fertile ground

This has been a thirty day period of incredible growth, progress and momentum. I am so very proud of myself for committing to creating a 30 Day Deal for the month of December. This post marks the completion of the commitment I made to make at least four contributions between December 1 and December 30.

I have difficulty remembering a time when I’ve felt this focused and had this much momentum carrying me forward. It is truly powerful that, at the beginning of this month, I told myself there were a certain few objectives I wanted to accomplish over that period of time and I stayed focused on making them real to me. Beyond the mere accomplishment of those objectives, I also worked on my awareness of how I accomplished them, what that process entailed.

As I’ve learned from Michael Bernoff, one of the most vital processes one can commit themselves to is to become obsessed with the process of how to become the person who gets the goals you want. Rather than jumping from goal to goal to goal or from idea to idea to idea or from strategy to strategy to strategy, if you dedicate yourself to figuring out how you become that person, it becomes a part of who you are. Once you’ve integrated that process into your being, you move beyond needing motivation or strategies and you live your life as that person with what you’ve become as a part of you.

I also completed another goal I set for myself by finishing reading the book Using Your Brain for a Change by Richard Bandler, who is a mentor of Michael’s; in the afterword, he talks about how Neuro Linguistic Programming (which Bandler co-created) is more than a set of tools. He posits that it truly is a mindset that one develops about how they learn and view the world. I really latched on to this idea; how we perceive the world is really one of the few things we have any control over in our experience. What most resonated with me from the afterword, however, is seen below:

“You see, whenever you think that you understand totally, that is the time to go inside and say, ‘The joke is on me.’ Because it is in those moments of certainty that you can be sure that the futile learnings have set in, and the fertile ground has not been explored.” – Richard Bandler, Using Your Brain for a Change

I had not truly realized before reading that book, and letting its knowledge sink in, that certainty is a sure path to becoming stuck in your life. When certainty arises, you lose your curiosity and stop asking questions; when someone presents something to you that challenges that certainty, you close off your perspective and lose an opportunity to expand. We all have fertile ground in us that is unexplored, whether because of certainty or because we have not allowed ourselves to acknowledge it or discover it. I invite you to examine how certain you are in how you view the world and to challenge that certainty, to allow yourself to be curious, to have wonder, to ask many questions, to let the joke be on you. It is then that you will truly begin to expand out into the person that you are possible of being.

Here’s to 2016: the year of exploring fertile ground. Happy New Year!

-MJH