto the edges of your feet, the outside edges of your feet, then the inside edges of your feet. Outside, inside. Reverse it. Outside, inside. Once you learn this pattern, from the toes to the feet, toes, wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck, torso, hips, knees and ankles, you can shake it out. Okay, good, good, good, good, good. You can literally warm your whole body up in three Minutes, because every tendon, muscle, ligament in your entire body is connected to something that you just moved. So you can warm up the whole body. And now you're ready to get into your day. So with just three minutes in the morning. And of course, you could do morning ritual while you're doing that. Of course you could. We want you to be clever about this, to connect these things. So before we go any deeper into the subject of today's symposium, do we have any questions, any comments, questions and requests? I believe that there was one from somebody. No, no comments. Scott, did you have a question? Please unmute yourself.

Yeah.

You had asked me to ask about the transition from cloud hands to single whip.

Yes.

I'm a little fuzzy on that.

That's. It's okay. It's okay. So the most important thing, always start with the hips. Start with the feet. Don't worry about the hands. As I've often said, learning Tai Chi by watching hands is like trying to count the leaves in a forest by counting. You trying to count the trees in a forest by counting leaves and dividing by a thousand. So stick with the root, but also ask intelligent questions. Just like that. So let's take a look at. One of the things I want to start doing every week is taking some chunk of the form and going over it and over and over it so that you understand what it is that we are doing. So let's take a look at the movement that's called cloud hands. And then at the end of cloud hands, it transitions into single whip. That's correct. I believe so. Here we are. And I'll back up. So cloud hands starts in this single whip position where my knees are bent, my tailbone is tucked under, shoulders level, hips level. So it's like heels, knees, hips, shoulders. I'm in this position here. I'm in this position here. This hand is in kind of a crane's beak position. This hand is in a flattened palm position. And I'm relaxed. So I'm going to start here, just kind of relaxing. I can wiggle around, finding my balance here. Now let me see. How can I do this? Yes, I can. Okay, so the cloud hands are. I'm going to push to the corner so I'm facing 12 o'. Clock. I'm going to push to 1 o' clock with this hand. The low hand sweeps down. All right? And then this hand pushes and this hand comes up. Now, in actuality, both hands are moving continuously, but I'm freezing this just a little bit to show you. So I push here and I bring my feet together, touch here, and once again, I'm going to break it down so here and there. So that's the second one. So in other words, you get that the cloud hands is this movement. That's the cloud hands. Okay. And you do it three times. Actually, you're going to repeat the cloud hands sequence three times over the course of the form. But within each of those, you also repeat the movement three times. Now, if I've done that the third time, so this is the third one. Now here, as I would be going into number four, I push to the corner, and then I turn that push into the crane's beak, and I pull this. And instead of pointing to the corner, I come back into single whip. So we start in single whip. Do this, I think I was doing here three times, and then on the last one, go back into single whip. Let me come up here so I can show you more carefully. See? So I go for here, push into that, push into that. So would everybody kind of do that at the camera? Push, then turn it into this. Push, and then into this. Does that help? Scott, turn off, turn on your microphone.

Yes, it does. Thank you very much.

Great. I love it when people ask those specific questions. And let's take a look. Because the qigong, the joint mobility, the Qi balls, the constant bear, all these exercises are developmental, and you can put them all into the Tai Chi. You really can. So let's just take a look at how some of these ideas that we've just been talking about relate to the first five movements. Let's take a look at the first five movements of the form. So my heels square, my feet are balanced on the ground. Might kind of get that feeling, where is my balance? Is it on the right? Is it on the left? You try to get as close to 50, 50 as possible without actually getting there. You can't be 50, 50. A statue can be 50, 50. But living things will shift their balance side to side. Okay, so it's like 51, 49, 51, 49, 51, 49. The zero point is theoretical, not actual. You never quite get there. But if your heels are approximately 1 fist distance apart, you then imagine that you have threads attached to the backs of your wrist. And on an inhalation, because you expand on inhalation, you contract. On exhalation, you inhale, and rising hands put a little smile on your face. Feel okay. And the rising hands comes back. And as your hands press down, you bend your knees. Okay. Then you shift your weight to the right. Your toe can Stay on the ground, just raising it. For the sake of example, I shift my weight to the right, and now I press forward. All of my weight goes on to the left, and I turn in this direction. Seven Star. If I stop in seven star, it's called seven star because your mind should go through seven checkpoints. And if I'm remembering properly, the checkpoints are something like both heels, two, both knees, four hips, five, both elbows, six and seven. And my left hand touches the pulse point on my right wrist. I can just kind of stop there for a minute, run my mind through. Is my balance on the left, heel is touching the ground for reference, Face relaxed, hands in the center. Okay. And then this movement. Shoulder forward, turn the hips again, push to about 130. And now it's another one of those. Push to that crane's beak. And I slide my left foot out, and I'm in Single whip. Those are the first five movements. So you might very well. Does anybody have any questions? Questions about those? Because the truth is, if you understand the first, if Chin Mancheng is correct and the Constant bear is 80% of what there is in Tai Chi, then taking the constant bear into actual motion is closer to 85 or 90%. If you can really get the first five movements, you've gotten a lot. You've really gotten a lot. So anybody have any questions about that before we go on? Because I am just here for you, and we're having fun together, learning. Vicki Solomon is entering the waiting room. Okay, so I see. Does anybody raise their hands? Do you have any comments, questions or requests about literally anything that we have covered so far today or stuff that I've talked about in the past? Yes. Tom Barkley, would you unmute yourself? Unmute yourself, Tom. Yes.

