[The] Complete [Life]
“Ultimately, martial arts means honestly expressing yourself…now it is very difficult to do. I mean it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky and be flooded with a cocky feeling and then feel like pretty cool and all that…or I can make all kind of phony things, see what I mean, blinded by it or I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself, and to express myself honestly, that, my friend, is very hard to do.” — Bruce Lee
Expression is beautiful.
How will you express yourself?
In the last article, I made the case that what we’re all searching for in life (or chasing after) is a package of external things (stuff, experiences, community, contribution) and internal things (growth, meaning, expression, peace of mind, self-actualization/potential and Self-Realization/Spiritual maturity and so on).
The challenge is that, despite searching extensively, I’ve never found a kind of multi-faceted blueprint for living and working that even talked about all these things together, never mind helping to deliver them reliably. Have you?
Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of good information out there, but nothing that really pulls it all together. And if something is not pulled together, then it risks being piecemeal or leading to efforts that are conflicting, or even counterproductive. Even being able to talk about, and reflect on, how this “package” applies to you is a useful step forward in bringing those things into your work and life (and perhaps read the last article if you haven’t already).
Personal necessity, frankly, drove me to try to find a solution to the “blueprint” as I dealt with the positive and negative “fallout” of trying to chase a dream.
I left my corporate job back in 2016 to try to launch a startup business, develop my creative side and follow a vision of how to change the world. Three years on, and I felt I was drifting, looking for a unifying idea that would make sense of everything that had happened, good and bad, and provide a concrete focus going forward.
The twist in this whole scenario was that my “success”, as I envisioned it, would come from helping you to get the thing that I myself was also searching for.
That unifying idea has slowly emerged over the past 18 months as Complete. It began when I realized that I wasn’t spending any time on creative projects that were really important to me. Even more important, at that time, than the immediate monetization of my business. What began as a kind of working holiday within my entrepreneurship career, turned into the main thing. And I’m now ready to begin to try to share that with you now.
Compete is a new paradigm for working and living that lets you see new possibilities, push your boundaries, and begin to live on a higher and deeper level.
The “big idea” of Complete is that you can learn and apply a specific set of creative practices and tools to not only change your work and life, but to be more content after you do. And have the capability to continue evolve and change in the future.
Complete has an overarching philosophy, and three supporting disciplines of: Express, Explore and Energy, all of which I’ll preview in this article.
Complete, as you might expect from the package of benefits it is trying to deliver, bridges personal and professional growth on one side, and spiritual growth on the other, as shown in the diagram below:
I’ve grouped the specific tools and techniques and exercises that are part of Complete into a new domain called Creative Personal Growth (CPG), which I’ll cover in the next article.
My vision is that Complete will eventually be entirely experience “stream” and/or story based and real time (rather than lots of reading and self-reflection exercises, or even conventional seminars or webinars). Until that time, CPG provides a useful step forward and stepping stone, with creatively “tweaked” personal and professional growth exercises, tools and approaches that you can begin to use straight away.
So, let’s get started at the beginning, with the mantra of Complete:
Live on a Higher and Deeper level.
What does living on a higher and deeper level mean to you?
What could it mean?
Are you ready to go on an adventure?
Deep like the Ocean.
I’ve always had a fascination with the ocean. Growing up on a variety of islands will do that to a person, I guess. For me, the water is more than just H2O. It is living, a life force, energy, power, expression, potential, and so on.
It’s often said that we’ve explored more of space than the oceans on our own planet. Whether that is true or not, we haven’t explored much of the ocean (~5%). And we haven’t explored much of our selves either. Most of the time we’re just splashing around on the surface.
Going deeper in life means being real, original, authentic, vulnerable, and whole.
It means tapping into your inner potency, and using that energy to flow and to roar.
A Higher State of Consciousness
Life exists on many levels except we’re glued to the ground. We’re attached to our identity, stuff, and past decisions, for example.
Did you know that the weight of the Space Shuttle was only 4% of the total at launch weight (including external boosters and fuel). We think of personal change like those booster rockets, trying to blast through and push through the weight of inertia, and fear and so on. Shooting for the stars.
That is certainly one approach.
Except that life is also like a hot air balloon, you go higher when you ditch the ballast.
