Content

Having - What Do You Want? (Pdca)

What matters to you?

What is important to you in this context?

Having in a way is survival, it is metaphysical(?), it is wanting and is influenced by your experiences, your role models, it can sometimes detract from options available to you, it can sometimes open you up to options available.

This section is where vision comes in - do you want to have a new standard, a new way of doing things, harmony.

From a place of having, you can then choose various things you want to do in your life to satisfy what you want to have. Operating from a place of doing means you’re focused on only what is right in front of you..

Wanting to have a positive relationship with my mother, wanting to have things be perfect when it always felt wrong, that influenced where I came from when I looked at the scope of what was possible for me to do

Goals as a Construct

How they help you, how they hurt you, how they enable you.

Biological Imperative -

Point of a goal is to feel a sense of purpose of meaning that we do not grasp until after.

A goal is an empty box to fill, it is a checkmark to be checked, it is creating the concept of zero in our present in relation to the expression we want in our minds.  Goals are dreams, goals are imaginations of a different world where the experience you are wanting is happening.  Goals are how this world could be just a little bit better if we could live into them.

Sometimes the box we are trying to fill is too large and we can get overwhelmed if it feels like too much at once.  Goals consist of a plan but the completed outcome does not exist yet.  Setting unrealistic goals only accomplishes the need to feed the ego of its desire to create this world that satisfies your id but then conversely causes the ego to tell us to quit when we start feeling overwhelmed by it.

I Don’t Know What I Want, The Burden of Choice

Millennials were raised in a world that demonstrated life was way more fun in the theoretical than in reality.

We were all raised with these huge concepts of what we could accomplish for ourselves in our lives with so much available to use as free resources.  Parents and teachers and those in older generations only see the huge plethora of information we had at our disposal at such a young age.  What they do not see is the incredible exposure to information caused us to dilute what we pay attention to because there frankly is too much to be able to focus on to understand what we want to pull out of it.

What I end up seeing is that many Millennials love to talk about the lives of the rich and the famous like they’re currently living it by framing their current experience into a photo that looks like what was put in our faces when we were younger as the definitions of happiness.  The experience I see in consensus is one that is exhausted.  People are constantly chasing after many goals with no focus because of constant influences pulling us in different directions and at this point we need to be distracted as a baseline because we do not know what to do with our thoughts when we have just ourselves to think with.

All of this information gets thrown at you and then the immediate question is “What are you going to do?” from a young age that puts you into a pressure chamber of thought and then the older generation wonders why the younger generation has no vision.  There’s no vision because most of us have been asked to consume information and direction for most of our lives instead of generating a perspective that allows us to pick our next step instead of waiting for it to be laid out plainly in front of us.

A strange burden put on Millennials is that their parents only wanted a better life for their kids.  That was the concept they put their focus around.

Living Life Distracted Instead of Being Distracted By Life

A product of having so much to choose from is a trend of high-latency decision-making because we feel the need to look up an answer, to get a second opinion, to talk to a friend first, to make a proposal, to essentially get reassurance in what we have already grasped as the makings of an action.  I both relate with and hate this sensation of constantly needing to have our opinion backed by the opinion of someone else.  What I have learned is that this makes it so we build our realities more around a consensus of thinking instead of around what we want for ourselves.  

We think we are living when we are allocating time into our distractions and if something we really want isn’t a distraction from what we have to do, it probably isn’t going to happen.  What’s funny is I find I have the best times to write when I am in the middle of a videogame, or a conference call, or anything other than the moment where I sit down and say okay Brian you gave yourself 3 hours to write and instead you got on reddit and fell into fan theories about stories again.  When I’m at work, I want to write the entire I’m there but then when I’m home I’m distracted by things I should do for work.  The reality is I am a person who people think has focus while I struggle with the same silly flopping over oneself sensation as everyone else in my generation.  

We tend to look for the answers to our problems by finding associations with things that help us compensate the sensation of fulfillment with the sensation of being dulled?

We have a shrinking minority of doers and an increasing majority of planners, fewer people actually living life and more people choosing to fill the stands of life and cheer those who are living life on in their efforts.  This comes from a person who frankly struggles to not put a computer screen in front of them after spending a childhood putting screens in front of themself

Focus is a function of priority in relation to a target.  It is not something you can find but is a power you learn to wield better over time.

Know What You Want - Drive In Your Own Lane 

You need to ask yourself when entering a precarious situation what defines success for you and that relates to how you want to be.  If what you want to have is not in alignment with how you want to be then you are not demonstrating integrity with yourself.

Having huge desires for yourself in life is not an easy way to live, but it sure is an easy way to not die.