Seems to take a little longer with the earpods. Watching that combination of capture and whip. What was the name of it?

Single whip.

Single whip.

Single whip.

That comes out of capture and pass hands, doesn't it? Or was it the other way around?

Thinking of the Kung Fu, it's push. And then I create this movement with my hand. Exhalation there. And your body is expanding at that point. So these things are kind of connected. You're contracting and then expanding. Later on, you will once again contract and then expand. So if you watch the breathing and the lower body, you'll get it. And then we can refine. If you have a. You know. Does that answer your question? If not, try asking a question from a different direction so I can be sure I'm answering it.

Which direction does the Teaching come from Tai chi to kung fu or kung fu.

No, Tai chi is a form of kung fu. Kung fu is a Chinese word. Or gong fu. It's just a term meaning accomplished technique or hard work. And you can apply. You could have kung fu at writing, at carpentry, at anything. So the formal turn is Kung fu wushu, which wushu is military art. So it's accomplished technique and military art. Tai chi chuan means grand ultimate fist. It is a form of gong fu Wushu. Okay, thank you. You betcha. I love this stuff. Okay. Who. Anna. Hello, Anna. How are you today?

Pretty good, Getting better. Could you repeat briefly the checkpoints? You said in Seven Star that it's called Seven Star because you're like conscious of the position of your body.

You bet. And remember, these points are conceptual and referential. This is not dogmatism. So you could say I'm going to pay attention to both feet too. Both knees, four, my hips, five, both elbows, six and seven. Okay, so you could do that. You could choose seven other checkpoints and you'd still be okay. You know, just, just remember all the checkpoints are made up. It's really a flow. And we just stop moments in the flow in order to give our little monkey mind something to focus on. But the real thing that the teacher is doing is creating a context in which you can flow and experience what happens when you have both structure and flow. Lauren Davidson.

Hi, Steven. I have a life writing question.

Go for it. I love it. Journey to life. So go ahead.

Yeah, we've got the. The six principles of working through to. To make stuff. Make stuff. And I'm finding myself starting to write longer things than short stories. And I'm curious as to how to adapt things like finish one to four stories a month when I'm getting into 15 plus thousand word stories.

Okay, so here's what I would say. What I suggest is not what you're going to do because you're an adult. You're a grown ass man. So you're going to do it your own way. However, I can make recommendations to you. My recommendation would be write short stories, one to four per month. Don't go to longer stories until you have sold. In other words, if you've sold 5,000 words of stories, you can write a 5,000 word story. If you sold 20,000 words of stories, you CAN write a 20,000 word story. So you use your sales to help you understand. Do it at your own pace. But I would. Are you published yet, Lauren?

I've got one sale of a Thousand word story.

Love it, love it, love it. That's great. You just stepped across a line. You are no longer a virgin. You know, seriously, you know, it is important to celebrate having stepped across that line. Fantastic. Now what we want to do is to replicate that success. We want you to sell story after story after story. And as long as you're becoming more and more honest and more connected to your sense of experience in life and more skillful, you will have important things to show us. So here is what I would say. If you wanted to stay within the structure of life writing, go right ahead and write your 15, 20, 30,000 word short stories, but also write really short stories, at least one per month. So you'd alternate between them. And a short story could be a half a page long. You could write flash fiction that's just two pages long. You know, a man was sitting alone in the room. The last man in the world was sitting alone in the room. There was a knock at the door. You know, that's a two sentence short story. Of course, the third sentence is he opened the door and it was a woman. But you know, it's. He was happy. And so he said, my name is Adam. And she said, hi, my name is Isabel. Anyway, so you. Which if you want to stay within that structure, which is designed to stair step you from where you are to where you want to be, I suggest that you take the smallest steps possible. That you, you set yourself up for success after success after success, rather than taking too big a bite and conceivably risking failure. And that is the biggest single error that I see otherwise good young writers make is they try to write novels before they publish short stories. I think that that is, it's like stepping into the black belt class. When you're a white belt, you're going to get the crap knocked out of you. Of course there are some prodigies, there are people who can do that, but don't gamble that you're one of them, because we're talking about your life. So write what's in your heart. But if you would allow me the honor of providing you with safety rails, also write short stories. And by the way, if you will do that within the context of this, one of the things I do is I say if you got a really good, really short story from time to time, we can actually workshop those stories on the call. You know, if you're following this path, if you're in the programs, then we can actually afford to spend the time to work with you. As you know, we're about to get extremely busy, but so our ability to give away our time is. We can't afford to coach people for the kind of money that the average person can afford. So the only choices we have are based on to give our time away to the people who are in these programs or charge somebody a. I think that the technical term is a shitload of money to do coaching. And frankly, I don't get a whole lot of pleasure from that. I'd rather coach people like you guys, you know, so if you write really short stories, I can take a look at a three, four page short story and I can say, oh, this is what you need. You need this, this, this, and this. I can't necessarily do that with a 15 short story. Okay. Does that answer your question, Lauren?

