Let’s Get Real

 

You hear it all the time from the spiritual/coaching community: step up! Be seen! Spread your message! Be all that you can be (thanks to the US Army for that one)!

Inspiring indeed. And true… we should all constantly be growing, learning, evolving, and using our own particular talents to the greatest degree possible. But it can also be confusing and frustrating. In fact it seems fairly abstract to most of us. What the heck are your greatest gifts anyway? How do you know – you’ve had them all your life and so they seem ordinary to you. In fact, chances are that you can’t even see your gifts at all. It’s like: who, me? Gifts? WTF?

I have had a few clients who came to me expecting to “be healed” by talking to me on the phone a few times and doing a prayer. While that is part of the process, the bulk of my work is facilitating your own realizations about yourself and convincing you that it’s worth it to take new, sometimes scary, actions. Remember the one about “same actions = same results”, etc.? Yeah, that.

But that sounds like so much b.s. to many of us. What actions? Even, what results?

Take the thing that you really think you can’t do but would like to. “Boy, I wish I could…”. Then, look at why you think that you cannot do it. And look at the people who can do it. Do they have a brain… arms and legs… can express themselves and interact with people? So can you. What then is the difference between you and them? The difference is that they are doing it and you are not.

Now, wanting to be a champion sprinter when you have a bum knee ain’t gonna work. If you simply can’t grasp higher mathematics, you’re not going to be a rocket scientist. But there is something (sometimes many many things) that you can do better than anyone else. You’re simply not doing it.

Finding out what you do best and how to do it can be a lifelong quest. Nothing’s wasted, so that experience is valuable. But at some point we need to put all those lessons to use. In this world we’re in right now, “real” actions count. We can sit and philosophize all day long – but nothing happens. It’s like electricity: There can be a huge amount of power available, but it’s only potential. It has no useful purpose until it’s grounded. All of that spiritual energy does nothing, goes nowhere, until it’s grounded to the Earth to make real change.

I use myself as an example often because I’m intimately aware of my own process.

• For my entire adult life, I was so confused by all the religions and the inconsistencies I saw that I didn’t know what to believe. I envied “church people” because they seemed at least to take comfort in those pre-packaged ideas. Now, I have a very firm grasp on what I believe to be Truth (for me) and I don’t waver. How did I do that? By making a decision and taking action to learn more about the possibilities.

• Socially, I was always a shrinking violet and an observer, and it didn’t matter whether I was at a relatively boisterous biker party or at dinner with a group. I didn’t care for attention, and I usually had little to say. The thought of being seen and the center of attention gave me the screaming meemies. But something nagged at me for years that this was not right – it wasn’t authentic for me to be hiding.  So, with great trepidation I faced my fears and joined Toastmasters.  In a few weeks from now I’m giving a presentation in Philadelphia. It’s impossible to express how surprised I am to find myself doing anything like that. But I am, and it’s because I took action.

• Of late I have taken to using video to get my message out. Even just a year ago I ignored this medium out of fear. Fear of what? I guess it was fear of failure, fear that I looked funny or didn’t speak well. Again, as my own sense of self worth and empowerment grew, I realized that those were just excuses. Yeah, some people will indeed think that I look funny or don’t speak well. But my message isn’t for them. I discovered that plenty of people enjoy my videos and get value from them. If I hadn’t physically stepped out of my fear, I would never have bee able to use this powerful tool.

• Because of my frustration with my performance for most of my life, I admit that I could be a pretty nasty and mean-spirited young man, and was rapidly turning into a grumpy old man. I yelled at the kids and wasn’t very kind to my spouse. But as I grew in the knowledge of my own value I realized that my actions had real effects on people, no matter how I felt that I loved them and wanted to take care of them. So I took it upon myself to be different and to act differently… and now I rarely raise my voice or criticize. And if I do, I reverse it immediately.

These are a few examples of how real action gets results. I’m a far different man than I was ten years ago and that delights me. Yes, it’s because I woke up and began to think differently. But without real action, those thoughts would have been just pretty things hanging on the wall for me to admire, in my own private museum in my head… and as such would make little real difference in my life or to those around me.

The next time you think about something that you “can’t” do, ask yourself, “why not?”. Of course your mind will have a ready answer supplied by your subconscious, because that’s the way it is programmed. But if you keep asking and dig deeper, the voice telling the story of who you are will begin to stutter nervously. It is afraid of change, but you aren’t. The easiest way to re-program that little discouraging voice is to prove it wrong by doing that which frightens you. Trust me, once you can do that the ball will be rolling in your direction.