MAGIC and the inner child

Hello, I guess people are there. Hello, I guess people are there. Hi there. Steve Barnes, back here at home after Lost Con and let me type on here. So it's the first day of the week, and I just needed to think through what I'm doing at the. At the beginning of every week. I take a look at everything that needs to be done and try to focus on the three most important things that will accomplish the most this week and then make damn sure I get those things done today. I'll be. I've got several different kinds of business. It was a very busy weekend. A lot of energy. I crashed out about. I stayed up about an hour and a half too late on Saturday night. So I got. Went to bed about a half hour early last night. Slept a bit late, little bit late today. So I'm feeling fine right now. My voice is a little gravelly, and it'll probably be till tomorrow that I feel totally back together. But I'm. I've started playing with some things with the morning ritual. I always do the morning ritual with Tai chi in terms of the affirmation and incantation and so forth. But I also am starting to do my first set of the five Tibetans, just five reps of each of them. And I'm playing with that a little bit, too, to increase some intensity. And that seems to be working pretty well. But what I wanted to talk about was something that happened over the weekend. I had a lot of chance to talk to people, a lot of opportunities to interact with people. And there was one interaction in particular that I found to be particularly positive. I saw seeing an old friend, Casey Bernay, and just. Just talking about life and development and things like that. And one of the things that came out of that conversation. Wait a minute, let me have a little sip of tea. Was a discussion of the magic formula. Last week, Jason had asked me whether or not any of the models that I give him could be used to predict the results of his friends. Could you predict my friend's results? And in talking to Casey, I realized my aunt. The answer I gave him might conceivably be useful to some of you guys. So the answer that I gave him, you know, because models we're talking about, you know, the hero's journey and rapid planning method and other other things, you know, idea and so forth and so on, all these different models that I created to help me understand the space in which life takes place. I'm not smart enough to put my finger directly on it. And I think that it's possible that that you can't, that it's beyond language. However, you can set up certain experiences that if you will put yourself through them, you will learn the things that you need to learn. So you take a goal in terms of your body, goal in terms of your emotions, you know, relationships, your goal in terms of your finances. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to create a really concise model of how to market for Jason so that it's as clear as the, the model that we have for selling. But you know, I've, I've rather the model that we have for writing. But writing is something I'm a lot clearer on. I've been doing it for a lot longer and I'm a lot more advanced at that. But I figure if I put enough thought into it, I'll figure it out. But even that model, the life writing six step process, for instance, I don't have one of those that would apply to his friends in general. But what I do have is the magic formula. Magic. Now that you know, M A G, I C, M is map or model. A is actions, daily actions. G is gratitude, positive, positive emotions. I is intention, clear goal. And the goal should be a smart goal, S M A R, T, specific, meaningful, as if now realistic and time bound. And the C is courage or conviction. You have to believe that you can and should have this thing. If you don't believe that you can and should take actions, you won't. So what I told him that if you. The formula is, it's actually I made a tiny, a tiny adjustment to it. It used to be that map times actions times gratitude times intention times clarity times, you know, courage, conviction equals results. Now I'm saying it equals luck because I'm seeing that that was the thing that was the most remarkable about this process. That when I made sure that I had about a five in each of those categories that I was, you know, had a clear map of what I wanted to do, I was taking a lot of action, I had my emotions in a really good place, my goal was extremely clear and I allowed myself no doubt, you know, I knew that I can do this and I should do it. And it was set up so that even if I didn't get the result, I was having fun and learning things along the way way. So I was in a no lose situation. Whenever I put myself in that situation, luck seemed to start happening. It was just strange. Things would come out of nowhere. So what I told him was give your friends a score from 0 to 9 in each of these Categories, especially if they're the kind of people who want to say that they can't succeed because society won't let them, okay, If they have a zero in any one of those categories, if they have no model, no map of where they're going, they just test it. If they are not taking daily action, if they don't keep their mood good, in other words, if they're always complaining, always depressed about things, always angry about things, you know, expressing gratitude if they don't have a clear goal, in other words, they say, I want to do better than I'm doing, you know, I want to make more money. No, you have to say, I want to increase my income by 20% this year, you know, or something like that. Goals or dreams with deadlines, they are specific. And the last thing, that confidence. If there's a part of them that feels like I'm gonna, I can work at this, but I won't really get it. If they don't have a positive sense towards it, if they don't have confidence, they're not in a state of confidence about it. If they have a zero in any one of those categories, you have to remember that the equation is multiplicative. So if you have a zero in any one of those categories, you're going to lose. Or at least it is predictable that you're going to lose or the chances of your losing goes way up. So just very, very briefly today, make sure, if you feel that you don't have luck in your life, that you were born disadvantaged, anything like that, I bleed for you. I understand exactly what you're talking about. That's exactly the situation I found myself in life. And this pattern of having a clear map or model of where you're going, you model somebody who's already done it, or you read a book that has been proven to help other people get there. You go to a school that has produced the kinds of people that are the kind of people that you want to be, etc, etc, you're taking daily action, you're controlling your emotions so that you're feeling positive. You are, you have a clear goal, you know exactly what you want so that you will recognize it when you get it. And you are feeling. If you feel confident, you have it set up so that you know. If you ask yourself the question, how can I increase my income by 20% and have fun in the process and learn the process and contribute to the world in the process. Now, no matter what happens, if you say that you're going to contribute in the process, then you're looking for ways for your daily activities to contribute to the world, to help move you out of pain. You know, and that's another thing, another model to look at. I got a million of them. The you first move out of pain, then you connect with joy, and then you open your mind to finding how you can contribute to the world. Right? That order. Get out of pain, accept joy, find ways to contribute. That's