You get what you give
In a sense, living on a higher and deeper level is what you get from Complete, i.e. that package of external and internal things that we’ve been talking about.
Except that Complete is also not really about getting a bunch of stuff, it is what and how you give and do and be. It is about who you are, and who you become, not what you have.
Be deep like the ocean and as light as air.
Discipline 1 — Express
Expressing yourself is literally what you “press” from the inside out into the world, and into the universe.
In this section we’ll talk about expressing yourself in terms of:
- Developing a creative capability that lets you make practical changes at work and in life
- Transcending your Ego, attaining peace of mind and developing spiritually
- Breaking down barriers, and feeling connected
Express means — Developing Creative Capability
Many of us go through life acting like a transistor radio. We receive the signal from the outside, and try to play back or replicate that signal as best we can. The “signal” is things like cultural norms, definitions of success, and so on that I talked about in the last article.
If things are not working as we believe that they should, we start randomly turning the dial. We search. But at best we find something that someone else has chosen to put out there. We remain consumers.
Expressing yourself means flicking the switch from receive to transmit.
You become a two-way radio. You add your voice to the universe and others hear that voice. You are no longer a passive consumer of life. You create.
You make something out of nothing.
If you want something different out of life then you must do and be different.
Learning to be more creative is immensely proactive and empowering. You learn how to make a door where before there was only a wall. In practical terms it means that you, for example, learn the tools and develop the confidence that enables you to do something different: change career, or start a business for example.
And if you look at where creativity comes from it starts from inside. That is how you flick the switch. You start on the inside, with a feeling or a problem.
When I help individuals to be more creative, we begin by recalling memories of personal experiences. As individuals we make memories because there are strong feelings associated with them at the time. Try it, think of a memory from childhood and pick the first one that pops into your head. Usually this memory will be something out of the ordinary, either happier or sadder than normal. In fact, it is normally a sad memory that people come up with, we tend to remember bad times as specifics and good times as generalized.
Even this small exercise is powerful. You realize that beyond the stuff you’ve accumulated, all that you have in life are memories. And memories are crystalized feelings of a place, person, time, or situation.
So, to be more creative we begin by sensitizing ourselves to the inside world, then moving on to sensitizing ourselves to the outside world.
We examine how different stimuli make us feel. Then, in creative practice, we try to express that feeling in different forms and media: pictures, poems, words and so on.
I call creativity a superpower because it lets you make something out of nothing, but that “nothing” is really the input of your everyday life and memories, good or bad.
Your life experiences and memories are unique to you. That uniqueness is a fuel for creativity as you learn to “unlock” and to express yourself. And that creativity lets you do practical “new and useful” things in the world that are also meaningful to you.
Express is — Transcending your Ego
Bruce Lee wanted to get thinking out of the way in fighting (and in living).
He saw that the most effective way to express yourself in fighting was to automatically respond to a stimulus (based on training and sensitization) rather than to get caught thinking.
If you’re constantly up in your own head, then you’re not going to be the most effective fighter. And, as it turns out, being constantly in your own head isn’t great in life either.
Most of us have experienced a busy mind, but you might not realize that your Ego dominates your internal monologue for much of the time
The result of this Ego domination is that we only ever see the world through our subjective thoughts, not how it really is.
The Ego is susceptible to pride and social comparison, and tends to “close down” ideas that are risky to your established identity and the way you are now. In other words, it closes down exactly the type of different ideas that allow you to change into a new and higher self.
Working to express yourself honestly means getting better at putting your Ego aside and living directly.
You can learn to put your Ego aside through meditation, fasting, time in nature and by practicing creativity, for example. We’ll return to these later.
Moving from experiencing the world filtered through your Ego, to experiencing life more directly, emotionally, and intuitively really equates to a change (or raising) of consciousness. You learn to experience and to engage with the world in a different way, and that is spiritual as far as I’m concerned.
Express is — Breaking down barriers
Most of us work and live with so many mental and emotional barriers between ourselves the outside world.
At work you might relate to the idea of donning your “armor”, “putting on your game face” or “faking it until you make it”. Business culture often drives us to be a filtered, self-conscious, restricted or a different version of ourselves.
That means therefore that we don’t express ourselves fully and honestly. And, at worst, this lack of honest expression can drive anxiety and depression and (self-destructive) coping mechanisms.
