May 15, 2019

by Willard Barth and Steve Pavlina

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable. – Helen Keller

In our day-to-day lives, the virtue of courage doesn’t receive much attention. Courage is a quality that we usually equate to soldiers, firefighters, and activists. Security seems to be what matters most to people today. Perhaps you were taught to avoid being too bold or too brave. You were told things like, “It’s too dangerous. Don’t take unnecessary risks. Don’t draw attention to yourself in public. Follow family traditions. Don’t talk to strangers. Keep an eye out for suspicious people. Stay safe.”

But a side effect of overemphasizing the importance of personal security in your life is that it can cause you to live reactively. Instead of setting your own goals, making plans to achieve them, and going after them with intensity and passion, you play it safe. You keep working at the stable job, even though it doesn’t fulfill you. You remain in the unsatisfying relationship, even though you feel dead inside compared to the passion you once had. Who are you to think that you can buck the system? Accept your lot in life, and make the best of it. Go with the flow, and don’t rock the boat. Your only hope is that the flow of life will pull you in a favorable direction.

No doubt there exist real dangers in life you must avoid. But there’s a huge difference between recklessness and courage. I’m not referring to the heroic courage required to risk your life to save someone from a burning building. By courage I mean the ability to face down those imaginary fears and reclaim the far more powerful life that you’ve denied yourself. Fear of failure. Fear of rejection. Fear of going broke. Fear of being alone. Fear of humiliation. Fear of public speaking. Fear of being ostracized by family and friends. Fear of physical discomfort. Fear of regret. Fear of success.

How many of these fears are holding you back? How would you live if you had no fear at all? You’d still have your intelligence and common sense to safely navigate around any real dangers, but without feeling the emotion of fear, would you be more willing to take risks, especially when the worst case wouldn’t actually hurt you at all? Would you speak up more often about things that matter to you, talk to more strangers, ask for more sales, dive headlong into those ambitious projects you’ve been dreaming about? What if you even learned to enjoy the things you currently fear? What kind of difference would that make in your life?

Have you previously convinced yourself that you aren’t really afraid of anything… that there are always good and logical reasons why you don’t do certain things? It would be rude to introduce yourself to a stranger. You shouldn’t attempt public speaking because you don’t have anything to say. Asking for a raise would be improper because you’re supposed to wait until the next formal review. These are just rationalizations though – think about how your life would change if you could confidently and courageously do these things with no fear at all.

What Is Courage?

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. – Ambrose Redmoon

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear. – Mark Twain

Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway. – John Wayne

I like these definitions of courage, which all suggest that courage is the ability to get yourself to take action in spite of fear. The word courage comes from the Latin cor, which means “heart.” But true courage is more a matter of intellect than of feeling. It requires using the uniquely human part of your brain (the neocortex) to demand control over the emotional limbic brain you share in common with other mammals. Your limbic brain signals danger, but your neocortex reasons that the danger isn’t real, so you simply feel the fear and take action anyway. The more you learn to act in spite of fear, the more human you become. The more you follow the fear, the more you live like a lower mammal. So the question, “Are you a man or a mouse?” is consistent with human neurology.

Courageous people are still afraid, but they don’t let the fear paralyze them. People who lack courage will give into fear more often than not, which actually has the long-term effect of strengthening the fear. When you avoid facing a fear and then feel relieved that you escaped it, this acts as a psychological reward that reinforces the mouse-like avoidance behavior, making you even more likely to avoid facing the fear in the future. So the more you avoid asking someone out on a date, the more paralyzed you’ll feel about taking such actions in the future. You are literally conditioning yourself to become more timid and mouse-like.

This type of “avoidance behavior” leads to a kind of paralyzation in the long run. As you get older, you reinforce your fear reactions to the point where it’s hard to even imagine yourself standing up to your fears. You begin taking your fears for granted; they become real to you. You create this imaginary wall around yourself that insulates you from all these fears: a stable but unhappy marriage, a job that doesn’t require you to take risks, an income that keeps you comfortable. Then you rationalize your behavior: You have a family to support and can’t take risks, you’re too old to shift careers, you can’t lose weight because you have “fat” genes. Five years… ten years… twenty years soon pass, and you realize that your life hasn’t changed all that much. You’ve settled down. All that’s really left now is to live out the remainder of your life as contently as possible and then be lowered into the ground, where you’ll finally achieve total safety and security.

But there’s something else going on behind the scenes, isn’t there? There’s that tiny voice in the back of your mind reminding you that this isn’t the kind of life you wanted to live. It wants more, much more. It wants you to become far wealthier, to have an outstanding relationship, to get your body in peak physical condition, to learn new skills, to travel the world, to have lots of wonderful friends, to help people in need, to make a meaningful difference. That voice tells you that settling into a job where you sell widgets the rest of your life just won’t cut it. That voice gnaws at you when you catch a glance of your oversized belly in the mirror or get winded going up a flight of stairs. It shares its disappointment when it recognizes what’s become of your family. It tells you that the reason you have trouble motivating yourself is that you aren’t doing what you really ought to be doing with your life… because you’re afraid. And if you refuse to listen, it will still be there, nagging you about your mediocre results until you die, full of regrets for what might have been.

