Having the best 2023

Hi, Steve Barnes here. This is Life Riding Live. Maybe it's just going live on Sunday, but I'm making a commitment to having the best 2023 I can possibly have. And I would love to have you guys along for the ride. Anything that I can answer about it. I mean, I've got so many reasons want to do things right, so many reasons to want to get things right. And I had several different articles I posted about the question of how can you do this? I mean, there are people in this year and I'm not expecting them to, you know, think that they can just, you know, jump up and shake that off. No. Or that the things that have happened to them are not real or illusory or anything like that. So if you're in that category, please understand that I'm not speaking to you at this moment. And I respect where it is that you're coming from. I'm speaking to people who can see that and feel that it is valid and feels that there is a possibility that 2023 could be their best year ever. And I want to take a look at the question of, well, what would that mean and what would we do? How would we behave if we wanted to have 2023 as that best year ever? I have a lot of different reasons to want to pay attention to this, to want to take this possibility seriously. I mean, I don't know what's possible. I do know that at this moment it feels as if I have some tools that are creating the life that I desire at a reliable pace. I mean, slower than I'd like. But I'm trying to move my whole life forward at one time. If I wanted to move in just one arena, if I wanted to just improve my money or just improve my fitness or just improve my relationship, that'd be a lot easier than trying to do it all at the same time. To do it all at the same time, to simultaneously upgrade your physical self, your financial self, and your personal relationships would require that you actually change. You couldn't fake it, I don't think. At least that's a theory. That's the hypothesis that you can't fake it if you're doing with all three things. And that's exactly what it is that I want. So if I was going to do this, then one of the things I'm going to have to do is to talk about it publicly so that people will challenge me. So that I have to think about it. I have to answer questions, well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about this? What about this? What about this? As long as I bounce it around inside my head, it's nothing. If I take actions, that's better. If those actions seem to correspond with my hypotheses, that's even better. If I can tell other people what I'm discovering or what I'm doing and they test it in their own lives, or they think about it and challenge me with questions. Now, either I'm making the world a better place because I'm putting something out that is a valid path, or. Or I am error checking myself. I'm using the group mind, the community, to help me understand whether or not these things are true. And that seems like a good balance because, you know, we don't have forever to play this game, Cult life. And I do think that the last month of the year is a good time to look at what you've been doing and begin to make your plans for the next year. I don't want to wait until New Year's Day and create a to do list, you know, or a goal list of this. I want to be thinking about that now. So let me think about this and go over all three of the arenas. What do I have if I was to look at my family? I have depths of love and respect and connection with Tananari that I would. Would like very much to deepen. I'd like very much to understand myself more in terms of my reactions to her, especially when I have a negative reaction to something that's been said or done. Ask myself what's causing this? What's happening inside me? How am I responsible for what has happened here? What's going on here? Because the only part of the equation I can change is me. So it doesn't do any good to look at other people that you are in an intimate connection with without looking at yourself as well. So what can I do there in terms of my son, Jason? Jason is just making me so happy. He agreed to aim at improving by 1% a week. He has been doing better than that. I mean, really, since we moved in this house, it looks to me like he's been improving 1% per day. I mean, you know, maybe, maybe 4% a week, something like that. I mean, it's been remarkable. And I am just. I love him so much and I'm so proud of him and he's starting to see himself. But I can be a better father. I can be a better role model. I can communicate more clearly. I can make sure that he understands that I see everything that he's been doing and trying to do. And I can just let him know who his father is more. Let's just put it out for him. This is the legendary lament. I didn't keep up with my New Year's resolutions. How about we avoid tearing ourselves down for not carrying out our plans perfectly? Absolutely. In fact, when you set a New Year's goal, you should anticipate that you will not keep it perfectly. And what you're looking for is not keeping it perfectly. And by the way, thank you, Eric. It is. These conversations are. Conversations are better than lectures. Okay. To me, I like to know who's out there. You set a goal because in the performance of that goal, if you take a look at the hero's journey, there are going to be failures. You know, that's the dark night of the soul. And you confront evil and lose. So the only way you find out what the territory is is by testing it. The only way you find out whether that where the ground is stable is by, you know, crunching through the ice. So if you, if you already had the ability to accomplish a goal, you'd already have the goal. That's the way I look at it, that, that especially in terms of goals that are