Validate Your Life

I was on a live coaching conference call talking about different brain changes and patterns with some other coaches and I thought about the prospect of sharing a personal story.  We were discussing how adolescents can sometimes be sensitized to things that other people may deem as unproblematic, like, for example, not having someone to sit with for lunch.  Yikes!  I instantly communicated the effect of delivering a bit of personal history with the purpose of galvanizing the conversation, session, and communication.  On the topic of offering personal anecdotes….ANYWHERE!

• in coaching
• in consulting
• in friendship(s)
• in conversations
• in romance-seduction
• in rapport-building
• in relationships with anyone!

I propounded ever-so eloquently if I do say so myself that offering a personal story could be helpful for four good reasons.  A personal anecdote can: (more…)

I also must know YOU can only impat your emotions.  I (or anyone) can offer suggestions or advice or praise or insults but it’s up to you to feel good.  Everyone’s in charge of their own emotional state.  You are neither obligated nor have the power nor have the capacity to boost or change anyone’s emotional state.  Sure, you can know what triggers things in people but that is still THEM.  If I went to Africa, the same thigns I talk about here to boost people’s moods may not work their, or better, or whatever.  The whole point is that it’s someone else’s problem and state.  Even if I make someone else’s emotions my own problem that’s like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle when you’re locked outside of the vault in which it’s in.  No one can open you vault but you, so only you can help yourself.  That self-reliance is reassuring and comforting and refreshing.

The great Tony Blair once stated the truism:

“The art of leadership is saying no, not yes.  It is very easy to say yes.”

Indeed, when it’s so easy to become toxically riddled with guilt or shame, or simply having a bad habit of serving others requests at your expense, it can be very easy to say yes, and difficult to say no.  But a “No” is what is needed.

Brilliant article excerpt from earthlingcommunication on the different classifications of saying no, providing you with some options (This site had the same list, so I am not sure of lists origin.  Neither site properly cited.)

Variations of How to Say no

There are many variations of saying no. Each are suited to specific situations. Choose which one you think is best for the situation:

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Top Reasons Why People Find it Difficult to Let go of Hurtful People

• Fear of Rejection
• Strange, but true. Fearing to cross someone off your list means you somewhat fear rejection from others. Don’t ever fear rejection; you must interpret everything merely as feedback!
• Fear of People Attacking Back
• You may fear people retaliating. For me I feared the people cutting off financial support, supplies, and “material things”.
• Fear of New Behavioral
• Old habits die hard. Period.
• Top Most inefficient ways that People Exclude what They Don’t Want
• A lot of this works subconsciously….
• Do things to make them unattractive.
• Outrageously insane, but, yes, true. Some people gain weight, tarnish their image, purposely (subconsciously) look disheveled to “repel” people and things they don’t like, but don’t know how to exclude.
• Punish themselves

Yep the old, “it’s my fault” line creates a lot problems.
Get out of their mind and into yours. Your mind is a colorful, alive, limitless place – trust me, you want to go there!
Every people-decision in life opens a door and closes another. YOUR spirit and existence would benefit greatly to manufacture precise actions that open the door of Welcoming of exhilaration, romance, joy, jubilation, honesty, clarity, and quality, precision, freedom, strength, and grace, while closing the door of Misery of repulsive vilifications, confusion, frustration, angst, and pain. So many of us close the Welcoming door and open the Misery door. Don’t do that! You either welcome the right, good, quality people and events into your life that make you feel sincere, calm, and energized and feel warmth from the world, or you let in the infectious people, situations, things, and habits that taint your worldly perspective obfuscating your weltanschauung with bleak misery. Your interpretation of the zeitgeist reflects whom you welcome or do not welcome into your life. Do not even give yourself the choice to not close Misery doors and open Welcoming doors of genuineness. Just develop an instinctively intrinsic validation system to always slam shut the Misery door and fling open the Welcoming door.
This sounds simple, but, often the simplest things need the most alignment.
Let me know if you think this sounds too harsh, haughty, or haranguing, or if you have related ideas.

(Modified-Reconstructed 2007 Post).