I think it gives me some stuff to work with. Thank you.

You betcha. Megan, you had a question. Where's my Maggie? Hello, Meggie.

I didn't actually have a question and that's why I lowered my hand. I had a comment and we're kind of past, far past it, but I just going through the warm ups with you this morning or this afternoon, just now, it. It brought into my mind in sharp focus the. That in. In the Chen style class that I was able to take for a couple of years, I. One of our warm ups, you know, most of them were pretty similar, was the toe roll. So because your toes need to be. I call it that. She didn't call it that. She didn' the name. I'm sure it was Chinese.

Yeah.

Basically you just, you go up on your toes, you know, you get up on your tiptoes and then you kind of roll on your toes to one side and you go in circles.

It's almost like doing constant bear on your toes maybe.

I don't know. Yeah, you keep rolling them around in a circle, you know, four or five times just as a warm up. But I wasn't. I don't remember having that, you know, as an exercise before then. And when you just.

No, it wasn't. Hawkins did not with me in Hawkins's class and he did not teach that the joint mobility drills comes from another source.

Right. But I'm just, I don't. I don't feel and hear that in just what we just went through. And I wanted to point it out as a.

Well, here's what I would say about that. That, that I'm going that everything is being engaged, but it's not being engaged as powerfully as if we isolated as you just did. And that Isolation is very valuable. So if I say you can move through your whole body in three minutes, that doesn't mean you can't spend 20 minutes and do specialized things. And instead of just going in circles, you go in cloverleafs and figure eights and, you know, increasing levels of complexity and increasing levels of isolation. Of course you can. You could look at belly dancing exercise and popping and locking exercises from different forms of hip hop dance, and you will find exercises that you can adapt. And what's critical is that you be intelligent. This is your body. This is your life.

I just wanted to throw it out there as something that I found when I started that Chen class. I was in the middle of healing from a really bad injury in my hip, and I found that toe rolling part, you know, just like this, getting up on your toes, you know, and to be enormously useful for regaining my balance.

Fantastic. And so I just wanted to throw.

It out there for people.

Thank you, Meg. Thank you. I would suggest that to you guys. You know, try that. Especially if balance is an issue. If you. Some kind. Great. Clarissa Walker.

Hello. Thank you so much, as usual. Thank you. So I just wanted to follow up and then ask you and t a question. You took time a few weeks ago to give me some suggestions about flash fiction. You said try it out. It was my first time ever trying micro fiction. And I've been studying it and I love it. And I'm getting to. I do my morning ritual. I love that too. And I'm starting.

It's the foundation of everything we do.

Yes. I mean, I mean, it's really. This stuff works, you know, you know what you do and you know what you're talking about. But I had a question. Really was from last week's. Some things you said. Last week I was in an environment that was too loud for me to unmute. But you were helping a gentleman and the conversation was about his son. But I just wanted to ask that in a writing way if unt could comment on, like, when you're. When you're doing things like memoir narratives or memoir work as. As you're writing, inevitably you're gonna. But kind of like, intersect with the stories of other people, whether it's family members or people that. What are your thoughts on, like, principles as a writer to do that responsibly when you want to be honest and you want to tell the. You want to tell a story that's going to be meaningful to someone else, but you know that by telling your story, you're inevitably telling the story of.

Someone else, would you, please?

