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

learning

Continuing my intention set in 30 Day Deal, I’m back here (for the second time in five days; FIVE DAYS!!!). I’m back partially because I made a deal with myself, yet also because, through that deal with myself, I have had experiences that I feel worth reviewing and sharing with you here.

On Friday night, five dear friends of mine from my college days came to Chicago to see me play George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play at Oil Lamp Theater, as well as to visit with each other. It’s funny that, as you’re growing up, no one really tells you, “Hey, you’re going to form connections with these people and grow to love them, but there’s going to be a time when you have deliberately make time to see them because you won’t be able to just walk down the hall to be with them.” Thanks to the collective efforts of all six of us together, we were able to make the time and space to get together and share laughs and tears and memories and, most importantly (to me), hugs.

I knew, approaching the night of the performance that I knew they were going to attend, that I was going to most likely have a level of emotional vulnerability that was quite a bit higher than what I usually work to achieve in playing the man who forgets that he is not a failure because he has friends. I knew it, and it happened; I was almost a wreck twenty minutes in when (SPOILER ALERT) George’s father dies (I normally wouldn’t think this warrants a spoiler alert, but I keep meeting people who have never seen the movie, which is confounding to me). I so deeply felt that loss because the people I knew were in the audience had gone through that same sense of loss as I did when our friend Chris Alonzi passed away two years ago this past December 10. I learned that that level of vulnerability was within me because of those people and our experiences together and, ultimately, because of the love we share for each other. I could not have learned that without that experience.

I also learned today that, when you set an intention and pursue it authentically with your whole self, you can truly achieve a sense of accomplishment that boosts your confidence and gives you an incredible amount of momentum to move forward. In my 30 Day Deal, I set the intention to learn one to two new monologues. I did it because I knew there was an audition coming up for a theater company here in Chicago that I have auditioned for multiple times and that I would very much like to collaborate with in the future. I knew I needed a new monologue to present to them, so, when the 30 Day Deal came around, I said to myself, “I’m going to put this on here and I’m going to do this, so I can give myself an opportunity to win in that audition room whether or not the people casting like it or not.” So, in less than two weeks, I learned a new monologue from a play called Arcadia by Tom Stoppard on the suggestion of a former theater professor of mine who has shown great confidence in my abilities in the past. I walked into that room, made some very pleasant small talk (even managed to get a joke in before I started to make all of us feel comfortable) and presented my pieces. When I finished, the artistic director, who I am always happy to audition for because he’s incredibly intuitive and gives excellent notes, noted that he thought the play I took my second monologue from (The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh) was nice (in comparison to some of the very tragic outcomes presented in McDonagh’s other works) and then gave me an excellent note about the Arcadia monologue. Before I left, he said that he thought my choices in monologues were nice, and that the note he gave me about the Arcadia monologue would create an even better contrast from the choices I was already presenting in the Inishmaan piece. I walked out of that room knowing that I gave them my all AND that I had accomplished an intention that I challenged myself with two weeks ago.

That knowing brings with it a fantastic sense of confidence because, when you tell yourself that you’re going to do something and play full out in getting after it, you make it real for yourself, and that’s what we’re here to do. Learning is part of that process, yet I think people miss that learning is a process. You learn some things easily, you learn some things well, and you have difficulty learning other things, that’s life. However, if you can take how you learn from the things you learn easily and well and apply that process to those things that you have difficulty learning, that is when true achievement occurs.

These experiences and this journey have opened my mind to knowing that learning how to learn is the greatest process we can engage in. We’re all different, driven by different ideas, beliefs, outcomes and emotions, so it’s imperative that we direct our attention and our energy towards learning how to best live our lives and how we function. When I function at my best, then I can serve you to function at yours; it’s as simple as that.

Simple, not easy, though certainly well worth it all.

-MJH

progress

So, I missed the seven year anniversary of my first post here on Musings, which continues a ridiculously prophetic element of my first post and how I’ve treated this blog over the last seven years.

I had decided (then) that I did not want this blog to be some sort of appointment-keeping task, where I would regularly write out of obligation. In fact, I shared with a friend today that I felt that nobody ever got what they wanted by doing things out of forced obligation. However, I have recently realized that I have been missing an opportunity to exponentially boost the progress and learning I’ve done over the last three or so years by sharing my thoughts and processing here in this forum.

That is why you are reading this post on my blog right now; I made a promise to myself to make at least four contributions to this blog between December 1 and December 31 as a part of my personal 30 Day Deal.

What is the 30 Day Deal, you ask? It’s a jumpstart to the end of 2015 as introduced by my mentor, Michael Bernoff. When you listen to the replay of the free training call Michael did about the 30 Day Deal, you’ll find out that, the rest of the world gets excited about the dawning of a new year and we get caught up in a flurry of resolution-making and goal-setting because it’s the spirit of the turning of the calendar. However, what usually ends up happening is, when the high of the new year fades away, we lose that sense of momentum in the shared experience, and our resolutions and goals fall by the wayside. So, Michael invites you to make a deal with yourself to ask yourself, “what can I accomplish in the next 30 days?”  When you set that intention and accomplish it, you create an incredible amount of momentum for yourself, and what better time to do that then in this last month of the year, to give you an excellent start to 2016 without just riding the high of the collective new year’s frenzy?

I want you to focus on this right now; there is something amazing about you and what you’ve accomplished so far. As you’ll find out from Michael on the 30 Day Deal training call, it really comes down to this:

“You have mastered the art of getting to where it is that you are right now.” – Michael Bernoff

I want you to re-read that for a second; you, the wondrous human being that you are, have mastered something. That speaks to the truly phenomenal things of which you are capable. It reminds me of something I read in Using Your Brain for a Change by Richard Bandler (a mentor of Michael’s, and another part of my personal 30 Day Deal). He shares,

“[P]eople work perfectly. I may not like what they do, or they may not like it, but they are able to do it again and again, systematically. It’s not that they’re broken; they’re just doing something different from what we, or they, want to have happen.” – Richard Bandler

So, if we already work perfectly, why do we have all of the rage and turmoil and suffering in the world that we see on a regular basis? Because there is a difference between working perfectly and working for the benefit of others. Every issue we encounter, from violence against others, to hateful rhetoric, to even just rudeness, is the result of fear. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived idea of lack of love and consideration. Everyone works perfectly because they have learned whatever behavior it is they have learned from their experiences and their feelings and they are able to replicate it regularly over and over again in every situation they encounter. What our task is is to help those people who make their decisions based on fear to make a new decision; we do that by showing them love, by learning to become a persuasive communicator, by helping them see the world in a different way, and by learning how to become a person who can help them make that new, love-based decision.

I’m very excited to share more of my experience with my 30 Day Deal here in this medium with you, and I invite you to check out the resources I shared and even create your own 30 Day Deal and share it in the comments below! I recently shared with another friend that, the more you share your intentions with others, the more real you make it for yourself, in thought and word. In fact, when you’ve shared it, you now have created an inherent sense of accountability from the people you’ve shared it with.

I am now accountable to you; will you be bold enough to join me?

-MJH