Rescripting Negative Imagination

“I AM A POSITIVE PERSON”
Not 100% sure, but I suspect most people, when asked if they think they are a positive person, will indeed think they are generally a positive humanbeing.  For those who don’t sign up in the “Positive Paulina” camp, there’s likely a group that will say, “Well, positive is good, but I am also realistic.” (This is a limiting statement that allows them to dabble their feet in both sides of the pool. Wait a second… what does a negative pool and a positive pool really look like?)  Then, you will get a group that says they are as negative and cynical as possible. Then there’s people who say they are positive and go home and cry in their pillow every night, realistic people who wonder why they are depressed, and cynical people who wish the world didn’t have to be the way it is.  Is that all the categories? Surely not.

Point is, when someone SAYS they are positive, it isn’t likely the whole picture, and even if it was the whole picture, it only applies to that moment because through space and time everything is in fluctuation. So, the label (like so many) is not nearly as valuable as our actions.  But where it gets fun: it’s not just the actions we take mechanically, or the words we say, it all starts in the thoughts we think, in how we perceive our world (and how we allow ourselves to change how we choose to perceive… ).  If I want to say “I am a positive person,” that’s fine, but if I want to make that my reality, I have to be positive. That starts by thinking positive.

WHY THAT WEIRD INTRO?
I was going to start this post by saying I was a positive person, and then started to think about that statement, because the whole point of this post is to ponder the concept of rescripting negative imagination. So, even a person as ridiculously positive as yours truly, I still have a post to write about my negative energy! I can get into all the fun details about neuro-plasticity and all the theories of positive thinking, positive energy and riding positive waves towards our goals… someday…maybe in another post. Overall, I am subscribing to this positive energy thing.  People like Rhonda Byrne (The Secret), Bill Harris (CenterPointe Research), John Kehoe (Mind Power), John Assaraf (NeuroGym) and many more are making a gazillion dollars explaining how everyone can be making a gazillion dollars (or achieving their dreams, in the event a gazillion dollars is not making the list of things to do in order to achieve their dreams).  I’m not going to evangelize these approaches right now.  I’ve simply made a personal decision that I value positive energy, and I’m welcoming more of it into my life every single day.

THE NEGATIVE IMAGINATION CHALLENGE 

So, ergo this post. I am in the middle of a life change.  There is a lot going on, and there is a lot of disagreement and strange influxes of distrust that have been making their way into this life change. Now, of course, it is all to easy to say I cannot control everyone, and this transition is supposed to be difficult and the way it went down was unfair to me and boo hoo hoo, poor me a victim of the big bad universe, or fate, or maybe some life form that looks like a giant Kermit the Frog declaring my happiness is none of his business. That’s all hogwash. (Someday, I will Google how the term “hogwash” came to be…are we not supposed to bother washing hogs because they love the mud? Maybe that’s it.)

So the positive energy approach is to see your reality up front.  OK, I would then phrase my reality like this: this life transition is going very smooth – there’s abundance in my life, and through my abundance I can help the other folks involved in this life transition. But, when I am not paying attention, my brain has been doing a couple things I find fascinating.  First, it will wander into random places… so instead of dwelling on my goals, achievements or other zones that will move me forward, I will snap out of a thought and say, “Why am I using my time to contemplate the different ways I trim my fingernails? Or replaying the scene in that action movie and changing the endings around?”  Those situations are fairly benign, but then we add said “second thing.”  I will see my goal in my mind, and the conversation with a key person will go poorly, or a step I take will be met with devastating failure…entire ventures will fail.  That’s exactly the opposite of what I want.  I am not scared when it happens – this is not the same thing as a fear response (which puts us in survival mode and shuts down our contemplation). I am contemplating the scenario, but I am going at it exactly the opposite of what I should be doing, and I am not present in the thought – it is just playing back without my intervention.  After the “failure film” finishes playing, I snap out of it and I have to stop myself and then rethink, re-visualize and try and re-feel that scenario in a positive way.

That’s generally how it goes down. And here is the silver lining… I have achieved, in this situation, what Bill Harris calls “awareness” – that is, I see the impact of my actions as I am doing them.  I am now aware of this behavior, and I can now rescript it. So here is what I am going to do… this is going to be epic.

BEFRIENDING THE HISTORY ERASER BUTTON

There’s this episode of Ren & Stimpy where Stimpy has to guard the history eraser button. (spoiler alert) Stimpy eventually gives into the narrator’s badgering temptations and presses the button. The history of everything is erased.