Important words here. Excluding dangerous, abusive and destructive people, habits, and things from you life does not classify as “holding grudges”. Protecting yourself, your mind, your life, from people that hurt you, make you feel neglected, make you feel shitty, lost, confused, and foul does yourself a favor. Whenever you put time into “thinking” about people – even if it’s thinking about how to avoid them – you give them fallacious power. Power does not exist, but I used to spend a lot of time getting enraged when people I didn’t like contacted me. Does that process have a desirable purpose? No, because you can’t make anyone feel blame. Don’t give undesirable relationships the privilege of hearing your words (even if you deliver vilifying insults – that response could still be rewarding for them than ignoring a person).

So, conclusively, one thing I have done to prevent emotionally abusive people, debilitating habits, or miserable places from entering my life is remove them from my contacts list. Then It’s simple. If you get a call or message from someone who is not on your list of people who “support your beliefs, call you back, and are “active” in your life” you just ignore them! Or if you get an urge, a compulsion to execute a destructive habit, you just ignore that impulse!

One common reaction to excluding people and saying “no” to people (implicitly, just cutting them off) is the sensation of guilt. The involuntary reaction of guilt originates from illusion; it doesn’t exist, but it gets you to do things that bring you more pain and turmoil. Here’s an example: I would frequently get calls and emails from people that brought me pain, blatantly insulted me, and hurt me in the past. I’d exclude them (delete emails, delete messages, etc.) but then would feel my unconscious reaction of guilt speaking up saying: “Don’t hold grudges. Maybe those people are different now. Call them back.” I’d listen to my idiotic “guilt-based ego voice” and, once again, I’d go flying into a tormenting, painful, confusing, and denigrating interaction with those people then. Therefore, indirectly, it was “Guilt” that operated as my greatest enemy. It was guilt that tricked me into diving back into destructive experiences.

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How does simply ignoring, rather than reprimanding, scolding, yelling, undesirable people, habits, or occurrences benefit our longevity’s efficiency? Because you stay in control that way, while sectoring your time to share it with exciting and authentic experiences. A computer server has millions of requests “knocking on its door” all the time, every second of every day. Yet there are thousands of protocols and “permissions” files within that server that immediately tell it what to do (and what not to do) with “packets” of information received on the internet. Did you ever get that “Error 404 Not Found” error while surfing the internet? If you’ve browsed enough pages, you know what I’m talking about.
An internet server has a busy life. It doesn’t have time to shut-down all operations and yell and scream and get enraged at an “excluded host” when contacted! It can only afford – thankfully – to send a quick, instantaneous programmed response, “Error no access”, so it can focus its processing power on the good, resourceful tasks – exchanging data and updates and requests and gets and formulas with permissible hosts on the internet.
Your interaction with the world and people should be the same. You open up your emotional doors of clarity, honesty, and sincerity to those “permissible” hosts and quickly exclude the “impermissible hosts” (those people that do not fulfill and support your beliefs, nor ideas, nor call you back).

(Modified 2007 Post)

I’ve given this a tremendous amount of thought.  No, more.  I’ve written chapters in books to this topic. No…More.  I’ve devoted many years of my life to interacting with people and trying to treat all people as equal of equal intelligence.  My mantra, rubric, guideline, personal manifesto, what have you, was something along the lines of this (outlined in the 8th chapter of the complete rubbish book I wrote, Validate Your Life):  “Everyone is of equal intelligence; we all simply channel our intelligence cultivate intelligence rather into different areas.  Meaning that someone watching tv beomces “an intelligent couch potato”, someone who studies manifolds and topology, becomes an intelligent mathematican.” Right, sounds elagitarian, equal,  all for one one for all nice humanitarian perspective of the world and the minds it, right?

You are not a leming.

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• Main Validate Your Life Podcast
• John’s NLP Course

I am not you, and you are not me.  That is the way things are.  I like that.  As you ponder that, let me explain to you why I find tremendous value in that distinction.

Distinctions create boundaries.  Without distinctions, everything would be porous and absorbing this information or that information would generate confusion.  But that confusion is instantly absolved when we utilize distinctions.