So how do you respond to this annoying voice that won’t shut up? What do you do when confronted by that gut feeling that something just isn’t right in your life? What’s your favorite way to silence it? Maybe you drown it out by watching TV, listening to the radio, working long hours at an unfulfilling job, or consuming alcohol and caffeine and sugar.

But whenever you do this, you lower your level of consciousness. You move closer towards an instinctive animal and away from becoming a fully conscious human being. You react to life instead of proactively going after your goals. You fall into a state of learned helplessness, where you begin to believe that your goals are no longer possible or practical for you. You become more and more like a mouse, even trying to convince yourself that life as a mouse might not be so bad after all, since everyone around you seems to be OK with it. You surround yourself with your fellow mice, and on the rare occasions that you encounter a fully conscious human being, it scares the hell out of you to remember how much of your own courage has been lost.

Raise Your Consciousness

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. – Anais Nin

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace. – Amelia Earhart

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” You must do the thing you think you cannot do. – Eleanor Roosevelt

The way out of this vicious cycle is to summon your courage and confront that inner voice. Find a place where you can be alone with pen and paper (or computer and keyboard). Listen to that voice, and face up to what it’s telling you, no matter how difficult it is to hear. (The voice is just an one method your unconscious uses to communicate with you – you may not hear words at all; instead you may see what you should be doing or simply feel it emotionally. But I’ll continue to refer to the voice for the sake of this example.) This voice may tell you that your marriage has been dead for ten years, and you’re refusing to face it because you’re afraid of divorce. It may tell you that you’re afraid that if you start your own business, you’ll probably fail, and that’s why you’re staying at a job that doesn’t challenge you to grow. It may tell you that you’ve given up trying to lose weight because you’ve failed at it so many times, and you’re addicted to food. It may tell you that the friends you’re hanging out with now are incongruent with the person you want to be, and that you need to leave that group behind and build a new one. It may tell you that you always wanted to be an actor or writer, but you settled for a sales job because it seemed more safe and secure. It may tell you that you always wanted to help people in need, but you aren’t doing it in the way or at the level you should. It may tell you that you’re wasting your talents.

Take a moment and do your best to reduce that voice to just a single word or two. What is it telling you to do? Leave. Quit. Speak. Write. Dance. Act. Exercise. Sell. Switch. Move on. Let go. Ask. Learn. Forgive. Whatever you get from this, write it down. Perhaps you even have different words for each area of your life.

Next you have to take the difficult step of consciously acknowledging that this is what you really want now. It’s OK if you don’t think it’s possible for you. It’s OK if you don’t see how you could ever have it. But admit that you want it. You lower your consciousness when you deny it. When you look at your overweight body, admit that you really want to be fit and healthy. When you light up that next cigarette, admit that you want to be a nonsmoker. When you meet the potential mate of your dreams, resist the temptation to deny that you’d love to be in a relationship with that person. When you meet a person who seems to be at total peace with herself, allow yourself to admit that you crave that level of inner peace too. Get yourself out of denial. Move instead to a place where you admit, “I really do want this, but I just don’t feel I currently have the ability to get it.” It’s perfectly OK to want something that you don’t think you can have. And you’re almost certainly wrong in concluding that you can’t have it. But first, stop lying to yourself and pretending you don’t really want it.

Move From Fear to Action, Even if You Expect to Fail

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most of our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them. – Orison Swett Marden

Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air. – John Quincy Adams

Now that you’ve acknowledged some things you’ve been afraid to face, how do you feel? You probably still feel paralyzed against taking action. That’s okay. While diving right in and confronting a fear head-on can be very effective, that may require more courage than you feel you can summon right now.

The most important point I want you to learn from this article is that real courage is a mental skill, not an emotional one. Neurologically it means using the thinking neocortex part of your brain to override the emotional limbic impulses. In other words, you use your human intelligence, logic, and independent will to overcome the limitations you’ve inherited as an emotional mammal.

Now this may make logical sense, but it’s far easier said than done. You may logically know you’re in no real danger if you get up on a stage and speak in front of 1000 people, but your fear kicks in anyway, and the imaginary threat prevents you from volunteering for anything like this. Or you may know you’re in a dead end job, but you can’t seem to bring yourself to say the words, “I quit.”

Courage, however, doesn’t require that you take drastic action in these situations. Courage is a learned mental skill that you must condition, the same way that weight training strengthens your muscles. You wouldn’t go into a gym for the first time and try to lift 300 pounds, so don’t think that to be courageous you must tackle your most paralyzing fear right away.

There are two methods I will suggest for building courage. The first approach is similar to progressive weight training. Start with weights you can lift but which are challenging for you, and then progressively train up to heavier and heavier weights as you grow stronger. So tackle your smallest fears first, and progressively train up to bigger and bigger fears. Training yourself to lift 300 pounds isn’t so hard if you’ve already lifted 290. Similarly, speaking in front of an audience of 1000 people isn’t so tough once you’ve already spoken to 900.

