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September 19 - September 26, 2023
Life is at its best when love, money, and creativity are growing in harmony.
Am I willing to feel good and have my life go well all the time?
How much love and abundance am I willing to allow? How am I getting in my own way?
The only relevant question is whether you will let it be possible for you.
In the past, I could always say, “Well, I failed, but I wasn’t really trying hard. Maybe I’d have succeeded if I had really tried.” Or “I failed, but I might have succeeded if I hadn’t gotten sick.” But now, after making the commitment to going the distance, any excuse that crept into my mind sounded hollow, even ridiculous,
Fritz Perls, MD, the psychiatrist and founder of Gestalt therapy. He said, “Fear is excitement without the breath.” Here’s what this intriguing statement means: the very same mechanisms that produce excitement also produce fear, and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully with it.
the less breath you feed your fear, the bigger your fear gets. The best advice I can give you is to take big, easy breaths when you feel fear.
On Judgment Day, Mr. Lewin said, God will not ask, “Why were you not Moses?” He will ask, “Why were you not Sam Lewin?” The goal in life is not to attain some imaginary ideal; it is to find and fully use our own gifts.
Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.
Your capacity expands in small increments each time you consciously let yourself enjoy the money you have, the love you feel, and the creativity you are expressing in the world. As that capacity for enjoyment expands, so does your financial abundance, the love you feel, and the creativity you express.
All of us can find and nurture the capacity for positive feelings now, rather than waiting until some longed-for event occurs.
If you focus for a moment, you can always find some place in you that feels good right now. Your task is to give the expanding positive feeling your full attention. When you do, you will find that it expands with your attention. Let yourself enjoy it as long as you possibly can.
One thing I’ve learned from a lifetime of observing: being smart doesn’t keep you from doing dumb things. My grandfather had a colorful phrase he used: “stuck on stupid.” It meant that you kept doing the same dumb things over and over without learning from them.
It’s worthwhile to do something you’re not good at if the intention is to enjoy or master it.
You’re competent at the activities in the Zone of Competence, but others can do them just as well. Successful people often discover that they expend far too much time and energy in this zone.
some of her health issues were due to what I sometimes call “diseases of unfulfillment.” When people are not expressing their full potential, they often get illnesses that have vague, hard-to-diagnose symptoms.
There is only one place where you will ultimately thrive and feel satisfied, and that’s… The Zone of Genius
while breakthroughs are important and thrilling, it’s the subsequent stabilization and integration of the breakthrough into daily life that really allow the changes to be permanent.
These fears and false beliefs cause us to live our lives out of a success-limiting mantra that says: I cannot expand to my full potential because
Hidden Barrier no. 1: Feeling Fundamentally Flawed
If you have a deep, old feeling that there’s something wrong, bad, or flawed about you, you will find yourself grappling with that issue every time you break through to greater love and financial abundance.
The fear of being fundamentally flawed brings with it a related fear. It’s the fear that if you did make a full commitment to living in your Zone of Genius, you might fail. It’s the belief that even your genius is flawed, and that if you expressed it in a big way, it wouldn’t be good enough. This belief tells you to play it safe and stay small. That way, if you fail, at least you fail small.
Hidden Barrier no. 2: Disloyalty and Abandonment
I cannot expand to my full success because it would cause me to end up all alone, be disloyal to my roots, and leave behind people from my past.
Behind every communication problem is a sweaty ten-minute conversation you don’t want to have. However, the moment you work up the courage to have it, you collect an instant reward in relief
Hidden Barrier no. 3: Believing That More Success Brings a Bigger Burden
Hidden Barrier no. 4: The Crime of Outshining
This barrier is very common among gifted and talented children. They get a lot of their parents’ attention, but they also get a strong subliminal message along with it: don’t shine too much, or you’ll make others feel bad or look bad.
One great thing about Upper Limit work is that it doesn’t take much time to spot where the problem is coming from. Once you see it, you’ve turned on a light in a long-dark room. There’s cleanup work that usually needs to be done, but with the light on, it’s not that hard.
The crucial sign that we’re worrying unnecessarily is when we’re worrying about something we have no control over. Worrying is useful only if it concerns a topic we can actually do something about, and if it leads to our taking positive action right away.
99 percent of my worrying was completely unnecessary. It was very humbling to realize that my worries were there just to make me miserable. It was even more humbling to realize that I was the guy who had his finger firmly pressed on the misery button.
Imagine squeezing a tennis ball in your hand, then releasing your grip and dropping the ball. A lot of people don’t realize that they can dismiss worry-thoughts just like that.
Science tells us that it took a very long time for our fish ancestors to evolve the necessary equipment to turn those initial flops on dry land into walks. Now we’re in a stage of evolution in which we’re doing the inner equivalent of those early fish flops: we’re learning to let ourselves enjoy love, abundance, and other forms of positive energy without sabotaging
Criticism and blame are addictions. They are costly addictions, because they are the number-one destroyer of intimacy in close relationships.
Criticism works the same way. It is useful only if it’s directed at a specific thing and produces a useful result.
Chronic criticism and chronic blame are the behaviors we really need to eliminate. They are never about producing a result.
My assignment to you: become a keen observer of critical statements that come out of your mouth or fly through your mind. Begin to sort them into two piles: Pile One contains all the criticisms about real things you plan to do something about (“Hey, you’re standing on my toe. Get off!”); Pile Two contains all the others. I predict you’ll make the humbling but liberating discovery, as I did, that Pile Two towers over the paltry stack in Pile One.
Your exploration will go easier if you have a map. The map I use is what I call the Three Ps: punishment, prevention, and protection.
Long before morality came into play, the original definition of integrity had to do with wholeness and completeness.
Under the surface of most conflicts, you’ll find that the warring parties are actually feeling the same deeper emotions.
Where do I feel out of integrity with myself? What is keeping me from feeling complete and whole? What important feelings am I not letting into my awareness? Where in my life am I not telling the full truth? Where in my life have I not kept my promises? In my relationship with _____________________, what do I need to say or do to feel complete and whole?
What caught my attention, though, was the emotional tone behind those statements. Every time, the person’s face took on an expression of longing tinged with hope or burdened by despair. Longing is a persistent, lingering feeling of wanting something you can’t quite get or something you’ve judged unobtainable.
There is a huge fear underneath every complaint: If I took the Big Leap into my Zone of Genius, I might fail. What if I really opened up to my true genius and found that my genius wasn’t good enough?
Just notice the voices and feel the fears. That’s all you need to do with them. You don’t need to rid yourself of them.
What work do I do that doesn’t seem like work? (I can do it all day long without ever feeling tired or bored.)
In my work, what produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to amount of time spent? (Even if I do only ten seconds or a few minutes of it, an idea or a deeper connection may spring forth that leads to huge value.)
there is some essential aspect of the work you do that produces the greatest payoff.
put the highest priority on doing some of it every day.
Go all the way, and inspire them with your full expression. You can’t manage their feelings. Their feelings are their business.
What is my unique ability? (There’s a special skill I’m gifted with. This unique ability, fully realized and put to work, can provide enormous benefits to me and any organization I serve.)