If you do find yourself on the wrong track and/or not being authentic it can eat you up inside. I know.
Near the end of my corporate job, I was still doing great client work but what had started as inklings of the need for a new chapter years earlier, now felt like I was being torn up from the inside. I felt like a hypocrite. Here I was a “highly educated and highly paid advisor” trapped inside a prison that I had created for myself.
Just because you can do something well, it doesn’t mean that you should do it.
If I was really so smart, as my thinking went, then why hadn’t I already moved to a more optimal way to work and live than the one I was in at the time? And, eventually, I set out to do just that.
Not that it has been stress free since then. I’d wish to be further along in my latest entrepreneurial journey and, frankly, to have the financial side already at the level that I could completely support my family now and in the future and in a flexible way.
That I’m not there yet is a real psychological and emotional (and relationship) stressor. But, on a positive note, I don’t feel that constantly looming existential misalignment I did before.
I am expressing myself, and many of the things I’m most proud of under the “work” heading have happened since I left my corporate job.
I guess it would have been paradoxically “worse” if my initial approach had paid off more but not hugely. Succeeding at mediocrity wasn’t what I did all of this for. Sometimes it is better to fail, and then after the dark night of the soul comes inspiration.
Let me share something else, all this work to express myself from the inside out, also has the unintended consequence that more “gets in” as well.
I feel more. Things affect me emotionally much more than they did before, small things, but also macro topics such as inequality, homelessness and child hunger, for example.
Expressing yourself inevitably leads to becoming authentic, vulnerable and empathetic. And, ultimately, becoming more human. For better or worse.
The “big picture” of expression is that you might completely realign your work and life so that it expresses you more fully. Doing stuff you really care about with people you care about, and so on. That might happen in a short burst, but might also happen as a result of making numerous small changes over time.
It has taken me so so long to find these truths, but at least I’m well out of the starting gates and into the arena. What is perhaps slightly infuriating, as all hindsight has the potential to be, is not that I was doing only the wrong things over the past few years. It is that I wasn’t able to recognize the right things quickly and well enough to double down on those at the time.
When you do something different, the old measures of success don’t always apply. You find that your instincts are screwed up and even perhaps just plain wrong!
Most of us try to go directly to our goal, but life is usually indirect in the end.
For example you want a profitable business so you get busy analyzing revenue streams, and end up coming up with commoditized ideas. Instead of diving in, let the kernel of insight develop over time and marinate until you’ve got something new.
Find the one true thing that you’ll build your business around.
My hope is that now that I’ve found a potential path through the maze, I can try to hand you a map.
Discipline 2 — Explore
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” T.S. Eliot
We explore not just to see different things, but to see things differently.
Our exploration of the outside world affects the inside one, mentally and emotionally and spiritually. And our exploration of the inside world affects what we choose to explore externally.
Some say that the purpose of life is intellectual and spiritual development. That might be true, but it is all a little…general. Intellectual and spiritual development is a massive playing field to take on in its entirety.
If the goal of exploring is to improve your perspective, wisdom, knowledge and network, for example, then where to start to work most effectively? And how do you also enjoy the journey?
Before answering that, let’s think about the different ways to explore the world and yourself, which include experiences (direct experiences and stories about experiences), exercises (structured and unstructured), and education, for example.
And there are different modes of exploring such as wandering around (and perhaps following your curiosity), guided, hop on/off, and so on.
It turns out that adults learn best when they have a specific problem to solve, and by learning through experience.
So, what problem are you trying to solve?
In The Good Life Book, I suggested that you should create a vision of the future life that you want to live. Then, the gap between that vision and where you are now becomes the problem to solve i.e. how to get from here to there.
This type of gap closure approach is common in my former career of management consulting, in personal coaching (e.g. Sir John Whitmore’s GROW model), and generally in any performance management or success literature. You try to move from a definite point “A” to a future and well-defined point “B”.
In the book I proposed that goal setting, defining what “good” looked like, and running projects across five “pillars” of Vocation, People, Health, Spirit and Expression was a structured way to move towards your vision.
And a way to have a better chance of achieving happiness, balance and meaning when you got there, since the journey starts by knowing your own values.