An interesting question, actually. We're going to be taping a podcast later with Ashley C. Ford, who just wrote her memoir, Somebody's Daughter. We want to talk to her about her process. So in some ways, it's too bad we haven't already done that interview. I did a memoir with my late mother, and frankly, I am. Steve knows this about me. Very cautious, if not sometimes over cautious, about stepping on people's toes from especially this vantage point. I used to work for the Miami Herald, and I had a dating column. And I learned the hard way that writing about people, even obliquely not naming them. I had somebody's friend call me up, just very upset because they thought I was just making a little bit of fun, not even that much fun. But he never got off his phone in the first 10 minutes of our date. It was a dating column, and the friend was very, very upset because apparently he was very upset. That. Anyway, what I said was true, but was it appropriate? Was the question I asked. And ever since that time, I've been very careful about how I. I mean, how I use other people's lives. And there was an incident in the book I wrote with my mom that I thought was very important to include that she'd had a half brother who was executed as a juvenile, and that had a profound effect on her and her respect for her father because he wouldn't go to the courthouse to even be a character witness, he was so afraid in Jim Crow, Florida. But I respected her wishes not to include it in the book. But I did fictionalize it in a short story later. And my entire next novel, the Reformatory, is a fictionalized version of a real person who died in 1937. I don't feel entirely comfortable about how his namesake, who is still alive, a cousin, a distant cousin of mine, will feel about their names being used as the protagonist of my book. I thought about changing it, but in this case, it's like, well, he's my relative, too, and he died in 1930, 37. And I'm trying to bring his story to the world, so I'm not trying to hurt him in any way. So I think the bottom line is it starts with respect. I do not like tell alls. I do not like celebrity tell alls, where people are talking about who they slept with and when they slept with them, and he was still married and this and then the other. Why? Why is that important to anybody? To write it, just to write it doesn't make sense to me. But when you feel like there's something that, you know is just integral to you telling your story. I would change details. I would be oblique. I would not name names when possible. Like, if it's a super, super close relative, like a father or uncle. Oh, that's where you really have to wrestle with it because Ashley wrote some very uncomfortable things about her father in her memoir, that he had been imprisoned for rape and she herself had been a victim of sexual assault. So it was very relevant, this whole thing. And she chose to go out with that. I don't know if I could have. So really, ultimately, it's every individual writer's choice. But I would say be respectful. Be oblique when possible. But if it is really important to your story, those sometimes other people are a part of your story.

What I would say about that, that relates specifically to the principles in finance is that the three gates are very important. Is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful? If it is true and useful and you can find a way to say it kindly by obscuring information, by being oblique, whatever, then great. If you can get their permission, great. If it passes. But I would be very careful if it did not pass all three gates. There might be times when you have to do something that is not kind to a person who abused you, but you figure you know something in the larger sense of the world. To say this will save other people. And the truth is that demons breathe in the dark and on some level, even their own soul wants to be cleansed. That, if I can say this in the right way, but be careful about that, because access to media is power, and so power needs to be buffered with responsibility. But if you use the three gates, then I think that the principles that Tananarive is talking about will work themselves out. But be very careful, but you do have a right to your truth. Hold both at the same time. Be an adult, be wise, carry your own cross. But given that you can speak about what your journey was, it is your journey. It's your life. You have a right to it. But do try to follow the three gates if at all possible. Does that make sense? Hopefully that's useful and kind. It is.

It is.

It always is.

Thank you both. Thank you both.

Absolutely. To be. You know, one of the things that I wanted to say, and I'll come back to this in a minute, I'll answer some more questions, is that after this period, during this period where we were working in Hollywood, are almost certainly going to raise the price of this program, that what we wanted to do was to create an initial community. And so please, please, please, if you like, what's going on here, join soon, as soon as possible, so that I can coach you so that you're not paying more for it. But the people who come in, that price will always stay the same. That price will always stay the same. Once you're in your grandfather, I don't care if it raises eventually to $97 a month, you're still going to get it at 27 and we're going to add more and more value to what it is that we're doing. Any other comments, questions or questions? And then I will talk about a little bit of a lecture that I wanted to do today. I like to lecture, but I also like to just answer questions as much as possible. How can I help you? Is there some way that I can serve you? If there is, please let me know because otherwise I will just talk. As you can probably tell, I can talk on any subject at any length at any time. But. Okay, then let me, let me get on to the subject I want to talk about today. Okay, I think that that's close enough. So if you look at this we talked about, might have to go back a little bit further. I can tilt the camera up a little bit. What you will see over here is this is the process of behavioral modification. It's one way of looking at the process of behavioral modification. Step one is you identify the pattern you want to change. Identify the pattern that you want to change. And yeah, zoom has a whiteboard integral and I will start every week. We're trying to make things a little bit better in some way, but I have to apologize for not having complete mastery over the technology. I will get better. So the first step is you identify the pattern you want to change. The second step is you identify what you want to change the pattern to. What is the pattern you want? So for instance, if you were to say, I want to eat better, say, I want to stop eating so much sugar, that's pattern number one. I want to stop stress eating. The second thing is, what do you want to change it to? I want to eat in a way that nurtures and supports a high energy lifestyle. Step three is you raise your energy level. This is often forgotten. Step three is you raise your energy level. Step four is that you practice the new program. So it's like I say, I want to eat supporting my body. So I raised my energy level. And now I'm going to try to eat only good foods, you know, salad and clean proteins and clean carbohydrates. Step five is critical. Fail successfully. What that means is you understand ahead of time that if you try to do something that's going to change your life massively, in all likelihood, you're not going to be able to go directly to that. You're going to try it and you're eventually going to drop off, you're going to fall off the horse. That's just common sense. We all know that from watching babies learn how to walk. Why is it that we don't take that knowledge as adults and use it to let ourselves off the hook? I'm going to try this, and then I'm going to fail. And I will get some information, remove the emotions. The way you fail successfully is you remove the emotions so that you've just got the information. I did this, this happened. I did this, that happened. If you remove the emotions and just look at the data now, you can realign yourself and you start the process over again. And if you go through that process, what do I want to change? What do I want to change it to raise my energy level? Try the program. Fail successfully.