So grab a piece of paper right now, and write down one of your fears that you’d like to overcome. Then number from one to ten, and write out ten variations of this fear, with number one being the least anxiety-producing and number ten being the most anxiety-producing. This is your fear hierarchy. For example, if you’re afraid of asking someone out on a date, then number one on your list might be going out to a public place and smiling at someone you find attractive (very mild fear). Number two might be smiling at ten attractive strangers in a single day. Number ten might be asking out your ideal date in front of all your mutual friends, when you’re almost certain you’ll be turned down flat and everyone in the room will laugh (extreme fear). Now start by setting a goal to complete number one on your list. Once you’ve had that success (and success in this case simply means taking action, regardless of the outcome), then move on to number two, and so on, until you’re ready to tackle number ten or you just don’t feel the fear is limiting you anymore. You may need to adjust the items on your list to make them practical for you to actually experience. And if you ever feel the next step is too big, then break it down into additional gradients. If you can lift 290 pounds but not 300, then try 295 or even 291. Take this process as gradually as you need to, do it in a way that the next step is a mild challenge for you but one you feel fairly confident you can complete. And feel free to repeat a past step multiple times if you find it helpful to prepare you for the next step. Pace yourself.

By following this progressive training process, you’ll accomplish two things. You’ll cease reinforcing the fear/avoidance response that you exhibited in the past. And you’ll condition yourself to act more courageously in future situations. So your feelings of fear will diminish at the same time that your expression of courage grows. Neurologically you’ll be weakening the limbic control over your actions while strengthening the neocortical control, gradually moving from unconscious mouse-like to conscious human-like behavior.

The second approach to building courage is to acquire additional knowledge and skill within the domain of your fear. Confronting fears head-on can be helpful, but if your fear is largely due to ignorance and lack of skill, then you can usually reduce or eliminate the fear with information and training. For example, if you’re afraid to quit your job and start your own business, even though you’d absolutely love to be in business for yourself, then start reading books and taking classes on how to start your own business. Spend an afternoon at your local library researching the subject, or do the research online. Join the local Chamber of Commerce and any relevant trade organizations in your field. Attend conferences. Build connections. Enlist the help of a mentor. Build your skill to the point where you start to feel confident that you could actually succeed, and this knowledge will help you act more boldly and courageously when you’re ready. This method is especially effective when a large part of your fear is due to the unknown. Often just reading a book or two on the subject will be enough to dispel the fear so that you’re able to take action.

These two methods are my personal favorites, but there are many additional ways to condition yourself to overcome fear, including neuro associative programming, neuro-linguistic programming, cognitive therapy, and self-confrontation. You can research them via an online search engine if you wish to learn such methods and increase the number of fear-busting tools in your arsenal. Most of these can be easily self-administered.

The exact process you use to build courage isn’t important. What’s important is that you consciously do it. Just as your muscles will atrophy if you don’t regularly stress them, your courage will atrophy if you don’t consistently challenge yourself to face your fears. In the absence of this kind of conscious conditioning, you’ll automatically become weak in both body and mind. If you aren’t regularly exercising your courage, then you are strengthening your fear by default; there is no middle ground. Just as your muscles automatically atrophy from lack of use, so your courage will automatically decay in the absence of conscious conditioning.

Now this may sound overly gloomy, so here’s a positive way to look at it. Heavy weights can be a physical burden, but they are helpful tools to build strong muscles. You would not look at a 45-pound dumbbell and say, “Why must you be so heavy?” It is what it is. Heaviness is your thought, not an intrinsic property of the dumbbell itself. Similarly, do not look at the things you fear and say, “Why must you be so scary?” Fear is your reaction to, not a property of, the object of your anxiety.

Fear is not your enemy. It is an advisor pointing you to the areas where you need to grow. So when you encounter a new fear within yourself, celebrate it as an opportunity for growth, just as you would celebrate reaching a new personal best with strength training.

Catch a Glimpse of Your Own Greatness

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. – Erica Jong

The highest courage is to dare to appear to be what one is. – John Lancaster Spalding

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

So now what do you do with your newly developed courage? Where will it lead you? The answer is that it will allow you to lead a far more fulfilling and meaningful life. You will truly begin living as a daring human being instead of a timid mouse. You will uncover and develop your greatest talents. You will begin living far more consciously and deliberately than you ever have before. Instead of reacting to events, you will proactively design your own events.

Courage is something you can only truly experience alone. It is a private victory, not a public one. Summoning the courage to listen to your innermost desires is not a group activity and does not result from building a consensus with others. Kahlil Gibran writes in The Prophet, “The vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.” The purpose of your existence is yours alone to discover. No one on earth has lived through the exact same experiences you have, and no one thinks the exact same thoughts you do.

On the one hand, this can be a lonely realization. Whether you live alone or enjoy the deepest intimacy with a loving partner, deep down you must still face the reality that your life is yours alone to live. You can choose to temporarily yield control of your life to others, whether it be to a company, a spouse, or simply to the pressures of daily living, but you can never give away your personal responsibility for the results. Whether you assume direct and conscious control over your life or merely react to events as they happen to you, you and you alone must bear the consequences.

If you commit to following the path of courage, you will ultimately be forced to confront what is perhaps the greatest fear of all – that you are far more powerful and capable than you initially realized, that your ultimate potential is far greater than anything you’ve experienced in your past, and that with this power comes tremendous responsibility. You may not be able to solve all the problems of this planet, but if you ever do commit yourself 100% to the fulfillment of your true potential, you can significantly impact the lives of many people, and that impact will ripple into the future for generations to come.

What is the difference between you and one of those legendary historical figures who did have that level of impact? You both had many of the same fears. You both were born with talents in some areas and weaknesses in others. The only thing stopping you is fear, and the only thing that will get you past it is courage. What you do with your life isn’t up to your parents, your boss, or your spouse. It’s up to you and you alone.