transformational. And that's not 100 true, but it is legitimately the way I look at it. If I could do this, I'd already have done it. So I can't do this. But I have the confidence that I have the ability to learn how to do this. So this, that's, that's the thing. So I'm not going to beat myself up when something bad happens, because I will understand that beating myself up is one of the tools that my ego uses to stop me from changing. My ego does not want to die. And in the process of moving from one period, one position in my life to another, you're going to go through an ego death if it's, if it's a big enough thing. So the failures are critical. Any scientist will tell you that in, in terms of experimental process, they, they, you know, it's like, you know, the person, the story, possibly apocryphal, about, you know, somebody finding out Edison had tried 10,000 ways to make a light bulb and he failed. You know, and so somebody said, well, aren't you discouraged that you failed 10,000 times? And Edison supposedly said, I didn't fail 10,000 times. I found 10,000 ways that won't work. If you start with the assumption that there is something that's going to work, then everything that you try that doesn't work is removing one of the potential wrong paths. So you want to ask yourself, what is the healthiest reaction to not getting the result? Healthiest reaction to missing a day of work, a day of exercise, a day of meditation, a day of this, a day of that, a day of writing? It is. The healthiest way would be looking at the failure as information, as data, rather than adding emotion to it. Ah, I postponed this all day long. And then the end of the day came and I didn't do it. Great. Now I know tomorrow the thing that I didn't do today, I'm going to do that first. Because what's going to happen is the way my mind does it is. It will tell me that it is legitimate to postpone, postpone, postpone that I don't do it. And then the next day I tell myself that I'm going to do it and I postpone, postpone, postpone. So literally you can say, I'm not going to eat until I've worked out. And then to the degree that you can keep your word to yourself, hunger will drive you to doing it. Now, if you don't keep your word to yourself, then you have a piece of information that says, I have a difficult time keeping my word to myself. Once again, take the emotion out of it. Look at the data. The emotion in terms of your ego is there to stop you from using your logic, from using your intelligence. Your intelligence is problem solving. If you know I have a problem keeping my word to myself, you can inquire into that. You can go into therapy, you can journal, you can meditate, you can say, if I could keep my word to myself, I, I would have a major step forward. I could have the best 2023 I've ever had. If I can keep my word to myself, why don't I keep my word to myself? Ah, I'm better at keeping my word to other people than I am to myself. What does that say about me? I can keep my word at work, I can keep my word in this arena, but not that you look for what happens and you dig into what it means. And you, you do this as a process. And the, the lack of self respect, the lack of being able to forgive yourself is actually a tool that your ego uses to keep you down. In that sense, I'm going to actively, actively pursue this ego death thing. I may relocate to an English country manor with a homicidal butler named Descartes. I love it. Just don't put Descartes before the horse. Anyway, I, that's a perfectly good basic question. How can we have the best year possible? Look at the things that have caused you to get off the path. You look at the hero's journey. Do you have a goal the accomplishment of which would transfer would be evidence that you were the person that you wanted to be, that only the person you wanted to be could accomplish this goal? And in my case, that goal would be, I have certain financial goals in terms of my career this year. I have relationship goals in terms of my marriage and my fatherhood. I have physical goals in terms of wanting to attend a dynamite martial arts workshop in the Philippines in 2024. In order to be. To feel like I'm going to enjoy that as much as possible, I will need to feel a certain amount of aliveness. Now I feel that right now I've made a breakthrough. There's something happened in terms of, you know, when I was working on the five Tibetans and combining that with meditate with. With tai chi and distributing the Tibetans through the day in, you know, with my five minute miracle, something about that has. It's kind of kicked in. I just noticed that I did a Scooby, take this. Like, wait a minute. This is different. I'm waking up in the morning feeling different, you know, in. In a good way. So if I can identify the goals, you know, being able to attend the workshop in Manila in 2024 and have a wonderful time and be high energy and come home with new knowledge, that really fires me up. And in terms of my relationship, my family, it's to love myself and respect myself. If I beat myself up because I fail at something, to me that's a sign that I don't love myself as much as I need to. I'm modeling. I'm listening to the voices in my head that were given to me by maybe a parent who was afraid that I wasn't going to be able to succeed and so tried to use pain to motivate me. So my relationship goals, my emotional goals, my financial, mental goals, and my physical goals are all fairly clear. You know, it's like, okay, so have I accepted responsibility for them? You know, it's kind of going down the hero's journey. If I accept responsibility for it, am I saying my behaviors will produce a particular physical result? My behaviors will produce a certain financial result, My behaviors will produce a certain