Learn.

Start over again. If you do that and you stay out of guilt, blame or shame, you will find that every time you go through the cycle, you get a little bit better. Just a little bit better. Not every single time, but it's going to be kind of like this. And so you have to give yourself the life writing program. With writing, the last step is Repeat this process 100 times. What do you think that's about? That's about giving yourself room to fail. That's about being absolutely clear on the fact you're not going to go straight to any goal you want. You can have to. You know, you're climbing to the top of mountain. You can't define unless there's already steps there. You can't go straight up the mountain. You're going to go around cliffs and you're going to have to backtrack and have to. This. You have to. That's life. Especially if you're living a life where there are no clear paths. You know, we all have situations in life where somebody says if you take step A, B, C and D, you'll get directly there in the other paths where it's like, you know, I can't tell you how to get directly there, but this is what I did. And that's that thing about having a mentor, having mentors, people who have already done the thing that you're trying to do, preferably starting from where you started. Okay, so this is this is a pattern. So given that to the degree that that is true, who can look at this pattern and see in their own lives how either they have used this or how they could have used this? Raise your hand if you can. Great, great, great, great, great, great. So one of the pieces that is critical is energy. And we've talked about the fact that fatigue makes cowards of us all. You know the reason you can't teach an old dog new tricks and is that the old dog is tired. So raising your energy level is a science in itself. And if you don't have any goal in life other than doubling your energy, just that goal by itself will change your life. Brendan Burchard, who I've mentioned many times, did research. He did a book called High Performance Habits where he was able to identify six habits of ultra high, high performing people. They were clarity, urgency, productivity, influence, courage and energy. And that once you look at each of these things can be developed, each of them can be enhanced. And once you take responsibility for all six, if you increase any one of them, it increases the rest. So energy is critical. So how do you increase energy? How do you do that? Well, there are four basic things that you need to look at for energy. The first one, I have to push this back a little bit, number one, and somebody writing this into the chat would be great. The first thing is exercise. So you look at when you talk about people who are really tired, paradoxically speaking, the right kind of exercise gives you energy for months to many different reasons. And there's both a yin and a yang aspect to it. Tai Chi is kind of yin energy. I mean, you can do it in a way to get Yang energy. Yang energy is increasing the amount of energy you have. Yin energy is learning how to utilize the energy you have more efficiently and effectively. So qigong is about relaxing, so you can feel the energy you've already got. Now we stay within that flow, do that and lots of good things happen. Lots of good things happen. Or you can do the usual thing of lifting weights and running and stretching. Well, actually stretching is almost a yin thing. Lifting weights and running, which increases energy in your body by increasing oxygen utilization and training your mitochondria and all sorts of interesting stuff. So there's increasing the energy and then there's getting more sensitive to the energy you have and getting more sensitive to the energy you have. You can get better at until the last breath you ever take. So there's a limit to how much raw, rough Yang energy you can get. And that generally peaks sometimes in your early 30s. But in terms of being able to have abundant flowing volcanic energy relative the amount of energy you need in your life, I think that that can increase. Well, I'm still trying to figure out what the limits of that are. It's wonderful. You can actually get more, more and more better and better at that as you get older. And of course there are going to be some inevitable ends to how much more you can advance that. But exercise of one kind or another. And I would say that stretching is a really good exercise because what stretching actually is, is learning how to release tension. It's not lengthening the muscles as much as it is de inhibiting the golgi tendon organ, telling your body that it is safe to relax. So you move into one position and then you try to breathe smoothly there. And then you move into another position, try to breathe smoothly there. Now there are forms of stretching that are designed to kind of hack your body's golgi tendon organs and the reflex there. I think that those are excellent for performance. If you're in a martial arts class or something like that, fantastic. But that's kind of performance for health. I'm a little cautious about them. I have to admit that I don't have profound knowledge of those techniques. I don't do them. But if any of you have experience with them, feel free to let me know. I think you really can increase flexibility. You can do this. But what you want is for your body to be relaxed enough so that when you are moving you're not fighting yourself. But aside from that, you're going to need something that is aerobic. The aerobic zone is the zone where you are moving intensely enough that you can talk but you cannot sing in general. That's a really good rule of thumb about it. So you want to push yourself until yeah, you're breathing hard, but you can still talk. You know, you don't need more than that for health. For performance you might need more than that. But performance, you know, it's Achilles choice. A short glorious life or a long dull one. You, you know, champions are always making trade offs there, so be careful about that. But all we're talking about is health is having the energy you need to work hard all weekend, all week and party on the weekend. You know, to me that's what I have enough energy, I'm working hard, get up and I, I, I love my family and I love myself and I scritch my kitties and I work hard, hard all day long. And I'm here on this broadcast with you, and I give you my energy. And I have to pump my energy up a little bit for this. Of course I do, because I'm asking you to share your energy. So I have to lead that energy to a massive. To a real degree. Somebody put up a whiteboard here, and I don't want that right now. Okay? So. But I will learn how to do that. I promise you I will. And that's. That's my promise to you. So that's exercise. The next thing is sleep. One of the most consistent. The average person needs between seven and nine hours of sleep a night. You know, I sleep. I like to sleep until my body feels light and cool in the morning. So I'll literally lay there and do a scan through my body and let my body tell me when it wants to get out of bed by it starts moving a little bit, I'll actually kind of start stretching and moving and twitching. And it's like my body is saying, time to get out of bed, Steve. If I have to get up before my body does that, I'm going to feel just a little heavy all day long. And I know it. And sometimes you accept that. But what we want is a sustainable, healthy life where you have the energy necessary to do the things you need to do to move yourself and your family, not just out of a survival state, because survival is just about, you know, getting to zero, thriving, feeling dynamic, feeling optimistic, being able to pull the