Catching a glimpse of your own greatness can be one of the most unsettling experiences imaginable. And even more disturbing is the awareness of the tremendous challenges that are ahead of you if you accept it. Living consciously is not an easy path, but it is a uniquely human experience, and it requires making the committed decision to permanently let go of that mouse within you. Going after your greatest and most ambitious dreams and experiencing failure and disappointment, intentionally running up against your most humbling human limitations instead of living with a comfortable padding of potential – these fears are common to us all.

The first few times you encounter such fears, you may quickly default back to the imaginary security of life as a mouse. But if you keep exercising your courage, you will eventually mature to the point where you can openly accept the challenges and responsibilities of life as a fully conscious human being. Continuing to live as a mouse will simply hold no more interest for you. You will acknowledge within the deepest recesses of your being, I have awakened to this incredible potential within me, and I accept what that will require of me. Whatever it costs me, whatever I must sacrifice to follow this path, bring it on. I’m ready. Even though you will still experience fear, you will recognize it for the illusion it is, and you will know how to use your human courage to face it down, so much so that fear will no longer have the power to stop you.

Embrace the Daring Adventure

Before you embark on any path ask the question, does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it and then you must choose another path. The trouble is that nobody asks the question. And when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart the path is ready to kill him. – Carlos Castaneda

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? – Kahlil Gibran

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. – Dale Carnegie

As you develop a sense of your true purpose in life, you may begin to feel an uneasy disconnect between your current life situation and the one you envision moving towards. These two worlds may seem so different to you that you cannot mentally conceive of how to build a bridge between them. How can you balance the practical reality of taking care of your third-dimensional obligations like earning money to pay your bills and taxes, pleasing your boss, raising your family, and maintaining social relationships with people who can’t even relate to what you’re experiencing vs. the new vision of yourself you desperately want to move towards? A whole host of new fears may crop up related to this seemingly impossible shift. How will you support yourself? What will become of your relationships? Are you just deluding yourself?

The best advice I can give you here is to forget about trying to build a bridge. Focus instead on beginning the process of manifesting the new vision of yourself from scratch, as if it were a totally separate thread in your life. If this creates a temporary incongruence in your life, just do it anyway. For example, suppose you currently work as a divorce attorney, but your courage tells you that you must eventually abandon this type of adversarial work. You envision yourself passionately teaching couples how to heal their broken relationships. But you can’t even begin to imagine being a trial lawyer who speaks about healthy relationships, and on top of that problem, you can’t imagine any way that you could make a decent living in this new career, at least not quickly. There’s just too much of a disconnect between this new vision and practical reality. So instead of trying to bridge this gap, just begin building your new vision completely from scratch in whatever time you have, even if it’s only an hour or two each week. Keep doing your regular work as an attorney, but in your spare time, start posting anonymously on relationship message boards to give couples advice on how to heal their relationships. Use the oratory skills you developed as an attorney to begin speaking to small groups about healing relationships. Perhaps create a new web site, and start writing and posting articles about your new passion. You don’t have to hide the fact that you’re an attorney, but don’t worry about bridging these two worlds. Live in paradox. Just start developing the new you, and allow the old one to continue in parallel for a while.

What will happen is that you’ll develop skill in your new undertaking, and you’ll eventually be able to support yourself from it, even if you can’t see how to do it right away. You may not be able to see a way to support yourself in your new vision right now, and that’s fine. Just begin it anyway, doing it for free, without any concern of how to turn it into a new full-time career. Patiently wait for clarity; you will eventually find a way to make it work. Then when the time is right, you’ll be able to peacefully let go of the old career and focus all your energy on the new one. At some point you’ll be able to commit fully to your new self. Your passion for your new work will eventually overwhelm your fear of letting go of your old source of stability. So instead of trying to transform your old career into your new one, just start the process of building your new one, and let your old one gradually fade. Even if you can only invest an hour a week in your new undertaking, you will probably discover that this hour is more fulfilling to you than all the other hours put together, and that passion will drive you to find a way to gradually grow this presence until it fills up most of your days. The most important thing is to begin now by introducing your new vision of yourself to your daily life, even if you can only initially do so in a small way.

No matter how difficult it may seem, make the choice to live consciously. Do not succumb to that half-conscious realm of fear-based thinking, filling your life with distractions to avoid facing what you really feel drawn to in those silent spaces between your thoughts. Either exercise your muscle of courage and progressively build the strength to face your deepest, darkest fears to live as the powerful being you truly are, or admit that your fears are too much for you, and embrace life as a mouse. But make this choice consciously and with full awareness of its consequences. If you are going to allow fear to win the battle for your life, then proclaim it the victor and forfeit the game. If you simply avoid living consciously and courageously, then that is equivalent to giving up on life itself, where your continued existence becomes little more than a waiting period before physical death – a life of existing as opposed to a daring adventure.

Will you allow yourself to die without embracing the daring adventure your life is meant to be? You may go broke. You may experience failure and rejection repeatedly. You may endure multiple dysfunctional relationships. But these are all milestones along the path of a life lived courageously. They are your private victories, carving a deeper space within you to be filled with an abundance of joy, happiness, and fulfillment. So go ahead and feel the fear. Then summon the courage to follow your dreams anyway. That kind of strength is undefeatable.