emotional result. To the degree that my behaviors affect these things, I then commit to the best behaviors that I'm capable of, and I continue to examine those. And the more often I examine those the better off I am. A lot of people examine their overall behaviors once a year, you know, at New Year's, and that can work pretty well. I think that it's more advanced to examine your behaviors and results every month. It's even better still to examine your behaviors and results every week or every day. Once you take a look at the notion that was a combination of many, many different disciplines, including, you know, Hawaiian huna and timeline therapy and neuro linguistic programming and contemporary shamanism. All these different things that I've studied over the years to see the goal very clearly. See the path between your heart and the goal as if it's a line of light. And then you ask your unconscious mind to create symbols of conflicting emotions and non optimal value hierarchies and negative emotional charges. And the stuff that stuck stops you from doing the things that keep you on the path that'll take you to the goal so you can be the person you want to be. So those things then are manifested as kinks. You visualize them as kinks in that line of light between you and the goal. You can see it very, very clearly. So then in your meditations and so forth, you examine those knots. What is this? Oh, this is something that my mom told me about. If I try too hard, people won't like me. You know, if you don't shut up, you know, more, Steve, if you aim too high, if you do this, if you do that, you'll lose your tribe. Ah, that creates fear. So I literally will have a goal, but I'm afraid to reach my goal because if I reach my goal, I'll lose my tribe. If I lose my tribe, I die. So how do I do this? Well, is it true, you know, I could go through the three gates. Is it true that I will lose my tribe if I change myself? There are aspects of truth in that. There really are. But what is also true is that there are new tribes. There's a new tribe that the people who reject you because you've gone too far or you are too confrontational or because you know, that's assuming that you are staying within a positive, positive set of behaviors. It's possible, of course, to be an idiot. It's possible to behave badly. And if they reject you for that reason, you, you need to change. But if you're just trying to be the best person you can be, and some of them, you know, will accuse you of, you know, toxic positivity or whatever it is, you might need a new tribe, a tribe of people who love positive people A tribe of people who will be positive for you when you need positivity and will appreciate it when you are positive for them, to remind them that they. That they can do this, that they can be this. If I look at the values, do I find, you know, the people believe, you know, money is the root of all evil. If somebody believes money is the root of all evil, or that rich people have to be, you know, are automatically, you know, corrupt, or that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. What are they saying other than the fact that they'll never be powerful and they'll never have money? And if they do, they will feel guilt about it and those conflicting emotions will tear them apart. Now they'll find themselves not keeping their commitments because on some core level they're feeling, oh, this is wrong. I shouldn't have this, shouldn't lose weight, or I shouldn't have love, or I shouldn't do this, I shouldn't do that. You have to believe it's okay. You have to believe that it is positive to the world for you to get the things that you desire, that being authentically who you are is a good thing for the world. If you can believe that, then your commitment to the world actually accelerates your growth and your progress as opposed to inhibiting that growth and progress because you're afraid that if you make it, you're making other people feel bad or something. These are all the things that run around inside your head that you need to look at. Unless you have simply got yourself to the point where you wake up in the morning, you do the things you need to do with joy. At the end of the day, you look back, you've done everything. At the end of the week, you look back, you've done everything. At the end of the month, you look back, you've done everything. At the end of the year, you look back, you've done everything. And at the end of your life, on your deathbed, you're laying there giggling a little bit. It's like, I've had a great ride. So those are kind of the thoughts that I kind of wanted to lay out on Sunday for you. If you like the way that I think, please join our talks on Fridays. You can join them@stevenbarnslist.com. just give me your email address and I'll send you the zoom links for you to be able to get in. And we'll keep having these conversations. Other than that, have a great week. I will be talking more about what it is that I'm doing to try to have the best year of my life, considering that many of these opportunities are opening up or seem to be opening up. And, you know, you only get so many shots at the brass ring. It doesn't just come around once, but there is a time when it comes around more and more infrequently. And right now, at this instant, there are brass rings in all three arenas that I could grab if I have the heart and the mind and the will to grab at them. You know, right now, you know, luck was a matter of creating the opportunities, but it is persistence and consistent action that makes it possible for you to grab that ring. So we'll see what happens, and I'll be reporting back in person about it. If there's anything that you can do that I can do for you, please let me know. You take care. Bye. Bye.