people around you with you and inspire them. So how much rest do you need and the quality of rest? Really look into that. Don't cheat yourself on sleep. Sleep is free. Okay? Get the sleep you need. Okay. Number three is diet. And whereas there are a ton of different ways of looking at diet, each one of them, you could go down that silo infinitely. In general, in terms of macronutrients, it's making sure that you're not taking in more calories than you're burning up. In terms of micronutrients, it's going to be. In some ways, you could look at it as an inverted pyramid with 3 parts fresh fruit, vegetables to 2 parts complex carbohydrates to 1 part lean protein, and just a fraction of fats and sugars that most dietary patterns from around the world optimize in something in that arena, you know, the. What you don't want is the opposite of that, where the ma. The majority of your diet is fats and sugars, and the smallest part of your diet is fruits and vegetables. You don't want that. So if you just kind of thought about I want to eat bountiful fruits and vegetables. And then I need enough carbohydrates. Carbohydrates is just fuel, carbohydrates to run my engine every day. And then I need enough proteins to rebuild the muscles and vitamins and minerals and so forth. And then I have enough fats for what my body needs there and also for taste. And then sugar is for fun, you know, just like this. I love ice cream. I love cookies. Actually, I'm a carb fiend. I have to be careful about that. I have a friend who used to call me God's gift to the 711 because I love Slurpees so much. But so you be careful to burn it off. That's all. You be careful to burn it off. And the last thing is goals. In other words, you have to be able to tell yourself, if you get this extra energy, what are you going to do with it? If you get this extra energy, what are you going to do with it? Because there are people who literally say, if I have more energy, people just expect more from me. People say, if I made more money, I just have to pay more in taxes and my relatives would just want that money from me. Unless you feel that doing a thing will increase the pleasure and diminish the pain, you won't do it. So if you say to yourself, and I suggest that you look here at the three centers, Body, emotions and mind. If you had more energy, how would it help your body? If you had more energy, how would it help the people that you love? How would you be able to serve them? How would you experience more joy if you had more energy? In terms of your plans for the world, how would you be able to facilitate your plans if you had more energy? If I had more energy, how would that connect to your spiritual view of what it is you want to give the world before you die? If you have those, if you can see how that energy helps your body, helps your emotions, helps your intellect, goals, so forth, and helps your spiritual vision of yourself, it becomes easier for you to exhibit the discipline necessary to stay on track. And you can, like I said, if you take a look at what are we doing in fire dance. One of the reasons I love this program is that Tai Chi by itself can help you deal with all these things. In other words, it can be exercise that sensitizes you to the energy you have. It can be exercise that increases the amount of energy available by. By literally training your body to move more efficiently. That's actually the energy you have that's still yin, but increasing your oxygen utilization and training your mitochondria simply by bending your knees more until you're actually sweating when you move. Sweating is very, very healthy. Unfortunately, there are people, especially if they're neurodivergent, who sweat is a very uncomfortable thing for them. I understand that. And so swimming might be a better exercise than anything out of the water, but it helps with that. It helps in terms of sleep because if you're training your body to relax, you can use that as you're going to sleep. You can literally go over your body from toe to head, telling your muscles to relax, feeling the relaxation. You can learn techniques to do that so that you relaxing. I have found that if I do deep, slow, diaphragmatic comments, diaphragmatic breathing, that I slip into sleep more rapidly. In terms of diet, if I start noticing how what I eat relates to how I feel physically when I do the Tai chi, I'll start noticing that there are certain things that I eat and I do the Tai chi that day. It feels different and not in a good way. Or sometimes I can notice how I eat today. How I ate yesterday influences how I feel today. You know, when I have, you know, when it's. I have big beef ribs or something like that, those big, fatty, nasty, delicious ribs, I'm gonna notice the next day. I feel like there's a lump of lead sitting in my stomach. And so it's like, oh, God, once you start noticing stuff like that, you almost hate it. It's like you had to tell me that eating this is bad. I knew it. But you had to actually show it to me. To heck with you. I'm not gonna exercise. Let me just lay on the couch and eat ribs. But if you're moving, you get into especially a movement like the Tai Chi. And in terms of the goals, well, we're bringing that in there by chanting our affirmations and visualizing our role models and washing ourselves with positive emotions and seeing the timeline between us and the thing that we judge. So we're taking care of all four at the same time. So this pattern, the fire dance pattern, Firedance Tai Chi.com is set up to help you increase your energy. All you'd need. Then can you add, you know, the five minute miracle? Are you taking your breaks every three hours? If you have done that, then are you piggybacking the five Tibetans on top of there in just a couple of minutes? You literally can. If you do this right, you literally can take care of all the basic core fitness you need all day long in just a few minutes, at the same time that you're also dealing with stress and learning how to shift your emotions so that when you finish one activity, you are shifting gears for the next activity so you can start everything clean. What we're doing to a huge degree is we're stacking. We're stacking technology on top of technology on top of technology until you get everything you need to break through your goals. And you have those goals in all three arenas. There's a goal in the body, there's a goal in your mind, There's a goal in your emotions. And it is my belief that you cannot shift. You cannot simultaneously grow in all three areas without actually growing as a human being, that you could grow in one of those areas and simply ignore the other two. And that's most of what you see in terms of really successful people. They make a lot of money, but their relationships are trash and they're destroying their bodies. Or they live in the gym. They got great bodies, but they live in their car, in the gym, they got no families and they're broke. Or they have wonderful relationships and wonderful open hearts, but they're not taking care of themselves physically and they can't support themselves financially. What I want for all of you is all three. Balance. It is my belief that balance is the only thing it is safe to be obsessive about. And even that you can go too far. Even that you can go too far. So before we go any further, and we're starting to go toward the wind up here, any more comments, questions, or requests, and be sure that you're asking us anything. There must be every week. I would guess that we get off this call and you think, oh, God, I should have said that, or I didn't understand that. Comments, questions and requests. Hands raised. Is Kathy about to raise her hand? Yes.

