Good Life Project - Are You Happy, Or Afraid?

Episode Date: January 26, 2017

“I’m good.” It’s a lie we often tell ourselves. Why? To avoid the fear and uncertainty that comes from owning the fact that things aren’t quite what we’d hoped. That we’re terrified of of leaving the comfort of a “passable,” yet mediocre existence in the name of embracing the pursuit of our own personal legend. […]The post Are You Happy, Or Afraid? appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, it's Jonathan. One of the things that I've learned over the years is that a pretty significant part of our community are what I call conscious entrepreneurs. And what I mean by that is, it's folks who are founders, and that could be of business and organization, foundation, private practice, anything like that, that have three things in common. One is that you serve a genuine need. You really solve a problem and you deliver that and get paid for it. And so solving a problem and generating real profit is important to you. The second is that what you create actually serves as a true vehicle for the expression of your strengths, your values and beliefs, and your voice. So it lets you step into your fullest potential. And the third is that there's something bigger happening here. You're part of something bigger and you're serving some bigger need.

And that's what I call a conscious business. And we've created all sorts of experiences, programs, courses over the years designed to serve conscious business founders in a variety of ways. And amazing things have happened. We put pretty much everything on hiatus this year because we wanted to really deconstruct what we were doing and figure out how to bring more people together to serve them on a higher level. Because what we found is that not only do people need information and great advice and strategy and support, but there's a tremendous amount of isolation and loneliness for so many

people who are in the business of founding conscious businesses. And we want to create a true community. So we've been at work at this for the better part of the year. And I'm really excited to share that we are now live with this really powerful new experience. It's called the 108. And it is a conscious business collective. And if you want to know what that's all about, if you want to figure out whether it's in any way something that would be interesting for you, then you can either just click on the link in the show notes, or just head on over to goodlifeproject.com slash the 108. That's T-H-E and then the number 108. Check it out. See if it feels right to you.

If it does, thenlio. It's not the first time I read the book. I've actually read it a bunch of times, but I decided that I thought it was kind of a cool tradition to maybe revisit it and maybe sit down with it every January because it's a really beautiful representation of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey in the form of a parable that is profoundly different than Meyer, I think most people's experience, but it really lets you transfer into it. And throughout it, it really, it reconnects you with the stuff that matters and with the stuff that doesn't matter and with how often we throw the latter into our path as an excuse for inaction. This particular version of the book, the 25th anniversary edition of the book,

was actually given to me by Chelsea Dinsmore, who is the wife of Scott Dinsmore, who we all lost a little while back when they were traveling around the world together. And this version was actually given out at his memorial celebration. And so it has a little extra meaning for me, because he was also someone who went out and really lived his legend as he described it in The Alchemist, his personal legend.

And I was reading a page the other night that kind of caught me, and I wanted to just read a little bit of it to you and share my thoughts. We're still in that New Year's energy, I think, a lot of us, and trying to figure out how and when to move forward. And this is a scene between Santiago and an old tea merchant who sits down and they're kind of sitting around a hookah having a conversation as Santiago, the shepherd boy who's been spending time sort of rebuilding his life in a different continent and getting ready to move on to explore his own legend, is having a conversation, so it starts out, What is it you're looking for, asked the old merchant. I already told you. I need to buy my sheep back, so I have to earn money to do so. The merchant put some new coals in the hookah and inhaled deeply.

I've had this shop for 35 years. I know good crystal from bad, and everything else there is to know about crystal. I know its dimension and how it behaves. If we serve tea in crystal, the shop is going to expand, and then I'll have to change my way of life. Well, isn't that good? I'm already used to the way things are.

Before you came, I was thinking about how much time I had wasted in the same place while my friends had moved on and either went bankrupt or did better than they had before. It made me very depressed. Now I can see that it hasn't been too bad. The shop is exactly the size I wanted it to be. I don't want to change anything because I don't know how to deal with change. I'm used to the way it is. And when I was reading that passage, it popped into my mind sort of immediately. I was like, how many times have I said that variation of that phrase to myself as rationalization for an action? How many times have I said to myself, you know what, things are okay.

Things are, you know, I'm used to the way that things are. They're not as good as they could potentially be. They're not as bad as they could potentially be. But I'm really comfortable. I'm really settled in the state of the way that things are right now. And I'm more fearful of change, even though I actually know that there's something big and specific beyond this that I'd like to do. So in the case of the tea merchant, it was a journey to Mecca.

And it was part of his faith that that was one of the things that he was to do. And he settled into the belief that this was never going to happen, simply because he didn't want to step out of the box that defined comfort for him, that defined ease, that defined the known. He didn't want to move into Joseph Campbell's really disquieting abyss, that space where potential arises. But at the same time, the unknown is the rule. We don't know how it's going to be. We don't know if we're going to make it there. We don't know how we'll feel when we do.

We don't know if we have the resources. Are we good enough? And this causes so many of us to just not even try. And I think we all know that. But this story, I think, is so much powerful to me because it moves beyond just saying, hey, we know what we want to do and we don't want to try. And it really simply explains how we create illusions of happiness and contentment with where we are. Even when we have a very clear picture of where we could and want to be, we tell ourselves the story of now is good, now is okay. And sometimes that's true. Sometimes this place that we're at is genuinely good and is genuinely okay and is genuinely fulfilling. But sometimes

that same story that we tell us that now is okay, now is good, now is happy, now is fulfilling, is actually a rationalization to allow us to not take action that puts us back into a space of mystery, a space of the unknown, a space of having to once again be uncomfortable and take risks and be judged and potentially fail. And I think it's a really important thing to question when we choose not to act and we tell ourselves it's from a place of being currently okay. Test that assumption. Ask yourself, is it true? And what can you do? What evidence do you

have for the fact that everything is as good as it could be in the moment that we're in? And if you find that actually, when you start to look for evidence, there's not a ton of it there. And then you ask yourself that second part of the question, well, what is that other vision? What is that other yearning? What is that other place that I potentially see myself going? And close your eyes and then picture yourself already there. See it, smell it, feel it, taste it.

Drink it in. Really breathe it in. Take a few moments to create that intense, visual, sonic, sensory landscape as if you're already there. And then notice how you feel when you're there. And then ask yourself, is this feeling worth stepping back into a space of unknowing in exchange for the opportunity to actually be in that place?

And contrast those two stories then. You may find that your present state has plenty of evidence to validate your assumption that, yeah, this is good. This is where I need to be. This is where I want to stay. But you also may not. So think about that. It's never about sort of forcefully knocking yourself out of a place that's already good. But it's about taking moments to question your assumptions and see if you can understand whether they're rooted in fear or valid experience. So those are my thoughts for today, kind of bubbling up from my rereading of The Alchemist,

which is a really beautiful book that I like to revisit on a pretty regular basis. I hope that was helpful. I hope it plants the seed of something to think about as we start to really continue thinking about, okay, what are our commitments for this year to come? What do we want to leave as is? And what would we love to create as we move forward? Hope you enjoyed that.

I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project