SELF-AWARENESS 101 #7: THE TWO MOST POWERFUL WORDS YOU WILL EVER SAY

Today, I’m going to explore the concept that says, the two most powerful words you will ever say. “I AM.”

Over the years I have learned a lot of things that have dramatically changed my life. And one of the things that shifted a paradigm in me, was when I learned that the most powerful statement that someone can make, the two most powerful words in human behavior, psychology and in metaphysics are “I am.”

When you say “I am”, followed by any statement, and especially when you add a level of certainty or emotion to it, that statement becomes your reality… in many cases, it becomes your identity. What has been proven time and time again is when you combine these two powerful words “I Am” with intensity and emotion, everything around you moves to support that statement.

I’ll give you an example. I’ve shared before that I drank from the time I was 13 to the time I was 24 and I drank heavily. I avoided any responsibility for years. I had a very strong Identity that defined me. For years I thought, “I am an evil person and I am being punished”. Because of that Identity, I took all the terrible things that were happening to me and placed the blame on God, The Universe and others because I believed everything that happened to me was happening because I was a bad person and being punished.

Then came a moment in my life, based on many experiences that opened me to new possibilities, that I created a new Identity. A point came where I had to say with certainty, “I am an alcoholic.” And when I said those words, things shifted, and on an unconscious level, I no longer was able to make excuses for why I was drinking. I now had the identity of being and “alcoholic”. By making the statement and claiming the identity that I was an alcoholic, everything I knew on an unconscious level came up to support me in that statement.

Now, let me explain conscious and unconscious for a moment. Your conscious mind acts as a filter. It filters things through your beliefs, through your rules, through your values. Your unconscious just absorbs everything like a sponge. Your unconscious is called to action by your conscious mind based on how you direct your focus.

For me, identifying myself as an alcoholic, and doing it with certainty, it called on my unconscious to bring up all these references and resources that said, “Okay, if you’re an alcoholic, here are the ways that you act. Here are the things alcoholics do”

By acknowledging these things, it gave me a starting point, to begin correcting my life. By announcing “I am an alcoholic”, I was no longer denying my involvement in how I’d messed up my life. In that moment, I had to accept responsibility and accountability. So I started taking actions that supported me in becoming a recovering alcoholic. The identity changed from, “I am an alcoholic” to “I’m recovering. I am no longer drinking.” With this shift of “I am” and adding the certainty to the new statement, my unconscious started pulling different references and resources to support this new Identity.

Every time you put something after the two most powerful words ” I am” and you say it with certainty, your unconscious will accept that as your Identity and do things, millions of things, within nanoseconds to support you in that moment.

Now, saying “I am an alcoholic” was a great step for me in adapting a new Identity and helping me create new choices for myself, it also became something later on that limited me. As I got farther into my development, I started recognizing that I reached what many people refer to as a glass ceiling. Even though I was working diligently on myself, I wasn’t growing the way that I wanted to grow. And soon I discovered the reason that I was having trouble progressing was because I continued to identify myself as an alcoholic. So even though I was working hard on my personal and spiritual development, each time I Identified myself as an alcoholic, my unconscious mind was supporting me in that Identity by pulling up all of these references that said, “Okay if you’re an alcoholic, you need to act, think and be like this _______.” So when I reached a certain point, an Identity that used to serve me, no longer did and began to limit me.

As I began to more deeply understand the power of “I am” and “Identity”, through studying human behavior and psychology, I decided that I needed to stop identifying myself as an “alcoholic”.

Now, I want to be very clear at this point. I believe that I needed to identify myself as an alcoholic, early on, to accept responsibility and to begin taking the steps toward recovery. I do not believe that I would have stopped the self-destructive path I was on if I had not claimed that Identity. And I got to a point, in my growth where I needed to change my identity to continue to grow.

Understand that we can change our identity at any point in time. Most people don’t even realize how they create identities for themselves and change them. People walk around all day long, making excuses and complaining saying, “I am lazy.” Or, “I’m a procrastinator.” They say things like, “I’m just fat, you know, that’s the way it is.” But the thing is, when we say those things with certainty, our unconscious mind does everything it needs to do to support us in that statement.

So what I invite you to do is to become aware of how you label yourself.

Now I’ve had people come to me and say, “You know Will, I’ve been taught to do incantations and affirmations that say, I am thin, I am a non smoker, I am these things I want to be, and it never works.” The reason is that you’re saying these things on a conscious level and you’re filtering it, meaning that you’re not doing it with certainty. So you may be saying the words, “I am thin”, but you lack any sense of certainty, so the very next moment your conscious brain is saying, with certainty, “No I’m not. I am fat!”

So how can we address this when we are attempting to make a change? Begin with small adjustments. Begin making the statement, “I am taking steps to become thin.” Or, “I am deciding to make a change now and become healthier.” Find a statement that you can believe in, and adopt it as your Identity. Then as you progress, change the statement as you gain more certainty in your new Identity.

The things that get us into trouble and that we take for granted are the simple statements. We make a mistake and say, “I am a failure.” And we say it with completely certainty based on the mistake we made without even thinking about it. Many times we even joke about it and say it repeatedly. The more times you tell yourself something using words like these, the more certain you become in it being true . When you gain that level of certainty, it becomes your truth, it becomes your Identity.

So what I want you to invite you to do is for the next ten days, become hypersensitive to the powerful words, “I am ” and what you say after them.