It was faster for me to do this than find the hand button I.

Was trying to find. I just did that.

If you could just repeat the seven things you mentioned earlier. Clarity.

Urgency.

Production.

Oh, six things. Six things. Six things.

Yes.

Clarity. Energy. Urgency. Productivity. Influence. And courage. Clarity. Do you understand exactly what you want and what needs to be done in order to accomplish it? Where are you on the map? Clear. Be honest about that. Energy. Do you have the aliveness? Do you have the aliveness to move? Because you have to overcome inertia to shift from one period in your life to the next, raising your energy level. You know, if you increase the speed on an old record player, the needle will start skipping across the grooves. Okay, that's what you want. You want to skip out of your groove. You want to find it easy to shift from one pattern to another. So raise your energy level. Urgency. Do you have a sense that you have to do it now? Manana is a poison. The feeling, I can put it off, I'll put it off, I'll put it off. And one day you'll be on your deathbed and say, I shouldn't have put it off. I thought I'd have more time. Do you understand that this game has a limited time frame? This game called life. And for every goal that you have, there's a period where succeeding at it is great. Another period where it's useless, it's too late, you missed it to feel urgency it. That's what gets you off the couch. Productivity. Are you doing the work? Chop wood? Carry water every day? Are you doing the work? Do the work, do the work. Do the work, do the work. Make your peace with the fact that it's going to take work to get where you want to go. Learn to enjoy the work, even if it's only by saying, thank God I have the health to do this work. If you did not have the help to do the work, you'd wish you did, so why not be grateful right now and instead of resenting the work, say, I don't wish my life was easier. I want to be stronger so I can deal with what's in front of me, so I can take care of my family and deal with my dreams and make the world a better place. Influence. Anything you want in life is probably a lot of the things you want in life, especially any money. Every dollar you get in the world, you're going to get from somebody else. Dollars are just the symbols of the value that your tribe holds for you. In many ways not completely true, but it's true enough. So sales and marketing is about convincing people that they have a need, need, preferably an honest need, and convincing them that their money will do more for them in your pocket than in theirs. Or how about you convincing your children that they will be better off long term if they do their homework, probably by offering them some short term pain or short term reward. In a date or with a partner, you're trying to convince someone that if they spend time with you, they will be happier than if they spent that time alone or spent that time with someone else. You're saying, this is who I am and I am prepared to make sure that when we end our date you walk away from me feeling like that was a wonderful experience. I felt good. And it has to be on their terms. So influence to be able to influence other people to act in a way that is in alignment with your goals and dreams. Because the accomplishment of any goal is going to require the building of a tribe, the building of customers or transfer of enthusiasm, one person to another and courage. How do you deal with your fear? Reaching your goals is going to test you. Changing your identity is going to trigger fear. Always does, always will. So you have to have courage, influence, productivity, urgency, energy and clarity. That the magic formula is what gets you into the arena. You have to make sure you don't have a zero in terms of mapper model, daily action, gratitude, intentions and belief, conviction. But once you're in that arena, it is possible to piggyback other disciplines, other frameworks that have to do with success within that specific arena. And I want you guys to go beyond me. I mean, I can offer you the magic formula but please go out, research, bring things back to the tribe. And Brendon Burchard's hyperfilm performance secrets are pretty good set. They're not bad. I teach them to my son, my wife and I work, work on them. We're using them in this next challenge coming up. I use them every day. I build them into my morning ritual. I will literally say that I kept my morning ritual by saying, all the clarity I need is within me now. All the energy I need is within me now. All the urgency I need is within me now. All the productivity I need is within me now. All the influence I need is within me now. And all the courage I need is within