Cut the Crap and Close the Gap—between words and experience.

Just starting the Have More Fun & Increase Your Profits series? Click the links to catch up with Part 1 and Part 2.

Asking this basic question: What does that look like to you? Will always empower a person because it engages his imagination and sense of clarity. This is what we want to do with ourselves and others whenever possible. Simply ask: What does (or will) that look like to you? Because what follows next – presuming a picture has formed in your mind – is a triggering of feelings, and those feelings will then move or empower you in a different way.

This is one basic prescription for powerful, self-change. Yet along with this prescription I for one am learning to be very mindful of words because I can get trapped in them, sucked into their power to stimulate and provoke. Sometimes this can be a good, but not always. Other times it’s an addiction, an obstacle, like quicksand that stands in the way of my progress.

This simple prescription is part of my passion for transformation; my own, yours—if you want to share it—and ours, as a community of practice and support.

Now you have a tiny window onto the platform from which I will speak—a platform of incremental stretching, growing, awakening, discovery—the awareness of unfulfilled potential with trial-and-error frustration, self-judgment, crap I’ve seen and lived in, the ongoing battle between my conscious desire and unconscious urges.

Here’s another analogy. I am skippering a lifeboat in an invisible sea of ideas, about how human beings can operate optimally and change themselves when they desire to enough. In that sea there are now more ideas, theories, schools of thought, and growth practices about the structure of change and human brains: reptilian, mammalian, neocortical—the structure of the minds and mental processes: unconscious, conscious, id, ego, superego, masculine, feminine, neuro-transmitting, and hypo-performing—and behavior patterns: survival, fight or flight, multiple intelligences, emotional intelligence, flow, peak experience, disorders, etc. than anyone has time to learn or practice. I can’t possibly integrate them all either, let alone understand them.

My own practice, which seems to help me stay afloat and sane in this sea, consists of yoga, meditation, walking, loving as much as I can, nature photography, helping others, doing work that makes a difference, and being as responsible as I can.