Here is my plan, since what I want to do during an unhealthy negative imagination sequence is to stop it, erase it and replace it with a positive healthy version, I am going to spend time imagining that (take a swig of coffee friends): Whenever I imagine something, I will always have a history eraser button with me.  I am going imagine myself caring this little button with me whenever I am imagining, and I am going to practice pushing the button and erasing negative memories, rescripting them with positive ones. Buhbam, right? It’s crazy… redoing how I imagine.  maybe later I can imagine how I will change how I imagine about changing my imagination. Wut?

Anyway – let me see how that goes.  First step is to make sure I practice having the button with me, so that it becomes a habit.  Such a strong habit, that when my mind wanders into a negative thought, my own brain will be like “where’s that button?” and I will press it.  Then, here is the awesome part – the POWER of that button is to immediately erase that negative thought as though it never happened, and then I am free to imagine the positive version.  In fact, just becoming aware of this ability to press that button during a thought immediately pulls me out of the “film” and makes me a cognizant observer that can then redirect the whole scene as needed. Heck, I can stop and ask why someone is talking to me that way, or think about how to deliver an eloquent response that would help the situation, or imagine my yacht pulling up and allowing me to go on a vacation…whatever I want! It’s like double the self-programming. Nice.

This could be just the beginning of my mental tool belt.

That’s the theory anyway. Wish me success, and I’ll be back with an update….at some point!

TheRage3K

Giving Thanks

Right now, I would love to be asleep, but there are construction crews working a priority repair and I have this nagging cough… so jack hammers are at full blast at 2:45AM, and I am singing harmony with them using “cough counterpoint”; however, this is a “first world” problem. It’s not like I don’t have a bed, or fresh water, or a toilet. I have all that, and much more…so, a sleepless night – heck, some people would dream of being able to have a sleepless night where I am!

2013 has been quite a year.  A lot of things have happened and some can be posted on a blog, and some of it cannot! Bottom line is that I am truly thankful for what this year has brought.  I have been brought many gifts: time with family, good memories with friends, some solid career progress, a focus on balance and health, renewed energy towards goals which have been pushed aside for years, and renewed focus on achieving those goals.   I have been brought many challenges: family members I am going to visit in person, rebuilding my life when certain plans didn’t go how I thought they would, overcoming the loss of people near and dear to me, and pulling myself off the cross I created.

That last one is probably the most important.  For all my levels of introspection (and I do count myself as highly introspective) that was still another layer of self-sabotage that I had to crush this year.  Nobody cares about my crosses, nobody cares if I nail myself to them and whine and complain about how painful they are…  There are many rules of engagement I have generated over the years.  Some of them are good, but some of them create patterns that hold me back.  I’ve been re-scripting those. Then, even worse, there was my tendency to make OTHER people’s crosses MINE.  Like I would be helping them if I did that? Welcome to the “classic enabler.” The line between enabling someone else and helping them is sometimes very fuzzy – especially if that help is expanded incrementally over time.   I haven’t done it a lot, but there have been a few key places where I practiced this pattern – picking up other people’s crosses when the best thing I could do is let them build their strength and resolve by just coaching them instead!

Live and learn as they say! I am squashing unhealthy patterns – I am erasing negative self-talk, erasing unhealthy self-imposed rules, I am done making other people’s problems MY problems. Dunzo! I might need to clarify that a little more. I’m talking about the practice of making other people’s individual issues my individual issues; supplanting the priorities of my life with someone else’s priorities at the expense of achieving my aspirations. I still might assist with someone else’s priorities, but it will be because it furthers the goals that I have in place.  Another example, there’s a billion people that do not have a bathroom.  If I choose to accept the challenge of solving that problem, I already know I am not contacting one of the billion, making their bathroom problem MY problem and then building them a bathroom. They’d have a bathroom, but wouldn’t know how to maintain it, and then they would be mad at me when it broke or blame me if there was a problem with it… see how that enabling thing works? Unhealthy I say!!  In this particular example, there would be strategy, like researching how to best have their home country tackle the project from both an educational and infrastructure perspective. Yes, education is a huge reason why building bathrooms is a “waste” of time (oh, that was definitely “potty” humor): Governments must be teaching people WHY bathrooms are important (health), and teaching a workforce how to build/maintain bathrooms (plumbing, parts, water/sewage systems, etc).

Anyway, I could go on and on (surprise).  Happy Thanksgiving to everyone  – and hopefully, in the near future, I will be doing more to make this little blue orb a more effective place for everyone.  I will probably be writing more about that soon, but note the key word is “probably.”  Even with renewed focus, I have found life is ever-changing and the best plans must bend instead of break. Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a curve, anyway.  It just depends on the terrain, and viable methods of reaching the destination. That’s the 50,000 foot view of 2013 and it is an amazing view, whether plotted as a line or a curve!