me now. And invariably one or more of those things will be the thing that triggers the voice in my head that says, oh, what a, What a bunch of crap, you know, What a bunch of crap, you know, you're scared. You don't have any. You're tired. You don't know what you're doing. You know, why not just lay on the couch? This, today is a day to take off. Nobody's going to listen to you. I've got those voices in my head. I have to fight against them. And this tool that I'm begging you to use, firedance tai chi.com. please, please, please. I want you to get in before we have to raise that price. And that's going to happen soon. Now, these principles, we want you to start with our principles, experiment with them and then try your own. And if something is really working, bring it back. I'm happy to just like, oh, wow. Everything I'm teaching you is stuff I learned from somebody else. There are some things that I synthesized. I'm a very good synthesizer. But I adore it when my students bring stuff to me and then I can test to say, do I have that? How do I deal with that? Many, many times in the past, somebody's brought something I said I didn't have that. That helps me to complete the dynamic sphere of life a little better. So, Kathy, does that answer your question? I actually, you know, I went into that a little bit more because you triggered me. It was. I should have had a trigger warning on that question, Kathy.

But it's all good, Steve. We all love listening to you.

That's why we're here.

So thank you. And I love you guys. I am so happy to do this. Look, look, there's nothing normal or average about any of us. Some of us play in the illusion that we're the same. I never had that privilege. All my life I've known that I was not part of a group in that sense. My tribe is so important to me. The people I have found who are also trying to be the best they can, who are willing to accept that about me. I am so tired. I got so tired of being treated like a mutant. And now I love to gather around myself people who are either already high performing or people willing to commit to being high performing. I'm writing a book on ethical seduction for incels because what I see there is guys who have no idea what the mating game is are terrified they're not going to find partners. That fear turns into anger. They find a community of other angry men and they become potentially violent. I'm going to cut that off at the root. Cut that off at the root. Because I believe we can actually control our lives. Yes, there is racism and sexism and classism and elitism and all those different things. And we should change society and make it better. But while we're doing that, what is needed to change society are leaders. People take responsibility for their lives. What is necessary for your family is that you be a leader. What's necessary for your dreams is that you be a leader. And every one of you that shows up here and lets me talk to you about these things, from my perspective, every single one of you is a member of my tribe. And I love you. And I will do all in my power to stand between you and harm while you evolve yourselves. So I guess we're gonna end this today. That's right. Raise the collective energy. Ross so we're gonna end this today. And unmute yourselves and, you know, and say goodbye to the tribe until next week. Unmute yourselves. Hi, everybody. Bye, everybody.

Sign me on Facebook.

See you next week.

Have a great weekend for being here.

Please, please, please join the finance group. If you have. If finances are what stop you, send me a personal message, let me know what your situation is. We might be able to work something out. We have some scholarships that we can offer. We have some discounts we can offer. And, you know, we want your presence. I'm glad to take your money. It makes a lot of interesting things possible. We give away thousands of dollars every Christmas and basically most of the profits that we make on the products we sell, we give away because we make most of our money writing, you know, so we don't. We don't need that, but we want it. You know, it's okay, it's fun, it's fun, but it's not about money. It's about is. You need this to transform. You're willing to commit to it. Let us know what we need to do to get you in the program. But if you can, you know, if you can be part of this, go to financet.com please, in the next couple days. Enjoy, so that you don't miss the, you know, the current really low ball price. Take care, everybody. We love you. If you have any questions, email me. Personal message me, leave a note on kajabi, whatever you need. And remember, always be the hero or heroine in the adventure of your lifetime. Namaste. See you next week.

Namaste.