The Three Gates as self-correction

Greetings once again, Steve Barnes here with Morning Magic. This is where I drink my tea while I'm waking up and I talk to you about how I'm using this very specific technique, the magic formula, to guide my life. I've got eight days to turn in a book. So I'm in the. In the pressure cooker and things are going. So it's just being useful, trying to be useful here. So let's see, if I was to talk about. There was something in particular I wanted to talk about today, but I also wanted to discuss the way I woke up today. So I woke up and let's say I have three basic things. There's the magic formula, you know, the map or model of action taking action, gratitude, emotion, intention, goals and conviction. Courage, character. The sense that you can and should do something that you need to be sure you don't have a zero in any one of those categories. If you do, then that day is lost. So if you get at least a one in each of those categories, then you're at least taking a step. So I laid there and I asked myself, what is my model of action today? And I thought about my role models. I have, you know, William Shakespeare and Larry Niven. Sometimes Harlan Ellison is in there, Octavia Butler. And I know that they could fulfill this obligation just fine. So the action I'm going to take today is going to be going over 50 pages of the book, making corrections and then continuing on after that point. But that's my formal work. And I didn't take the weekend off as much as I wish I could have. But I didn't push myself as much as I might have. I need to be careful here because I have eight days of work, and that means I can't sprint every day. I have to kind of jog. And that's can be difficult because the anxiety can come into the picture in terms of gratitude, my emotions. So I'm laying there in bed, so I know what my role model is. I know what my action is going to be. And then it's positive emotions. What do I have to feel positive about today? You know, I wake up in the morning, I don't want to get out of bed. Who does? But as soon as I can think of all the things that are going to be good if I get out of bed, I increase my motivations. Now, the thing that was kind of interesting here is that there were two choices. I could have been happy about the chance to work on the project, or I could have been afraid of what happens if I don't work on the project and I just noticed that my emotions were positive. This is the good things. I'm in the positive state, clear intentions. I have crystal clear goals. Next Monday, I have to push the button on sending the book. And confidence, you know, it's like, am I that guy? Am I the person who can do this? I believe that I am. And I have a lot of experience suggesting that that's not an incorrect assessment. But I also look at the three gates. What am I going to do today? Rather, three centers. What am I going to do today for my body? I have to do some kettlebells today. A little bit later on, from my heart, I'll be interacting with Jason and with my wife and with you guys. And for career, I'll be doing the 50 pages. And I'll also be reminding you guys that if you're interested in knowing how I apply these principles to my writing, specifically how Tananarive and I have managed our career in that sense to leverage ourselves from writing stories up to writing in television, come to our workshop on the 17th of February, and you can find out about that at Screenwriting Webinar. Now, what came to me today was the fact that I made a mistake yesterday. And it was good to see that I had a way of correcting the error. And it had to do with the fact that I realized that, you know, there are times when you need to be efficient and effective. You know, three gates, is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful? I look at that as efficient and effective. Does this actually make a positive change in your life? And one of the things you have to do is to determine when it's time to cut off a communication. You know, when does it. Is it useful to talk to people and when is it not useful? If you realize that every conversation you have with someone ends in an argument, you don't get into those conversations anymore. If you really. There are things that you need to look at. If you look at five or ten interactions with different people and they all have some similarities, like, all of them started by screaming at you. And every time someone screamed at you, that conversation went nowhere. It is reasonable for you to say, well, if they scream at me, let me end it right then. Why should I spend another three hours talking to them if I know that every time they scream, it ends up with them walking with us, walking away from each other, being angry. At some point you have to ask yourself, what are you going to spend your time doing in your life? But there's a problem with that. And one of those problems is trying to understand how do I hold it in my mind that a conversation with this person isn't going to go anywhere. That's a difficult one because there's some cases where it's a matter of we don't see the same world. But what happens when they don't see the same world and they're a flat earther? Do you just think that you're not seeing the same world or do you think this person has a problem? I, frankly, I can't find a way not to think. It's true that there are certain beliefs that people can have that are evidence that there's actual mental dysfunction. Either that or they're not being honest with you. This is hard because few things are so black and white. And yet it's still critical to know when you are and are not wasting your time. And I realized that I was thinking about a very specific interaction where a communication was ineffective and had been ineffective over a period of time. And I believe that it was ineffective because this person is dealing with a lot of fear which triggers anger. They were in essence, from one perspective. And I'm trying to be really careful here, although you'll realize that I, I was being wrong headed. It was childish. It felt to me as if they were acting like a frightened child as opposed to an adult. In terms of interaction in the world that I'm moving through right now demands that I know who's on my team, who can be on my team, who can run next to me, who can block for me, who I can block for. This is one of the things that's important about going to team workouts. You know