A limitation of GROW and, in fairness, of my approach in the book is that sometimes you don’t know what you want, or what you think you want is not really what you want or need.
Just because you’ve cycled or ruminated on a daydream for a while (years, decades) it doesn’t mean that that is really the thing. Recalling is different from exploring. Being passionate about something isn’t always a reliable indicator for career choice (or at least not the only one).
The reason that I’ve developed Complete and Creative Personal Growth (CPG) is to fix some of the issues, as I see them, with traditional personal and professional growth approaches.
For example, instead of jumping straight into goal setting then doubling down on productivity and motivation to “push” you to your goals, we start by helping you to express yourself and then exploring what you really want.
When you know what you (really) really want, you don’t have to push yourself to move towards it.
It “pulls” you forward, because it is something that you care about, and want to do.
Even when that thing is difficult.
I’ll talk much more about specific tools and techniques for Complete/CPG in the next article. For now, I want to give you some more food for thought on the terrain you might explore in terms of maps or models of the psyche / soul / universe.
First, let’s imagine a cross-functional meeting at work. There are people sitting around a boardroom table from finance, marketing, sales, HR, and so on, and perhaps a CEO.
Finance and Marketing, for example, might see the business differently, they have different priorities and mental models that, paradoxically, are both truth or at least partially true at the same time.
After different views are presented, a consensus is reached that, ideally, is more holistic and “better” for the business than any one single department making the decisions on their own (focused/limited) perspective alone.
So who is sitting at the boardroom table of your own mind?
The reality for most of us is that there seems to be only one, or perhaps two people at the table. And only one is doing most of the talking.
Continuing this metaphor, exploring is about trying to get all the seats at the table filled, and giving the right voices the right airtime at the right times.
By doing so you, the CEO of your life, have a more complete perspective and capability to execute.
There are different models of what this “table” might look like. One, I’ve just mentioned is the five pillars model (Vocation, Health, People, Spirit and Expression) from The Good Life Book.
Another example of a model of self is the so-called Analytical and Creative (a.k.a. “Left and Right brain”).
We all have both sides, but exploring your non-dominant side is a path to understanding and expressing yourself more fully. As you’ve seen so far, I believe that most of us (in the corporate world) have our “analytical” side covered off reasonably well, and the biggest opportunity for change comes from unlocking your creativity.
There has also been a wealth of material lately (see what I did there) stating that it is ok to be organized, and to make money if you are an artist. Exploring the other side works both ways.
Other models of nature and self are Yin and Yang (feminine and masculine), and Nietzsche’s Apollonian (clarity, logic, harmony) and Dionysian (disorder, emotion, ecstasy). All of these models might give you some food for thought on what to explore. Not more of the same territory in more detail, but consciously something different.
Jung described different psychological types, and a process of individuation to explore and integrate those types. The type pairs include Introversion and Extroversion, Thoughts and Feelings, and Sensation and Intuition. Jung’s point with individuation, at least in my reading, is not to know your type and stick to it, but rather to explore the other side of your predominant type and, over time, integrate that into a more complete self.
You can (and potentially should) pursue education and exercises related to these and, no doubt, many of the other existing models of the physical, emotional and spiritual self (e.g. Maslow’s Human Motivations, and Indian Chakras, for example).
But, returning to the question of where to explore most effectively.
A creative journey inevitably touches on the other/both sides of all of the models I’ve just described. It is hard to imagine a more effective or efficient path, but if you know one please let me know!
For me, looking back on some of the creative things I’ve done in the past years it almost seems as if someone else had done them.
Over time, I’ve come to understand and legitimize the creative process more, and my role in it. I remember a turning point when I distinctly thought “you’re not a corporate consultant playing the role of an entrepreneur, you are an entrepreneur”, and the same for exploring myself as an artist. It is interesting and exciting to dabble, and there are certainly “points for trying” when you start out, but eventually you’ve got to “Turn Pro” as Steven Pressfield says. You have to push yourself to get better. To be simpler. To have more impact.
Returning to the original question, in my experience the answer to where to start lays in learning to express yourself, and utilizing select creative tools and techniques, towards something you really want/care about.
What do you really want anyway?
Discipline 3 — Energy
The final of the three disciplines of Complete is Energy (management, leadership, composition), and the connection to consciousness.