Keep track, how many times do you say, “I am ____”, something that empowers you or how many times are you saying “I am _____”, something that is disempowering or tearing you down. Become aware. Awareness is the key. Then start changing how you address yourself. This is a very extensive subject, we’re not going to be able to cover all of it right here and right now. But a it is a great place to start. What I invite you to do at this moment is simply become aware of how you’re identifying yourself. A small change in your Identity can make a major shift in your reality.

SELF-AWARENESS 101 #5: KIND WORDS AND GOOD DEEDS ARE ETERNAL YOU NEVER KNOW WHERE THEIR INFLUENCE WILL END

Can you remember a time when the kind words, good deeds, or actions of a friend or even a stranger, dramatically, impacted your life?

We really never know how our actions or what we have done for someone, is going to affect that individual and even more, how the ripple effect caused by that act will impact others.

To give you a great example of how powerful good deeds, or a simple act kindness can be, I want to share with you how the kindness of a stranger saved my life, and I believe also, because of what has happened since, their action also led to saving the lives of many others.

I was about 20 years old and I had gotten into trouble with the law because I was drinking, using drugs and being totally irresponsible. As a result of a drunk driving arrest, I was sentenced by the courts to attend AA meetings in lieu of going to jail. I complied, but had no intention of attending these meetings to get sober or change my life. I was only going to avoid being put in jail.

There was one specific meeting I went to which was in Glen Burnie, Maryland, and I came to the meeting having already been drinking and with beer in my car with the intention that after the meeting I was going to go out and continue to party.

At the end of the meeting a stranger walked up to me and gave me a card with his first name and phone number on it. He said, ”If you ever decide that you TRULY want help, call me.”

Well, I didn’t want help, and I quickly forgot that he gave me his number. Fast forward to four years later; I had reached a serious low in my life, as some call it, I had “hit the bottom” and I was looking for some answer… for some kind of help, some way to stop the insanity I was living at that point. I was going through a box of that contained all of my court documents and I found the card he had given me.

Now, the story would be great, if I said I called that guy and he helped me change my life, but that’s not how the story unfolds.

This is why I’m saying we never know how our good deeds may impact somebody. This guy never heard back from me, I never saw him again, and our interaction lasted 1 minute at the very most. But the card that he gave me, when I was at my lowest point, gave me hope. His offer gave me a belief that there were people out there who genuinely cared, that there were people who were willing to help. And because of that glimmer of hope, that new belief that somewhere, there was one person who cared… and if there was one, maybe there were more. I began reaching out and found other people who were willing to offer their help in changing my life. And because of them supporting me, because of his initiating it, I rebuilt a devastated life, and have gone on and made it my mission to help other people change theirs.

We may never know the impact we have on others. It’s the ripple effect. When you drop the pebble in the pond and the ripples go out. Every action has a reaction-whether you are there to see it or not.

Because of that one person reaching out to me my mantra for life has become, (and I modified this slightly from something that was written on the card that the man I am speaking of handed me), “I am responsible, whenever anyone, anywhere, reaches out, I want them to have the same support that I had, and for that I am responsible.”

We’re talking about self awareness in this course, and one of the things that I think that you will begin to realize is that every interaction you have, happens for a reason. Every person that you meet and every communication you have is an opportunity. And it’s your choice as to how you’re going to leave that interaction. Are you going to plant a seed that’s going to help somebody? You know it can be so simple if we are conscious of our actions. Are you going to smile at somebody who is having a bad day? Are you going to help somebody with their groceries? You don’t know what long term effect that’s going to have. AND, that simple gesture could end up saving a life. I’m not trying to make it sound overly dramatic, but I really want you to think about it. I know for a fact that the simple gesture that man made to me in 1985 saved my life and as a result, other’s lives.

Think back in your own life. Can you think of three or four “small” good deeds that somebody has done for you? They could be things as simple as someone letting you go first in line at the grocery store. Maybe someone stopped to help you when your car was broken down. They could be small incidents, or major ones. Have you ever experienced a good deed when it has been done anonymously?

There’s a little gift that I would like to offer to you. I want to share a thing I like to do from time to time as a possibility of something you can do also and experience the joy I get when I do it.

Every once in a while, when I’m in a restaurant, I’ll connect with the waiter or the waitress that’s serving me. I’ll ask them to keep what I am about to do very quiet, and then ask them if any of their customers seem like someone who’s having a really, really bad day. Then I ask them to bring me that customer’s bill and I will pay for that person’s meal. Then I leave before they ever find out that It was me who did it. The deal I make with the server is that they are not allowed to tell customer who it was. All the server is supposed to tell them is that somebody wanted them to have a better day. The most it has ever cost me was $100 for a table of four, and often it costs less than $20. A small investment that is my little way of “paying it forward”.

I truly don’t know how this is going to affect the person receiving the gift. But my intention is that these “good deeds” give them hope when they’re having a bad day.

Again, what I’d like you to do is to take a moment and think of three to four times in your life where someone has done small deeds or shared some kind words that improved your day. Now, as you think of that experience notice if that had an impact on how you went about your day. When you become aware of how those little actions and a good deed have changed your life, you begin to become more aware of how you treat others.