who's strong and who can do it. You know who can. And if your intention is to get that touchdown, you have to know who can get across the line. And if somebody's leg is broken or they're not in shape or they're not strong or they don't know the plays or whatever. Is it reasonable to think this person isn't as good a football player? Yes, it is. The difficulty would be in saying that they never will be or in generalizing from that to they're not as good a person. And this is where I ran into a problem. Because thinking in order to realize that I was wasting my time continuing a particular type of discussion, I needed to stop my urge to communicate that urge to, you know, I wish everyone would understand what it is that I'm saying. Not that if they understood, they'd agree, but it would make my life easier. And I realized that that fear was coming from. I mean, that urge was coming from fear. That's the fear of being alone. That's the fear of not having a tribe. That's a fear that if you speak your truth in a way that is really indicative of who you are, that people will walk away from you. And whereas that's true, and the need to have tribe makes people accept beliefs and actions that they would not on their own, the positive side is that social pressure can also make us act better than we ordinarily are. So it's a neutral thing. But I could feel that my judgmentalism was not coming from the healthiest place inside me. So if I looked at the three gates and they asked me to be useful, and being useful means becoming more and more efficient and effective, then this particular way of making a choice was unkind. You know, Was it untrue? It depends on how you want to look at it. Was it unkind? Well, there's no way that what I was thinking was kind. It wasn't. So that led me to thinking about the three gates and something that people have asked. Are you supposed to fit yourself, shoehorn yourself into this pattern, even if it's inappropriate? If a mugger asks for your money, do you have an obligation to tell them you have a hundred dollar bill in your shoe? That kind of thing people will say, and those are conversations that can be had. If I consider them to be conversations where the person has not applied their imagination to it, that's okay. But if I were to think the person is being childish, then I'm being judgmental in a way that is appealing to my ego. And the only reason that's going to happen is if I'm afraid to drop that. If I can't see that they're just going their way, they simply see things differently. They've had a different set of experiences in life and wish them well on their journey. If I can't do that, that's my fear. So if the three gates are not asking us to reduce efficiency and effectiveness, then why is it that they're asking us to be kind? Even if there is a way in which the statement could be considered true, and the conclusion I came after digging into it is the deeper you go into truth, especially with human beings, the more likely you are to emerge in love, in compassion, in a sense of connection that, in other words, I was able to know I was not on the path of truth because what I was thinking was unkind, that even though I could justify It I'm justifying it from an ego position of needing to have tribe, needing to be right, fearing being alone, etc. Etc. Which then led me to ranking this person. And instead of just saying this person is not appropriate for this part of my path at this time, you know, peace unto their journey, I literally said to myself, they're not my equal, not in this way. Now I could say I'm saying not in this way. But once you open that door, there's some ugly stuff behind it. And there's some stuff that if we believe that at the core of what we are as human beings is love, then ego stops you from seeing that and tries to get you to place yourself above others. It's the same thing. And you know that you place yourself above others. If there's a part of you that puts others above you, it can't be one or the other, it's going to be both. And so ultimately, thinking that you're above others limits you, for instance, because you're looking at yourself and measuring yourself in comparison to other people rather than simply doing the thing that is your life. And in all arts, martial arts, things of this nature, the attention you place on yourself is attention that you're not putting onto the thing. So the time you're spending evaluating yourself in comparison to other people is specifically time not spent on the path of mastery. This is confusing and it's disturbing. And it helped me to realize that the stress that I was under had placed me, had taken me off the path that I need to be on in order to function. At the very best I can be, it's up to others to decide where I am and what I'm doing and what my path is. And the truth is that none of us can really compare ourselves to others. None of us know the paths that other people are taking. All of us have wounds. People live in glass houses, shouldn't throw stones for some very good reasons. So what I saw there was that there was a part of me that was putting people down. And that part of me was coming from fear and ego. And that the three gates showed me that it gave me warning to that, even though I could justify it. And that to let that go allows me to be who it is I really am. And in order to do this job that I'm doing right now, I have to be who I really am. I can't bring my ego with me. So all these different things have to lead me to a place where I can just be with the task or I can just do what it is that needs to be done and not worry about needing to be more or worried that I'm less than someone else. All I can be is the best I can be. All they can be is the best they can be. And if I want the universe and other people to have mercy on me and understand that Steve's just doing the best he can I must do that to others. I have to be kinder to others. Being kinder to others is the route to being kind to myself because when it comes right down to it there's no difference between yourself and the people around you. We're all part of the same thing. So that's applying one model. Three gates to my life this week and something that was thinking about and I hope this has been useful to you once again. I hope that I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a wonderful day and the most important thing I can think of is have a magical, magical week. Take care.