Energy is the capacity to do work. It goes into everything we do, but it also comes out of what we do and how we do it (and even why we do it) too.
Although clearly connected to the other two disciplines of Express and Explore, your journey to live on a higher and deeper level can begin and end with what you do with Energy.
On a sunny Monday morning I’d just finished a bike ride around the lake in Dallas, and was sitting at a quiet gas station munching on a breakfast taco, and slurping down a coffee.
Everything was perfect.
It was a moment filled with contentment, clarity and calm. At that moment I didn’t want for anything, not more success in business, more likes, or more of anything (though objectively there was plenty more to do, it just stopped being overwhelming and dominating my consciousness)..
Later, I’d begin to call the state I was experiencing at that moment beautiful consciousness. It felt like being in love…with the universe.
The experience, several years ago now, left a lasting impression. It was remarkable since it was so rare. It was remarkable because it underscored that what we’re searching for is a state of being as much as, or more than, stuff.
It got me thinking about how energy fits into Complete. Energy is not only what you do, but how and why you do it, and also about what you don’t do.
For years since that initial experience I thought of beautiful consciousness as a curiosity, an interesting side dish to the main course. That main course was presumably monetizing my business and/or being a “famous” creative. I didn’t realize that consciousness is the main course, and the appetizer, and the desert for that matter. It is the central stuff of life, and enables you to pursue all of the other visible external “baubles”.
Let’s take a look at energy from the perspectives of management, leadership and composition.
Energy Management
Most of us would say that time is the limiting factor in achieving what we want out of life.
That is partially true in a general sense but really, I’ve found, it is the quantity and quality of energy that determines what you get out of life.
Mindset affects the perceived quantity and quality of energy you have, but habits, particularly those around “no-mind” and the body might have a bigger effect.
There are three parts to energy management i.e. aware, generate, and direct.
To begin, it is time to do some detective work and monitor how you feel and to determine what (and who) contributes most to the highs and lows of your energy. And, to work out which types of energy best match different types of productivity such as administrative work, creative work, interpersonal work and so on.
This detective work builds awareness of what works and doesn’t for you, and which habits/cycles generate or fragment energy. From a self-care perspective the onus is on you to understand what and who destroys or disrupts your energy, and what or who builds energy.
It is probably significant that my beautiful consciousness moment came after exercising outside in nature on a sunny day. It may or may not be relevant that I was eating a taco, probably more relevant is that I hadn’t eaten anything for like 16 hours before that time. And I’d only drank water, since I usually don’t drink alcohol the night before I cycle in the morning. More generally, I usually feel more clear and “big picture” creative in the morning (many people do). I don’t check the news or emails before going cycling either. I cycle alone, but I know that for many other creative purposes, collaborating with others gets a more interesting result.
So, you become aware of what gives you energy and what takes it away. And the generate part of energy management involves getting more systematic in your habits to consistently give you the right quality and quantity of energy and different times during the day.
I’m not a medical professional so don’t take this as rote advice, but I’ve been experimenting with intermittent fasting lately with positive results. I feel more clarity and more in touch with my body and, combined with meditation, more connected and calm. I don’t think it makes me feel more creative. And yet I am, since when an idea does come out of this state it is typically a more solid idea.
Energy management is also about what you don’t do. I heavily restrict reading the news or social media in the morning (and for most of the time). The best thing I can do in the morning is open up a notebook to a blank sheet of paper and jot down whatever ideas are on my mind. The worst thing I can do is read emails or the news (i.e. what a lot of us habitually do when we wake up). Now that I’m more sensitized to how I feel, it feels like a kind of pollution moving through my body after I look at the news. Afterwards, my attention and focus are no longer my own. My energy is, let’s say turbulent instead of calm.
I feel like I need to say something now about calm…
“Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d’être violent et original dans vos oeuvres” Flaubert in 1876 letter to Madame Tennant
“Be regulated in your life and ordinary like a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your works” –Gustave Flaubert
I want to make the case for self-care over self-destruction as a means of generating creative/productive energy (that can still be edgy if you need it to be). When I left my corporate job I built a metaphorical bonfire out of my old suits and ties. I didn’t want to be in a box anymore. I didn’t want to be conventional. I didn’t want to be constrained.