the sequence. Okay. You sure to have a million of them, Steve? Yeah, Kyle. Actually, to be. To be completely honest, one of my gifts has to do with the capacity to resolve dualities, to see the connection between things. I'm really good at that. And so if somebody wanted to follow one of my models, if somebody wanted to get the result that I'm talking about, let's say you wanted to be a writer. And so you're following the six step life writing pattern. You know, write a sentence a day, write one or four short stories a month, polish and submit one short story. Don't rewrite, accept editorial request, read 10 times as much as you write, and Repeat this process 100 times. Let's say that that's what you wanted to do. So you have a clear, you have a clear model. Okay. And you're trusting me because you figure, oh, Steve's published 3 million words. I think that he can help me with this. You know, they're much better teachers than me. But you've decided that I kind of have something. There's something about me that you like. You know, you'll follow what I'm saying. Then you need to take daily action. What's the daily action? Writing at least one sentence a day. Did you do it? Yes. No. If you did, move on to the next one. Positive emotions. Do you do things every day to get your emotions in a place where they are positive and outgoing so that your energy needs to have an external pressure. In Koichi Tohei's book Ki, he talks about the fact that you take an aikido master has his energy, his intrinsic energy, and he, he pushes it out into the world. It's a little bit like a clean stream running into a cesspool that as long as the pressure is, is going out, what's in the cesspool can't back up into you. And I like that. So you want your positive energy. You have to work it out. So your positive energy is stronger than whatever negativity there is around you, that there can be negative around you, but you can't let it affect, affect your internal world. Clear goals are Incredibly important. Incredibly important. Just writing down your goals once a week will put you so far ahead of most people, it's not even funny. And what I suggest to people is that, you know, because it's a five minute miracle, five times a day, you take a little breathing break. Five times a day, you sort of envision the path in front of you. You know, what is it that you're doing? Why are today's activities having an impact on where you want to go? You know, what's going on, you, you make, make contact with it five times a day, once a day, once a week. For God's sake, don't just wait until December 31st or January 1st and do a, you know, New Year's resolutions. And even that is better than most people. I mean, seriously. So if, if you will connect with your goals every day, every week, you know, if you will get that 1% improvement per week, if you do it more often than that, then you're going to be looking at everything you do and finding ways that the thing you're doing not only moves you forward, but you're having fun and making contributions at the same time. Remember, move out of pain, accept joy in your life. Take joy as a goal. You know, Dalai Lama said, the meaning of life is to be joyful. End of service. And the last thing is to share what you've got. If somebody said to me that, you know, I share because I'm grateful to the people help me, well, there's some truth to that. But the real truth is that my motivation is utterly selfish. In studying masters, what I noticed is that masters of many, many different disciplines, they're always learning, they're always doing, and they're always teaching. So if I want to be a master like the masters that I admire, like the masters who created me and helped me and nurtured me, I have to do the same thing. And the only way to do that is to take joy in it, right? I apply this to myself. So I'm always doing the things that not only make me better, but, but help me be happier and help me to share with people. And I've got it set up so the automatic actions take me out of pain. You know, that everything I need to do to stay out of pain is at the level of unconscious competence. Virtually. You know, I have to get up in the morning, I exercise, I do a certain amount of work, I check business, I align with my family. You know, what do we need to do today? You know, we get this at the end of the day, we Play and dump stress and have fun. That's just a pattern. But built into that pattern are all the things I need to take care of my body, take care of my emotions, and take care of my career. It's automatic. I found the automatic thing. So working backwards from my real goal is to be happy. Okay, you'd be happy, safe, whatever. The way I implement that is various things. You know, I write, I work out, I hang out with my friends, you know, and I take care of my business bills and all those things that I have to do in order to take care of the pain, accept joy, share with people. I hope you can see that there's a lot of complexity, but I keep trying to boil it down to the smallest number of pieces, okay? And sometimes I'm more successful than others. And the last thing, that sense of confidence. I don't know if I will reach all the goals that I have, but it's not the point. The point is to keep moving towards them. The idea being that success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal. So if my goal is to take care of myself, take care of my family, take care of my community, to share, to bring light to the world. Because in that way, I have to be in the light. And that keeps me on my path every day. I can kind of say, did I spend the last 24 hours doing these things? Did I spend the last 24 hours being on the path? In the last 24 hours, did I help anyone? Did I share? Did I learn? Did I give? Did I grow? Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter? It's Brendan Bouchard's trilogy. I love that. So this is just, you know, being in touch with you. I'm going to try to do this. I promised I was going to try to do this every morning. So I'm going to be better some days at that than others. But leading into the end of the year, I've got 33 days. The love feast with tananariv, which tells me that I needed to take care of my child self so that my needy, wounded, abandoned child, you know, that's the negative way of looking at it, is always feeling taken care of. Therefore, I can spend this time serving tananarive every day, making sure that she feels loved and safe and protected. In order to take care of that child, I need to be sure that my adult self is fully active. The parent of my child needs to be fully active, fully engaged. And that was something I found out the first time we did the love feast that I was not being totally adult, I just wasn't. I was letting my child run rampant to a degree. And because of that he was not always safe. And because of that when something went wrong, he felt threatened, he felt inclined danger, he felt terrified. And that led to some negative results. If I am confident that I can take care of myself no matter what up to and including the notion that, you know, I will inevitably deteriorate and pass away, if I am good with that, if I'm okay with every step of that, if I know that I can handle my stuff, then that gives me the freedom to love the people I love with all my heart. And that's what I want. I'd like to end this today with a salute that I heard just Travis McGee, novel dresser and Indigo talking about a Mexican salute. It was health, love and money and the time to enjoy them. So that's what I wish for you. Health, love and money and the time to enjoy them. Take care. Have a wonderful day.