(Reworded from a Winter Soldier quote)

I Don’t Need Your Story, Just Tell Me What You Need

You do not need to qualify the content of your desires and you do not need to explain why you chose the kind of sword you chose, you have it because you chose it.  Whether or not it helps you accomplish what you’re trying to do is something you won’t know until you try and see for yourself. What you make is influenced by your experience and there is nothing to explain or back up behind expressing what you want for yourself that isn’t actively hurting or disrespecting someone

If a system works well, the work takes care of itself.  If a dream works for you, it will produce actions around that dream without feeling resistances to the idea we are pulled toward..

What Feels Right is a Feeling, Not an Answer

The best sword you can forge cannot be compared to others because the best sword for you is what works for you.  Developing a perspective that works for you (while respecting others) will be more effective than trying to copy someone else’s design.  

This is where we talk about trying to be like our lovers.

I was not happy and thought I was doing the wrong x but I was being the wrong b.  I thought happiness was a function of doing, as y is a funciton of x.  But y = mx + b and how I was being through everything I was doing was negative, needy, and depleted.

Keeping Your Thoughts Fit - The Value of Self Care

Helps you stay in alignment with what you want and get back to self.

Getting in touch with some sense of spirit within yourself and declaring to yourself what you want to bring to your problems should inspire how you want to be feeling in those situations.  Practicing the habit of giving yourself a break to center yourself on how you’re feeling and orient appropriately is going to ensure you continue to take actions that are in alignment with how you want to be feeling.

Being a Sage When You’re Feeling Salty

How they help you, how they hurt you, how they enable you.

Expanding circles from landmark

Yucking Your Own Yum

You Cannot Be Controlled, Only Heavily Sedated by Influence

Being Controlled. Or Are We?

The experience of feeling controlled by others is one where all of your carrots are out of your hand and this person has all of them leading you on.  They know how to push your buttons, get you going, have you coming back for one more comeback, they have you.  It can be hard feeling like we are at the mercy of people who know how to influence us effectively but if you want to stop feeling influenced by someone you need to ask why it is you want their approval, validation, respect, attention, or time.  You cannot be influenced by someone who you perceive you can get nothing out of, including love.  This means they perceive they can offer you something you want in exchange for doing more for them, for being enough for them, for staying in line with their expectations of what you ‘should’ be doing and at their mercy for direction.  Should is not something that comes from within, should is always something coming externally of us that is telling us to fall in line, to back up, to bow down, to give in, to give up, to quit.  

Learning when to back down from the influence others have on us because we can perceive an idea of a different experience of life is frankly hard to grow out of, and it is something you have to grow out of through time.  Just like developing a fitness routine if you’re well out of any practice, mental fitness is something that needs to get beaten back into shape and kicked into action in ways that are harder to see than getting up for a workout everyday.  I myself struggle with coming out of a mindset that I realize caused me to self-reinforce sensations of not feeling good enough with every experience I had.  It is the context I come from and I cannot undo it, only understand more as I forgive myself for not knowing enough to be ‘enough’.  It first started as something explicitly said to me by my mother to me on a repeated basis and over time in implicit forms. It took me a long time to realize as an adult that the reason I shun myself from doing anything I want, as a default, is because when my mother first tried to kill herself, she told me it was because she felt unloved because I wanted to live with my dad and the idea of killing my mother through my own choice was what resonated with me.  That was certainly not the last time an event like that had taken place and to this day I still wonder if a time will come where I will receive an inevitable phone call from a hospital that will tell me she didn’t make it this time. That her inability to cope and deal overcame her, and she is no longer here.  

The very next thought in my head will be “this is my fault and she warned me.”

For years, this has been a triggering foundation for me whenever asked the basest questions about what I wanted because I constantly didn’t know if it was the right thing to do.  This only perpetuated the fact I felt compelled to deny the person I was at risk of being seen as gay and only fueled the development of an alter ego that constantly and externally sought everything everyone wanted me to be except me and then actually me would apparently just be there and survive.  

The decisions I made for myself at the time led to actions perpetuating into the person I am, but it also yielded a person of incredible talent and no concept of self.  I have learned a lot about a lot of things and it feels good to be likened to heavy artillery when big issues pop up at work, but it stopped feeling good when I started realizing I wasn’t the person actually making decisions.  I had great ideas and a lot of power behind them, but only if they could be enacted through the decisions of others and I could not advocate for how I felt things should be running because I had not footing on who I was to stand on.  I only had logic and at some point there is an element of knowing oneself you have to attain in order to influence others in ways that are beyond the rationalizations of logic and accelerate passion behind an effort because there is a perspective behind it.