As it turned out, I also bristled a bit at the field of self-help, which I’d become a member of, I guess by default, by publishing a self-help book. I feel that, with some exceptions, that self-help is dreary, goody-goody, and unimaginative. I had the vision in my mind of an improvement concept that was more rock n roll, more punk (i.e. less pure Apollo and more Dionysus mixed in). Life isn’t all lightness and clear delineation. That is not reality. That is not truth. I don’t want to listen to any advice from someone who doesn’t admit that they’ve still got problems.
Yet, living in a constant state of chaos and self-destruction is not the answer either.
Some of the most interesting artists I’ve met over the past couple of years have extremely well organized to-do lists and/or work practices. These are people who are prolific, and unlike many others, the next time you meet them have done the projects that they said that they wanted to do.
Trying to be edgy doesn’t make you edgy, just as trying to be cool doesn’t make you cool. It’s much more confronting to try to express yourself honestly and completely (including the pain and the bad bits), and to try show that and get it to resonate with others.
Energy Leadership
Directing energy is how you apply your energy to your work and life. The mechanics of directing can be as micro as to-do lists and schedules, or as macro as creating a life vision or mantra. In The Good Life Book, as I did for businesses in consulting, I advocated finding the “burning platform” as a means to get started on a transformational change.
The reason is that, unfortunately, we don’t automatically do things that are sensible and good for us because there are many (familiar) blockers to doing so, such as including fear and inertia for example.
A burning platform is about understanding and intensifying all the downsides of not doing something. In personal transformation this is looking at the costs and regrets of remaining “stuck” where you are right now. Identifying both the costs to you and the costs for others close to you (e.g. your partner, family and friends).
Although I left my corporate job to pursue a dream (the “carrot”) it was the burning platform (or “stick”) of seeing myself stewing and stagnating, and my dream passing me by that made the change possible. But it’s hard to get where you really need to go by running away from something.
Eventually, you need to run towards something.
Dr Peter Fuda calls this the process of moving from a burning platform to a burning ambition. That so-called burning ambition is something that, as part of Complete, I call What I Really Want (WIRW). More of that in the next article, but for now imagine a situation in future where you’re spending your life doing things you really care about with people you care about. How would it feel?
How would you feel?
> Influence
Energy management has obvious implications for leadership since energy can be transmitted to, and influence, others at work and in life.
Part of what we’re all seeking in life is a connection with others. As you set out to change your work and life, that change will include others too.
I want to avoid sounding Machiavellian here, and avoid getting into the topic of power (you can read Cialdini or Greene for that).
Nevertheless it’s time to realize that you are a leader in the world. What you do and how you do it matters.
The quality of energy you bring to work and life matters. This realization came to me while strolling around the London Bridge area one sunny afternoon in early 2016, and was the tipping point in deciding to leave my corporate job.
When you realize that you are a leader (regardless of whether you have that as a job title or not), your whole orientation, positing and intentionality change.
You become proactive (in the Stephen R. Covey sense) because, after all, who else should take the lead if not you?
It is my hypothesis and hope that the raising of consciousness that will enable my vision of a kinder, fairer and more sustainable world will come as a byproduct of getting people to Express and Explore themselves and align their Energy to get what they really want.
What if you discovered that work and life aren’t zero sum games? That it isn’t a dog eat dog world (and if it is then you’re arguably doing the wrong things in the wrong way).
What if you discovered that you could reach self-Realization in a moment, right from where you’re sitting now?
I don’t expect all of you reading this to “quit corporate” or to do something completely different (though some will). You might already be where you need to be to make a difference, or close. You just need to be able to look at things from a different perspective and create new possibilities.
Of course the various aspects of Complete still take work. And “doing what you were put on this earth for” is not always painless. Most things that are worthwhile take effort.
The key to how quickly you can get through the process depends on tapping into the right “experience stream” i.e. the right set of experiences (and stories) at the right time, and having the right context to fit all of that content into.
Providing that experience stream and context is what I’m aiming to help you do by creating and sharing the Complete paradigm, and through Total Life Complete.
Composition
One idea that recently influenced my thinking on energy and “experience streams” is that of the three gunas (essential qualities) in The Bhagavad Gita. The gunas are Sattva (goodness, harmony), Rajas (passion, change) and Tamas (darkness, inertia). The Gita also talks about dharma (think: duty, but deeper than that).
