Supercoach - Michael Neill [25]
“Oh no, I’m not putting myself through that again,” the former eco-warrior or bankrupt businessperson will say. Yet lowering your involvement (doing less, dropping out, not playing anymore, etc.) won’t ultimately resolve your desire for change. It will simply give you a bit of time to lick your wounds and recover your spirit before throwing yourself back into the arena in the only way you know how.
Low Investment/High Involvement
The two best ways I know to lower your level of emotional investment in an outcome are:
• Get as clear as you can about what is in your control and what isn’t.
• Really see that you’ll be okay regardless of what happens and how things turn out— that your ultimate happiness and well-being aren’t at stake.
Years ago, I decided to see what would happen if I engaged in an act of “happy activism”—that is, I’d do anything I could think of to get our local council to put a pedestrian crossing in at the intersection near our house, but I’d completely let myself off the hook about how things turned out, which I recognized lay well outside my control. While the process wound up taking more than a year, to my surprise the entire project was low-stress, extremely enjoyable, and, as it happened, resulted in a pedestrian crossing.
This is the real payoff of a low investment/high involvement/effortless success approach—you get all the fun of being creatively engaged without any of the stress of being emotionally invested. It’s completely sustainable because it’s not dependent on continual emotional refueling to keep you going. And by letting go of trying to control the uncontrollable (that is, what other people will do and how things will ultimately turn out), you ironically increase your influence and the probability of getting what you want.
So, What Do You Want to Create?
“You want what you want, whether or
not you think you can have it.”
— Robert Fritz
Surprisingly often, the people I work with are out of touch with their wants and dreams. When this happens, the place to begin is with a simple exploration of all the obvious and not-so-obvious dreams and desires that fuel both our occasional discontent with where we are and our hopes and expectations of the future.
The following questions are adapted from the “Success Made Fun” one-year program (available at: www.geniuscatalyst.com), and they invite you to cast a wide net in exploring the future you most want to create for yourself and for the world.
They are based on the recognition that we all have a multitude of thoughts and desires fighting for recognition inside us and that the first step in choosing which ones you want to engage with is to get them out of your head and onto paper. They can encompass every area of your life, from your health to your wealth, your home to your office, and yourself to your spirit.
As you go through this exercise, I want you to start a list of possible goals for yourself. These don’t have to be accomplishable in a year, or even within your lifetime. Don’t consider whether they’re realistic or specific or fit any of the other “goal rules” you’ve been taught.
I’ll give you some simple ways to refine your choices later in this session. For now, just make a list of as many things as you can think of in each section, and then, when you’re ready, move on to the next.
1. “Should” Goals
We all have things we think we “should” do in order to make the most of the opportunities we’re being presented with . . .
• What goals “should” you pursue in the next year?
• What goals would make you “a better person” if you accomplished them?
2. Logical “Next Step” Goals
Often, the goals we pursue are simply natural progressions from the ones we’ve been pursuing in the past . . .
• What do you feel are the sensible, reasonable, responsible objectives