The next thing I invite you to do is commit to doing two things in this next week out of a genuine desire to contribute to someone else. I also ask that you make one of these good deeds anonymous. Maybe you’re going to make a contribution to a stranger like giving a homeless person money. Or maybe you know somebody who is having a hard time financially, and you buy some food and leave it on their doorstep. There are so many things you can do. I suggest for this exercise that you do at least two things. One where you actually interact with the person. And the other where you do it anonymously.

I really look forward to hearing your feedback on how this exercise affects you or maybe how you notice your good deeds affect the other person.

SELF-AWARENESS 101 #4: THE ONLY MEANING ANYTHING HAS IS THE MEANING WE GIVE IT.

Today we’re going to take a look at a lesson from “A Course in Miracles ” and the lesson is, “The only meaning that anything has, is the meaning that WE give it.”

As I became more self-aware, one of the fascinating things I learned about human behavior and psychology, and one of the greatest gifts that ended up giving me a freedom I never before imagined, is that we are the ones that attach meaning to the experiences in our lives. More specifically, it’s not what happens to us, but it’s how we view it, how we perceive it and ultimately, the meaning we attach to it. We’re going to explore this topic today, and if you feel inspired to get into the subject at length, I suggest reading the book A Course In Miracles.

As an example, you may be aware from other articles that I lost my leg when I was eight years old to bone cancer. Being a young child and having a very limited perception of the world, I attached a very specific meaning to that experience. The meaning was partially self-generated, but as is often the case, it was majorly influenced by other people’s “meaning”. I was influenced by the beliefs and perceptions that other people had so it wasn’t even my meaning that I attached to the experience.

The meaning that I attached to losing my leg was that I was being punished, that there was something wrong with me. Based on the religion that I grew up in as well as the community, that was the answer a child was given. When bad things happened to people, they were being punished. Attaching that meaning to losing my leg affected and directed every aspect of my life for years. I abandoned the religious beliefs that I had been brought up with, I actually rebelled against them. I turned to alcohol. I turned to drugs. Along with the meaning I attached of being punished, I also thatched a meaning that I was not worthy of any of the good things in life. Based on this meaning, I embarked on a very self destructive path for many years.

I came to a point when I was 24, much later in life, where I was offered this amazing concept that said, “You know Willard, you are able to look at any experience, and you are able to make it mean what you want it to mean. You can “choose” what it means to you.” The mentor said, “Why not choose what’s going to best serve you in that situation?” Initially, it was a hard concept for me to accept. But when I did look back at the experience, I looked and saw there were other options, other possibilities, rather than perceiving it as being punished… there was a possibility that there was another meaning. At the first, the opportunity of a new possibility was intriguing. One of the first possibilities I explored was that maybe losing my leg was about leading me on a path that would give me experiences that I never would had otherwise .

And if there was one possibility, then there surely could be others. I asked, “What could another meaning be?” Another possible meaning was… maybe this was for me to teach. Maybe it was for me to be able to stop other people from following the same path I had taken. All of a sudden, I came up with numerous possibilities of what that one experience could mean.

Everything that happens in your life, you ultimately choose what meaning you want to attach to it. Why not choose the one that serves you best? There is no “right or wrong” meaning. Only right or wrong based on whether it serves you.

Take a look right now, at some area of your life where you have attached meaning to something that is not serving you. Maybe something that you’ve attached a meaning to, that doesn’t support you and who you choose to be. Then ask yourself, what would another possibility be? What else could this mean? How could I look at this experience in a different way?

All it takes is a small shift, and it can dramatically… dramatically change your life. Again we choose the meaning that we attach and it’s up to you.

90% of the population will complain about how their life is, but… they won’t take responsibility for their lives being that way.

That means a very small percentage actually takes control, and designs the life that they truly desire. So what is the difference between these two groups of people?

I believe that for many what makes the difference is the realization that things do not happen to them, but rather they make things happen. And when someone recognizes this, I believe that is the beginning of the journey of developing self awareness… They begin to explore what drives them, and what they are constantly attempting to avoid.

Self-Awareness is many things and as you continue the process of developing self-awareness that definition may change depending on where you are in your life.

It can be a journey of understanding what your belief systems are. Learning about beliefs that empower you and beliefs that prevent you from achieving what you desire.

Self-awareness can be about understanding what you value most. Learning about what is most important to you and why it’s important to you.

There are also numerous sets of rules that direct how you live your life. Things that you will and will not do. Things that you will or will not allow. Whether you are consciously aware of these things or not, these beliefs, these rules, these values, they determine every action that you take.

As you progress on this journey of developing self-awareness, you will find that it is like peeling layers off of an onion. Each layer that you peel off will reveal more of who you truly are. And as that happens, you may find that you develop a deeper connection with yourself and with other people.

Developing self-awareness can be a very spiritual journey. It connects you to yourself, to your family, to your community, to the world.

For me, what started this exploration into developing self-awareness is that I found myself in a place that I didn’t like being. My life had become a mess and was nothing like what I had envisioned for myself when I was growing up. And in a “moment of clarity”, I realized that every decision I had made up to that point, had brought me to that specific place.

Until that moment in my life, most of my decisions were based on trying to avoid things, trying to avoid the truth, trying to avoid responsibility, trying to avoid even looking at myself because I didn’t like what I saw. And this led me to a place of total “in-authenticity” where I had no connection to myself, or to anyone else. I was running on a self-destructive “auto-pilot” and had no idea why I was having such a miserable life.