I see these three qualities as being energies that each sit at a different point of a triangle. And with the relative percentage of each type of energy at any time affecting the size and shape of the triangle as in the example below:
This triangle is a visual representation of what I mean by composition i.e. the mix of energies that make you up at any time. I’ve come to believe that in addition to a mix of energies, we each have or can establish a “home state” of energy. In my earlier example, the state of beautiful consciousness when moved into everyday life would be a home state of Sattva.
I think that it’s a mistake to believe that you have to constantly be hyped up and aggressive and self-loathing in order to perform at the highest level (i.e. some combination of Rajas and Tamas).
Being in Sattva to my understanding is like being poised rather than being passive.
Being poised means that you can bring other energies to bear instantly as the situation demands.
Perhaps this was also what Lee meant when talking about expressing himself?
Certainly I think that most of you can relate to being jittery on coffee, for example, but stuck on a work problem that you are trying to overcome with force, but to no avail.
You take a break, or sleep on it and then you solve the problem with finesse (rather than force) and in no time at all.
When we decide to “sleep on it”, two things are happening. First, the next morning, for example, we’re in a more productive energy state.
And second, the way that creativity works is that we automatically mull over a definite problem in our subconscious, and an insight or answer will come to us from this mulling over in future (hours or days later).
This is why it is so important to turn your dreams into a definite (well/creatively defined) problem, and to allow some time between an initial attempt at problem solving, and deep ideation. Life is problem solving.
Make sure that you are solving the right problems.
Another “rule” of creativity is that often the first answer or idea is often not the best.
Too often a quick idea is an obvious (and probably commoditized) idea. It might be sensible but is also often superficial, not getting at the underlying “truth” of the situation. We’ll talk more about creative tools in the next article on Creative Personal Growth, but as you can already see, being more creative means doing different things and things differently than we normally do. That can feel strange, but living your dreams feels strange too, when you first try to do it.
Again, your duty/path or dharma or purpose might be a straight line from where you are now, or it could be on a completely different path (and you need to find what that path is).
Perhaps moving to that new path will mean you go backwards in order to go forwards. I firmly believe that the only relevant measure of potential is the degree to which you express yourself in the broadest sense. How far out you push the circle. That might or might not involve the accumulation of a bunch of stuff. But just having stuff doesn’t mean that you’ve achieved your potential.
For me, if I’m honest, I oscillate on the subject of purpose. Various experiences in life have led me to strongly believe that is it my responsibility to help others that have lost all hope in some way. And it is natural that I believe, since I’ve left a corporate job to do something different, that perhaps my particular history is relevant to why this duty falls to me. And that it “had to be that way”, including everything that has happened since then (successes and failures). Perhaps, but that all seems quite inefficient too!
Nevertheless, it doesn’t feel like that duty is complete right now, and so I continue on searching for ways to make the right contribution as I also try to follow my intuition and interests. I’m not sure if those words help you, but let’s leave it at that for now.
Wrap
We are all chasing a package of external and internal things. In the context of Complete I call the journey of bringing these things into your work and life, and sustaining that over time “Living on a Higher and Deeper Level”.
The basic mechanics of how to live on a higher and deeper is through expressing yourself (e.g. being authentic and vulnerable and pursuing what you really want), exploring yourself (different “sides” and ways of engaging with the world), and managing your energy in different ways. These three disciplines all affect consciousness (both mindset and no-mind set)
There are many different, and often more productive, ways to engage the world other than through the analytical/Ego frame most common in corporate environments, and the one oft used by professionals.
Learning and applying certain creative tools and approaches can be a relatively quick and effective way to begin to live on a higher and deeper level since it “hits” all three disciplines (express, explore, energy) and multiple modes of being. In a very practical sense, creativity is a superpower that lets you make something out of nothing. And equips you to better solve problems in the real world and your life, such as how to change careers or how to get paid for doing something that you care about.
To badly paraphrase Peter Drucker, you must lead yourself and be a leader to others.
Everything we’ve talked about here is key to being a leader in the current environment. Creativity is a superpower in the corporate workplace and the community too. Perhaps you’ll be the change you want to see in your company or community and in the world.
Until next time.