There’s a tendency for people with whom I communicate to think that we have some connection, as-if they “know me”.  The way they communicate and the advice they give comes from the perspective of “I know this person in every dimension and in every aspect”.  But then I mention something that I have done that the person with porous distinctions has not done, like ran multiple marathons,  the person shirks back and immediately says “Oh, I couldn’t do that!”.  Instantly their slurring and blurring of our distinctions of you being me, and me being you –gets mutilated when an element of capacity enters the conversation.

You see, as you listen to this closely and intently you realize that intention should govern our behavior (and often it does when we are not being persuaded, manipulated, or under a hypnotic trance by the media), but  many times our perception of capacity limits our behavior.  When I mention to someone actions I have taken that they deem outside of their capacity (for example having written 4 books, or ran multiple marathons, or any other task of which people are incredibly capable of doing, but don’t believe they have that capacity to do so) who has a ruptured their perception of boundaries, what happens in their mind?  First they recoil.  They instantaneously have a thought process of “this person is not whom I thought they were and there exists a distinction in our capacity”.  Such distinctions are good.  Because in many ways, what makes you you, and me me, is our logical levels, which of course, include beliefs, identity, capabilities, and behavior.  If I am talking to you in person, we share the same environment.  That is it.  I’d say environment is roughly 3% of “who I am” and “who you are” at best.   Without logical levels, we are all practically identical twins because our only differences would be blemishes on our epidermal layer of our skin, hair coloration, simple, trivial distinctions bound into the same sequences of deoxyribonucleic acid.  So it’s truly our logical levels that spark this kind of Lamarakian

For awhile in my junior year in college I engaged this belief that we were all this spiritual, interconnected, “Universal One” person.  I enjoyed entertaining that belief because of many reasons.  Reasons for entertaining the “universal one” delusion: (more…)

Hear This In FULL as a free podcast! If you like what you hear. Be sure to check out the “Audio” page of http://www.validateyourlife.com for more inspiration and clarity!

People Categories

Categorize People in I’ve noticed those three distinctions VERY clearly in friends but instead of just categorizing appropriately the “friend” as a
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“I’m not interested”. “I love your energy and you’re doing a great job selling, but I’m not interested, mate.” “I can tell you REALLY want me to, but not interested. Thanks though! Happy travels!” “No, zero interested”. There’s magic in those phrases. There’s abundant, liberating, FREEDOM in those phrases. What do those phrases do? Those phrases reclaim your time. Those phrases reclaim your life. In life, all you really have is time. It’s arguable that you have decisions and time, but for someone committed to taking action (less decision-making), you truly only have time. Utilizing your time with the right decisions will earn you money, put you in the best place in the world, where you want to be.

If you don’t have the capacity to say those phrases, and control YOUR time, do you know how dangerous life will become??!!! Your life will become someone else’s life. Some salesman who invites you to test drive his car, or some teacher who wants you to pay them to take her class…all of those things you will do and people will drain you of money, drain you of time, drain you of life.

People may get offended if you politely tell them you’re not interested. Guess what? Their feeling offended is NOT your problem! If someone says to you “I’m not interested” and I feel offended because someone expressed their opinion about an offer, I’d have a seriously low-esteem or “taking things personally” or confidence problem! So honor someone being offended by you politely saying “I’m not interested, but I appreciate your offer” as some problem THEY have!!

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I stumbled across a flirting, date “tip”. This was phrased as a tip and it was about self-touch. It detailed that if a woman is interested in a man, she will touch her chest, leg.

I know (because I’ve dated women and we’ve discussed how they don’t subscribe to that) that some women do not touch themselves ad a part of their body and then expect a man to obsequiously sidle up to her because of HER romantic interest. And as a male, I personally don’t subscribe to that either. Why? Because the times that I observe with my fairly advanced body-language observation skills that a woman is doing some peculiar array of gestures and contortions that she is convinced is supposed to “express her romantic interest” (when in fact walking up to me and saying “I’m romanticlaly interested in you, want to chat?” would be the most phenomenal turn-on possible!) I was repulsed with how little confidence such a person has.