It took a long ass time to realize you are only controlled insomuch as how much you do not speak up in a situation where you would otherwise empower yourself to.  Being controlled begins with giving up the ability to influence yourself to someone else.  It comes from believing in someone else’s perspective more than your own and living into their perspective past your own personal limits.  It involves getting to the point where you are diminished to something unrecognizable, only then do you realize you have been gotten and you’re in too deep to make it back unscathed and unaffected by your experience and it makes you feel worthless.  Worthless because you couldn’t stop yourself for believing in something that sounded really good, worthless because you didn’t see signs you now see brazenly clear, worthless because you traded yourself in for them instead and what you got was nothing but heartache, rejection, and feeling manipulated.  It takes significant work, active thought processing against a standard to bring yourself back to, in order to really pull out of such holes in a way that prevent you from falling into another, and that is filling in the hole inside you.

I used to think of people as like puzzle pieces and that everyone has a jut that sticks out and a piece to get complemented by some eventual partner in life.  I liked it because I thought about how everyone has a strong suit and you can’t be great at everything, I said that’s what makes you unique.  What I find insane about saying that now is that is was in the context of thinking about being good enough at x and how being with someone will apparently complement what I am missing, literally filling in that void. 

I shudder at my naive-ass 20-year-old self.  Hell, I shudder at the thought of reading this at 40 and shaking my head from new lessons learned I have yet to gain understanding from. Well...first things first, I shudder at the thought of being 40.

Anyway, I now think of people like venn diagrams, we are all complete circles with 100% of our perspectives.  When we enter relationships, social contracts, or meet people, we all overlap in some non-zero quantity, even if that is purely in the context of our biology.  We all also have parts that do not overlap and should never overlap because that is called uniqueness, it is what makes you you and is what people like and love about you and is the part they say shouldn’t change.  It’s the part of you that provides distinction to others in the acts you do because they are seeing the person you are being through them.  When we choose to do, have, or be things we see in others, there is more of a merging of your circles, but the two of you cannot ever fully overlap because you can never be someone else just as an atom cannot occupy the space of another atom.  

Being Controlling of Others.

Being Controlling of Our Experience. 

No matter how much we want to think some of our worst actions were the product of another person’s intentions, we always have a degree of choice in the matter, even if the choices available to use are not necessarily favorable, they can still be yours to make.  In an everyday matter, traffic is a thing we take issue with when our concept of what we can control does not push the borders of the worldly problem of gridlock.  Nothing takes you out of living the life you want to live like a red light.  However, how you experience that moment is up to you.  Do you yell at the light with a menacing glare, furrow your eyebrow, and bark at your existence or do you choose to turn the song that’s playing to something you know you like so that you can take your mind off of something it thinks it can control.  Now now, back down boy.  The light shouldn’t be anything other than what it is and you shouldn’t be anything other than human if you’re sitting in front of one and choosing to follow the agreements your society has made with each other on how we will behave when we encounter one that stops us.  Nothing about that said you had to be a brat about waiting your turn.

Developing Focus

Focus is perhaps the greatest ally you could find.  It seems to only show up when we really need it, but not during the times that would have mattered to us when we wanted it by our side.

Figure Out Who YOU Are, Then Do It On Purpose

Take Your Perspective so You Can Have It

If you observe something you don’t like, understand it. If you 

If you don’t pick up a sword for battle, then you don’t fight any of the battles and won’t know how to swing your sword when you are backed in a corner and need to make a decision at the cost of huge things.

You Don’t Have To Explain Yourself, But You Will Need To

If yo

You will need to explain yourself to yourself at least.

Don’t Be Afraid to Complain

If you observe something you don’t like, understand it. If you 

Though there is a limit if you are not doing something about it.

Develop a Standard You Can Follow

You are the best and worst standards you create for yourself, including the standards you are following you aren’t aware you are following as a consequence of your idea of yourself.

Following the Betari model, our culture and behaviors are dictated by the values of others we allow to influence us that come from the beliefs formed by the experiences a person goes through.

The Standards You Follow Are The Ones Bringing You Value

Your behaviors and the culture you create with the circles of your life are a product of what you value in the context of a situation or pbolem.

You will not do something if you do not perceive it to add value to your life, therefore the standards you follow are the elements of life you have valued most on your journey through it because they stood the test of time by yielding self-reinforcing results to you as you continuously test 

What You Value is Based on Your Beliefs About the World & Yourself

Your behaviors and the culture you create with the circles of your life are a product of what you value in the context of a 

Having Experiences that Change Our Beliefs

Experiences > Beliefs > Values > Behaviors

Experiences reinforce our beliefs, which craft our values and the behaviors arising from those values.

Tacit knowledge is what people are thinking about when answering the question behind how they know something with certainty because of the self efficacy their experiences accumulated into.

Creating Experiences that Change Our Beliefs

Experiences > Beliefs > Values > Behaviors

You Do Not Have to Do Anything But What You Want to Do