Toilets Before Spaceships

Many folks have heard this phrase… “he’s so poor, he can’t even afford a pot to piss in.” We use it as a figure of speech, but for 1 billion people on this planet, right now, in the year 2013, it’s a reality.  Literally, according to the United Nations,  “1 billion people, 15% of the world population, practice open defecation.”  These are people who literally do not have access to a toilet, not even a shared one, not even an OPEN one where a bunch of people sit in front of each other and do their business because there’s nowhere else to go…

That really drives some perspective.  How is that even possible? Why don’t we see that on the nightly news? Maybe because it doesn’t sell.  I laugh all the time about how it is 2013 and our species seems so behind its capabilities collectively.  But when I think about it, it is usually in terms of “first world” problems like education systems, justice systems, civic and governance systems, economic systems…blah blah blah.

Now I am reading about the most basic system of all: a place to go poop, and there’s a billion people that don’t have a place?? Like for reals? That’s ridonkulous.

OK, so now what…I am just supposed to go back to my life and say,”Sorry you billion people but, I sure am glad it ain’t me. haha!”

Well, that’s what typically happens, I guess.  Everyone’s kinda focused on their piece of their pie, and I am not much different. . . . BUTT, maybe I should be.

Let’s think about this… we got 7 billion people now?  6 billion of them have a place to poop.  That’s a plus.  But what does that do? It does things like raise the child mortality rate, slows the spread of disease, and improves the sustainability of the planet.  I mean, poop is good for the planet, but 7 billion people worth of poop is a lot of poop.  So let’s say we give this missing billion a place to “pop a squat” as they say… let’s say we do that.  Then what happens?

We still have 7 billion people… now they all have bathrooms.  That’s good in some ways, but there’s still 7 billion of them, and the more we improve health the more crowded it is going to get.

At this point, some people put their villain hat on and say, then maybe we should be getting RID of places to poop.  So mortality and disease can go up and we can all die a little younger on average. . . . .  as long as it doesn’t happen in MYYYYY neighborhood (wink wink).

I don’t think that’s the answer.

And there’s a gazillion other factors to consider… for example, a lot of economic systems are reliant on growth in consumerism in order to thrive, so the more people the planet can support, the more money there is to be made by the Illuminati or whatever.  But then, if I were an Illuminati, would I care about money? Not really – at that point it is about power.  So maybe they aren’t interested in the planet supporting more hoomanz, maybe it is part of the cosmic plan for things to go to a certain breaking point.  Who knows. . .and that’s me speculating on someone else’s agenda.

I care about my agenda.  What is my agenda? Well, when it comes to poop, I think we should all have a place to go – from the Illuminati to the Indian salt farmer, to the African Saharan sand comber.  I have what Covey calls an “abundance mentality” – so let’s pack as many of us as we can on this rock, let’s foster ridiculous amounts of learning across all of civilization, lets colonize this galaxy.  But first… let’s all have a damn place to poop!!

Or so we think. There are other factors to consider.  For example, we might think, “if we build it, they will poop.”  But, this is not the case.  I have a good friend, and one day we theorized that if an advanced species came to Earth, an effective way to kill us all would be to simply give us free light sabers.  Seriously, we’d all be dead in like, an hour.  Research already shows, without proper education, some people have a toilet, and instead they use it to bathe, or store their weed and stuff.

So, maybe the first step is education and let people DECIDE what they want, then let them put policies and government in place to obtain it, or something like that.

It’s not as easy a problem to fix as I would hope… there’s serious infrastructure involved and people need to have the skill to engineer, build and subsequently maintain the physical structures, the ongoing supply chain, the financial systems, and of course the laws/policies that pertain to these systems.   Just building it is not the answer… communities need to evolve and mature to the point where they value having a place to poop.

Then there is the whole debate of what system to put in place… think about it – our current poop systems waste a LOT of water.  Are toilets REALLY the way to go (pun intended)??? Isn’t there some way to do this using other technology?   Something that requires less infrastructure, uses less or no water, and produces useful output (fertilizer, or maybe fuel pellets, or something)?  Just saying!

Anyway, today, I learned this crazy fact… and I realized we need to figure out toilets before we figure out spaceships, and I still think the answer is going to be in empowering people through knowledge.