Developing self-awareness puts you back in the driver’s seat, you get to decide where it is you are going to go, and you have more control of your life and your circumstances.

To do that, takes a lot of honesty, open mindedness, and vulnerability. At times, it’s not an easy journey, but it’s definitely worthwhile.

So, I invite you to join me on this journey. I’m going to do my best to give you ideas, to help spark your thought process, and also build a community around you. My intention is that this community will be a place for you to support each other, offering ideas, feedback and helping you find way to become even more aware, and ultimately finding ways to make the choices that help you become the person that you desire to be.

So what I ‘d like to ask you to do right now, is grab a pen and a paper, or do it on your computer, and take a moment to just capture what some of your beliefs, just the surface level, that first layer of the onion.

Some questions that will help you are…

1) What do you believe about yourself?

2) What beliefs about yourself do you have that empower you or dis-empower you? You are good at X; you are not good at Y.

3) What are your beliefs about other people? People are… and then fill in the blank. People are… good, compassionate, untrustworthy, greedy? What is it that you honestly believe about other people?

4) What are your beliefs on a global level… The world is messed up? The world is a great place? The world is in trouble? The world is on a new course? Your choice.

Ask yourself…

1) What’s important in your life? Family? Friends? Finances? Health? Power? Fame?

2) Why, is that important to you?

And now the tougher questions are…

1) Who do you desire to be?

2) How do you need to begin living, right now… to become that person.

Write them all down because over the following weeks I’ll be offering ideas to help you discover answers to these questions and more.

Welcome to your process of developing self-awareness.

February 9, 2019

Hello. My name is Willard Barth, and I want to welcome you to a series of articles I will be referring to as “Self-Awareness 101”.

After having spent the past 30 years focusing on my own journey of self-awareness, speaking to audiences big and small, consulting with businesses around the world, working with individuals to help them make tremendous transformations in their lives and now teaching others how to do the same, I’ve decided to “pay it forward”. If you are not familiar with the term, it comes from a movie by the same name. In the movie Pay It Forward, a teacher asks his students to “Think of an idea to change our world – and put it into action.” In the movie a young boy puts into action an idea called “Pay It Forward”. The idea is about doing something to help others without asking for something in return for yourself. What he did ask, was that the person receiving the help then “pay it forward” by helping 3 others and asking them to do the same. If you haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend it.

This series of articles is a part of my attempt to Pay It Forward. Over the next several months, I’m going to be releasing short article designed to help you on your personal development journey, and on your journey to self-awareness. Now, some of these are going to be ideas and lessons that have been shared by some of the greatest teachers in the areas of psychology, spirituality, finance, relationships, personal transformation and health. Others are going to be skills and strategies that I have personally used to help me overcome challenges or create specific outcomes in my own life and that my clients have used to do the same in theirs. Ultimately, the intention of this series is to open your mind to new possibilities, to give you ideas, skills and resources that you can apply in your own journey, and to give you a forum where if you choose, you can also pay it forward by sharing your experiences with others looking for direction.

Albert Einstein once said, “A problem cannot be solved with the same mind that created it.” When you open your mind to new possibilities, anything becomes possible.

Right now people are asking all sorts of questions. From issues they are facing within their homes to issues that affect people at a global level. People are trying to figure out what to do… about the economy, about the environment, within their relationships with one another and relationships with people around the world.

As people look for answers, one of the challenges that they will face is that they don’t realize that all change begins within. So many are looking elsewhere for the answers. One of my mentors, Wayne Dyer, released a book called,Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life. When you look at the title you may think, “That is such a simple statement”, but as you allow yourself to explore it at a deeper level you will also find it is a fundamental truth.

Here is a personal example of how that concept worked for me. I lost my left leg to cancer when I was 8 years old. And all I could think about, the driving focus for a good 14 years was, “Why me?” Everything that I focused on was about me being a victim and losing my leg. I believed that I was being punished. I thought that I did something wrong. I had a belief that God was against me. And those thoughts, those beliefs drove every action and created my reality.

Then there came a point where I changed that focus from “Why me?” to “How can I use this experience, how can I use all of the things that losing my leg led me to experience and learn, to serve others? How can I use these things to teach, to help other people avoid the outcomes and the mistakes that I made?”

Think about this for a minute: One idea can change your life. Let me say this again. One idea can change your life. Sometimes that change will be dramatic and instant, and other times it will be a small shift, that over time expands until you find yourself in a whole new place.

I want to be very clear. I am not sitting here saying that I’m going to be the person who’s giving you the idea that will dramatically change your life. The reason I created Self-Awareness 101 is to offer you inspiration, education and empowerment. I intend to give you the spark, the idea that will get the ball rolling. You will then be able to communicate, via comments, sharing what specifically that skill, that strategy, that idea means to you, and how you’ve either applied it in the past in your life, or how you can see applying that skill now can make dramatic changes for you.

I know that some people who come to these articles will be new to their journey of personal development and self-awareness. And that others will have invested years in studying different approaches that have given them tremendous benefits along the way. It is my intention to create a place where the new person can ask questions, and those who desire to, can share their experiences to help others along the way. Remember, “One idea can change your life.”

So I thank you for allowing me to play my part as I pay it forward. I welcome you, and I invite you to become a part of our journey here with Self-Awareness 101.