Empty Your Mind and Play
~BRUCE LEE
You know, I've always seen people improve their business if they continue to relate their business to a game. Or a contest...or a Bruce Lee martial arts tournament.
When they take it out of the category of "grim, grim, reality" and put it into the GAME mentality, that frees them up to do their best thinking.
But people starting their week? Where's the game plan? There is none because there is no game. It's too grim for that. It's too serious. It's all about my survival, or my worth. So it goes down the tubes riding on a river of fear. Just like the way the 17 lies began ... it was a book that was originally going to be called Lying to the Soul.
Here's what I said then and it's even more true today as markets swell and then shrink and swell again causing people to panic for all the wrong exterior reasons.
Fear is all about lies.
Not the everyday white lies we use to spare someone's feelings (usually our own). Nor is it about huge public lies like "I would never do anything to harm Nicole."
It's about lies that do more damage than those do.
These are lies to the soul.
These are lies we send down inside ourselves that convince us that we don't have any power.
My life as a writer and coach is now dedicated to uncovering a racket --- the racket of conning ourselves into believing we are helpless deep inside. The racket that talks us into believing in our defects instead of our energy.
This con job can become a life-long stratagem of self-deceit. If the lies are not exposed and brought out into the open, they can make fearful infants of us all.
We know how we chill ourselves down with these lies. How we use them to dampen the fire of the human spirit. And how we think "if I under-achieve, so what? At least that's predictable and easy to manage." Operating on a small percentage of our potential may lead to a life of mild misery, but it's misery that's easy to manage, just as a car going at a slow speed is easier to manage than one going 120 miles an hour. One hundred and twenty miles an hour is frightening. And thrilling.
The widespread popularity of self-deceiving might be due to its effectiveness. It gets the job done. It takes us out of the game. It sits us down at the end of the bench so we don't have to play. It even puts a cool towel around our necks, a towel that we can hide our faces in if we become ashamed that the world is passing us by...playing hard while we sit and watch. (Ever get a funny feeling watching the Olympics?)
We speak these lies (of how defeated we are) so that they roll down like chilly water onto our souls, down like the river Jordan, onto the flame of the spirit. All our lives our lies roll on. Roll on, like the Fugs used to sing, about the mighty river they called the "river of sh*t."
It was a song about lies.
Every lie we tell ourselves is based on fear of the unknown. Fear of the the fresh and the beautiful.
Fear of that daring plunge into unknown beauty.
Fear of uncertainty, fear of being courageous, evolving and creative.
Fear of risking being a total fool.
Fear of taking a stand for greatness.
Those fears inspire the lies. The lies give us an easier, softer way to go every time. They remove us from daring action and huge commitments. From inventing a future in the face of total uncertainty.
But the truth is, we don't have to accept anything cold rolling down inside us. We don't have to experience a river of fear. The truth is, we are powerful. We can fight back. We can take our lives into our own hands.