One thing is for sure, I’m never gonna look at a toilet the same way again…

Back to Goals

Our Planet is so gosh-dangly fragmentalized.  Unless I want to become a robot (not saying I don’t but let’s ride on the pretense that being a robot is not on the to-do list), pursuing 1 clear cut goal is really obnoxiously difficult.  Why is that?… I am yet again so glad you have asked.

It all restarted this year, in this post, culminating in an approach that I attempted to follow for several months.  Each time I would try to make progress, I found myself clicking on the little magnifying glass and drawing a zoom box so I could get to a quantifiable set of tasks.  But each time I drew a zoom box I kept finding more questions and options and little informational sidebars that kept fragmenting the vision…. by the time I had zoomed in enough to DO something, it wasn’t anything I was interested in doing.

So, here I am on Hallow’s eve with a metaphorical zoom box, a primed legal container, and having to revisit my entire approach.  It’s been a fascinating journey, but something still hain’t quite right.

To help correct this, I have to come to terms with a couple core concepts: 1) I am not a detail person and 2) that first statement is a lie.  If I can figure that out, then I will have $10,000,000 of net worth by the end of this calendar year.  There’s my vested interest in figuring this out.

Let’s go over some of the fun to be had, here… for example, I have an interest in natural resources.  Now, before I get into natural resources, I tell myself,”self, the first question to ask is ‘how much do we have’ and the next question to ask is ‘what’s our current and projected burn rate?’  Try Googling that… my search on global natural resources lead me to a list of oil companies, a list of government agencies, several wikipedia articles, to some outdated EDU site with a list of resources that was a 404 landmine.  There’s a TON of information, but it isn’t aggregated how I want to look at it.  In fact, this takes me back to the TED talk (yeah, do I get royalties for that? lol) about web 3.0 – if we could get at the data of the internet in a useful way, I might be able to visualize at least SOME of what I am looking for…  I say some, because there are entities who have spent a LOT of money cataloging what I want to research, and, well, what’s in it for them if they share?  I’ll tell you – the competition will come in and, with lower R&D costs caused by the release of the initial company’s intellectual property, they will wipe the initial company off the financial map.

Maybe then, my data won’t be out there…because that’s just the FIRST set of questions.  Anywho, if you know of an entity that compiles natural resource statistics such as quantity, location, burn rates, that might come in handy for me… or somebody I will employ.  Just throwing that out there – my core interests are water, power, fiber, farm land, and sanitation.

There – that was an example of a “zoom box”… I had to zoom in to do the research, and I have had that happen over and over.  The result is, it fragments my time and progress slows to a crawl on my goals because while I am zoomed in, there is no progress on the other fronts.

Robert Kiyosaki, as part of his cashflow quadrant concept, mentioned this issue of going from an employee to a specialist… it could be a trap, and the way out of a trap is a business model so I can get from business owner to investor, because until I have a portfolio of crazy ventures cranking out results, I am not going to make the kind of progress needed to fix the entire planet and launch a viable space exploration venture using giant robots shaped like our founding fathers.  Can you imagine that…on some distant world, the receiving civilization sees a giant Teddy Roosevelt flying through space towards their planet. Hey, it could happen!!

I have no interest in being the specialist anymore…I’ve been there, bought the t-shirt, scraped off the bumper sticker, and moved on.  There’s a lot of talented people who want to be the specialist, and I am OK with that!  My goal is to hire a team of those and put them to work solving all kinds of cool challenges.

Of course, while doing that I am still working on a video project, a web service architecture, a mobile app and a couple other side projects… but hey, stay tuned.

Goal Setting Across Space Time

Defining “my way” has been an exercise I undergo every 6 – 12 months as I plot a course from one interesting chapter to another in my life.  I could (and probably will) write a book just about that last sentence, but this time, my goal setting has been challenged – in a positive way.  Challenged to the very core (and even the concepts behind the definition of the “core” itself).  It’s lead me to a very interesting, comfortable and yet highly chaotic and disruptive state of mind.  My blog tag is “chaotic everywhere like me” so, I am generally OK with chaos. I also like order – when applied in way I find agreeable. Somewhere between order and chaos, I usually find some small, medium and large goals to work towards.  Then, in some twist of anti-Coveyist logic, I do all the small goals, get partially through the medium goals and wake up 5 years later wondering why I am not a rock star (I usually write polkas on the flute-a-phone, but it should be spontaneous transition, I would think).

So along comes this challenge. And I have been thinking about goals in the context of this challenge to figure out what I need to do to move forward on my larger goals in a more quantitative way (accepting that fluidity and chaos are part of the mix).  Today, I found a partial answer to that question.