I guess my question is, doesn’t that seem awfully reflective of the woman not having confidence? What’s stopping the woman from boldly going up to a man that she’s interested in and introducing herself? Why must she do this bizarre courtship ritual where SHE touches her self because SHE is interested in a man and instead of acting on HER romantic interest, she feels imprisoned in a set of cultural customs to passively “lure” her sycophantic romantic “prey” over to her? What percentage of women subscribe to such nonsense? I have absolute certainty that it’s no 100% because I’ve met women who laugh at those tactics. What’s frightening is that I think the percentage is quite high. In many ways, doesn’t this passive, low confidence, indirect role that such a high percentage of women play ultimately condemn their outspokenness, their directness, their assertiveness in the relaitonship?

As homo sapiens were consciously are endowed with teh capacity to NOT resort to bizarre ritualistic courtship mating drills like the ones birds resort to that involve a flashing of colorful feathers and an exotic dance. As humans, we have the capacity to see the inherent ridiculousness in and the confining ramifications of courtship “drills” and even gender roles. And with our consciousness, we can live more full and complete and more importantly, more direct with our emotions in a way that relinquishes us from “moratorium of hte unknown”.

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Holmes’ Meta Strategy!
This is the transcription and reflection on Robert Dilts’ Strategies of Genius.

Perception of Clusters of Details —> Behavioral Observations + Environmental Observations —> Inferences —> Combinations of inferences —> Conclusions

Cultural Assumptions & Facts are matched up with the observations to draw inferences, then the inferences are “compiled” to generate conclusions.

Why is Holmes Strategy so useful to learn?
Well, for one, Sherlock Holmes (although fictional) is the greatest observational-deducer probably ever to exist in our imaginations or out of it. The fact that he’s fictional does not prevent his techniques from being genuine, applicable, and highly useful. The observational-deducing strategies used by Sherlock Holmes seriously fall in the category of something expansively NLP because it increases the options you have in life. You can (and will) draw these truthful, accurate conclusions seemingly from thin air. Yes, that is impressive and makes for a great trick, but also for your own awareness and heightened observational skills this is extremely potent. It’s so valuabl eto understand how we go from submodality observations and asking the who, what, how, where, when (and sometiems why) questions to arrive at the causes and behavioral conditions and capabilities behind what we see. Wolves are notably more intelligent than dogs because of their 30% increased intelligence and heightened “observational learning”. Observational learning means that they’ll figure out how the cage they’re in works, and can quickly escape than anything without observational learning. Similarly, learning and Applying Holmes meta-strategy for drawing deductive conclusions from heightened observations frees you and expands your life MUCH more than the person who does not use this strategy. Ultimately, by using and applying Holmes’ filtering and questing and tying up observations with cultural assumptions, imaginations, and facts to reach inferecnes and then conclusions from the summation and formulaic equations of those inferences, you truly will lead a more liberated, more full, more complete life than someone who does not use these strategies. So learn on!

The fusion of cultural assumption & Fact with the observation is key and often the overlooked step.

If you see someone lightly hesitantly putting his hand on a woman’s shoulder (observation), it’s likely it’s their first date (inference) because if they had gone on many dates, there likely would be no hesitation (cultural assumption)!

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“There are these four ways of answering questions. Which four? There are questions that should be answered categorically [straightforwardly yes, no, this, that]. There are questions that should be answered with an analytical (qualified) answer [defining or redefining the terms]. There are questions that should be answered with a counter-question. There are questions that should be put aside.
These are the four ways of answering questions. ”
– Buddhist Quote

Straigthforward-answer, redefinition of terms, counter-question, neglect/discard the question = Straightup beverage, “what ingredients are in that drink?”, “is that the best drink on the menu? Have you tried..xyz?” “i’m not thirsty”. I LOVE This because it gives you permission to understand that questions are really truly what we make of them. and we don’t have to make anythong of them (discard), and can answer them if want (direct), or change them (redefine), or simply bounce them back (counter-question). I always thought I had to choose between categorically (directly) answering a question or not. Now I realize that was only 1/4 of my total options!