It started with a physical therapy appointment.  There were a lot of little things that made today’s journey interesting, starting with a cup of coffee and really good conversation. Then I hit the road-zen just right on the way to the appointment, from work all the way up to skidding just right into the parking space on the roof of the garage. Unexpectedly, there was a funky solicitor at the doctor’s office selling diet bars with a thick English accent and leaning his whole body across the counter, and then, in some strange twist on Jungian consciousness, my doctor greeted  me with an English accent.  A good start to the day.

But something kinda interesting and cosmic bubbled up as I drove back to work.  Like so many other thought-bubbles, it wasn’t anything completely new.  However, repetition has a way of making things more valuable or less valuable depending on context and perception.  Today’s context and perception – my position in the spiral of my life – definitely made this re-realization more valuable. I thought to myself: All things in the universe are connected (some don’t believe in that view, but I do…the asymptotic curve of magnetism alone was enough for me) and as such, I am a part of everything from the dinosaur bits that have made it to the molten core of this planet, to the ancient galaxies getting ripped apart by black holes on the edge of the universe. I am party to and directly connected with everything that exists and everything that is being imagined and pretty much even the things that are not.

Thinking like that really puts goal-setting to the test.  Our society pumps goal setting as a key to efficiency and achievement, and I don’t necessarily disagree.  But in the face of the cosmos, it is moot whether my goal is to write a blog post or rule the known galaxy – neither of those things are really a blip on the radar for something like the universe.  Kinda drives home the point: life is short, make sure you spend your time your way!

Somewhere between this blog post and ubiquitous and incontestable control of the known and unknown universe is the path I will choose, but ultimately, regardless of my choice… it is completely my choice. And when I look at how big the universe is, and my tendency to think big and want to accomplish large things, I have to ask myself… what is it about “big” things that are important to me? Now that I have demonstrated how small even the biggest accomplishment is in the face of nature, how important it is to do something I perceive as “big?”  The truth, it isn’t important unless I make it important, and until today, my big ideas just have not been that important to me – I have chosen other ways to spend my time.

Now, I have done all these cool little soul-searching exercises before – 7 Habits, personality profiles, career exams,  money management books/seminars, etc.  And from that training I have applied various plans to my life to achieve cool stuff for my employer, cool stuff for other people, and even some decently engaging projects for myself… but nothing big. Yet, when I look at what I say are my biggest goals, they are huge, substantive accomplishments that most people would argue cannot be completed in a lifetime. In truth, I have only shared facets of those goals – and when I do, the usual reaction is people will believe I can hit some of the marks, or even better, some people just say I need to come back to planet Earth and be realistic about what is possible.

Let’s look at some of these things: I was going to build my own version of the space shuttle, I thought about ways to build better robots, about ways to enable video on demand, about several different types of video games, countless movies/cartoons/skits, songs, short stories, photo journals, monolithic dome and sustainable housing projects, fixing issues with homelessness, broadening the scope of acceptable medicine, bio-engineering (with a focus of transferring learning directly from one brain to another), developing true artificial intelligence, reworking government across the planet, natural resource management, urban and commercial architecture, building a functioning worm hole without destroying our planet by accident,  converting Earth itself to a space craft so we aren’t dependent on this solar system, bringing back the power of village-based trade and agriculture using the power of the internet, keeping knowledge truly unbiased and using that as the foundation for immersive education and work environments, meeting our extraterrestrial neighbors, raising the bar on our species by getting rid of stupid economic systems that enable self-oppression, maybe a couple paintings, and at least some form of origami, a cool death ray (hey, not every critter in the universe as as sweet and nice as us hoomanz) and shields – everyone needs those… the list really could go on for a while more, and some of the stuff, in due time has actually been invented – and improved upon what I initially thought it could do.  And it isn’t about being original – I know there are other people thinking the same things, and even better, there are other people actually making accomplishments on these things. What matters is, when people ask what kind of future I want to be a part of, what kind of projects interest me, these are the types of things I want to engage.  These are things I would choose…

So, I show people a list like that, and they flap their arms in the air and say it is impossible. No, it is certainly not impossible and I have no interest in restricting my dreams to fit the definition of somebody else’s “possible.” Hmph!!

But, as you can see, it will take quite a network to put all this in motion.  I started saying maybe networking comes first, then I thought maybe I should start a company and use the income from that to build a portfolio.  But those approaches will be too slow.  I need something faster… and today, when I realized I was connected to everything… today, when I was told facing my bed north-south to align with the poles would improve energy flow, today was when I realized all of this is very possible – because it is all being done already.  I just need the right entity, the right little “engine that could”, the right network, and the right plan…and can plug into all of it.  That’s what I will have by Monday.