Aspiring To Adventure

To no one in particular, since this blog is read by no one in particular.

Last year was hard. I was pulling myself out of this long-standing funk I was in, and taking action to buy a business, which I did not feel ready to do and I guess you won’t be ready to do until sometime after you’ve done it.

I was getting ready to buy one, when my father in law died. I had the offer mostly worked out with them, and just needed to nail down the details.

And so I put things on pause.

And then my job had layoffs. And I was caught in them.

I hadn’t secured my financing while I still had that income to report.

So everything stopped.

And I stopped.

I half-heartedly looked for employment, but it was the holiday season, so everything was kind of slow.

I was slow.

I didn’t really want to go down that path.

I started looking at franchises.

And that seemed wrong too.

But I kept every path open. I didn’t commit. I also didn’t close them down.

Everything seemed absolutely pointless. Why do anything at all? Why exist? Why live? It all leads to the same place.

A lot of that, I realize now, is just grief. And I think I should be familiar with that, because when my life starts going in a direction I don’t like, that’s my response. To stop and glare at God with resentment. To tell him he’s the one who stuck me here, in this impossible situation.

But I did it.

I made all the decisions. I had all the agency the whole time, but I was shying away from using it.

I can see that I had the agency, because now I am using it. I am starting a business again. I am just going to go down a path, and see if I can make a living without leaning on a job. I am going to have some contracts, and design some products, and try to build a new kind of life for my family.

I want to be more present, to have time and space to be more present, by building the systems that we need to make an income without my day to day involvement in the work. To be able to step back, and to be able to lean in, and to be able to make those decisions based on something beyond survival, but rather, based on interest, and motivation, and a vision for the future.

I want my kids to know something of the struggle of life. To not be afraid to confront it.

And I used to think they would need to have no place to fall back to. But now I realize, they need a certain safety. But not too much. They need a ground they can land on when they fall, that will keep it from destroying them. They need a stable home where everything they need is there.

Sometimes we all need to step back from the hardness of life, and take a moment in a safe comforting place to heal. To admit that we are not just tough. We are not just persevering. We are also frail, weak, delicate, hurting, and in need of reassurance.

And when we need that, we need it. It may not always come when we do. But it doesn’t much help you when you pretend you don’t need it. When you become cynical and rigid in response.

I want a new kind of life. I want to stop looking to paychecks for security.

I figured out how to get financing. I have narrowed down my search to ecommerce brands and SaaS. And I’m actually reaching out and starting conversations with sellers.

Things are really moving, and I’m keeping them moving.

The biggest hurdle at each step isn’t actually the work that needs to be done.

It’s the invisible barrier of the unknown. The fog that makes you want to stop because you can’t see what’s on the other side.

Submitting a Letter of Intent for the first time is going to be scary. Even though it’s non-binding. It feels… real.

When things start to feel too real, and too big, and our muscles in these areas aren’t yet formed, we hang back.

We know we can’t do it all yet, and our mind is there to protect us.

The problem is that for some things you just have to start doing it in order to become someone who can do it. There isn’t necessarily a way to ease into it, and get reps without getting in way over your head.

You just have to trust that you’ll be able to handle whatever happens.

Or that God’s going to have a plan for you.

Sometimes, you just have to make the leap.

I’m searching for lawyers. I’m working on getting loan information. I’m looking for escrow agents. I’m looking at businesses for sale every day and looking for good opportunities.

In short, I’m moving along on my business search. Who knows what I will find?

But it seems like a path that is more exciting than working for someone else, and possibly much more rewarding.

I want the feedback from reality, not the feedback from a manager. I want to get results, not good performance reviews.

I want to find out if it will work, not find out I can’t do what I want because I haven’t convinced the gatekeeper.

I used to think I’d be happier if I could be really rich and successful.

And there is a bit of truth to that. As we gained some wealth, certain difficulties did go away and we were happier.

But not actually happier. More like… less unhappy.

I had space to thrive but I wasn’t thriving.

I thought if I got my circumstances just so, things would be better.

And they were, but… I wasn’t happy. In fact, as I had less to strive after, I got less and less happy.

“I thought all these things were going to fix my life”

They didn’t.

And I was worse off because I didn’t have the lie to tell myself, and the anticipation that when I “made it”, things would be better.

But I also wasn’t worse off, because I could see what the truth was more clearly.

All of the striving is just a distraction. The real work is inside.

Everything you need to be happy is given to you when you’re created.

And that includes God. He has a little spot in your soul, where you can be with Him.

The real journey is clearing away what keeps you from connecting to Him.

You’re not unhappy because your circumstances are terrible. That might even make it easier to be happy.

You’re unhappy because your mind and heart are pointing in the wrong direction.

You’re looking for the world to make you happy. Only God can.

And God is already with you.

You could have been happy all along.

Growing – developing.

We often think of growth as a logical or linear progression. We get bigger. We increase in strength. We do _more_ of whatever it is we are already doing.

But there is another model of growth that can be helpful.

Transformation.

Transformative growth is not simply doing more of something you already do, or doing it faster, or slightly better.

Transformative growth is bringing an ideal into an area of your life where you previously did not embody that ideal.

An example could be bringing the ideal of kindness into a nasty relationship with a neighbor.

You are doing more than simply attempting to become more kind in an already kind relationship.

You may not even get a good response from your neighbor.

But you are transforming yourself. You are turning yourself into something new by the actions you take.

This kind of growth is often the most rewarding, because there is the biggest change. And the challenge involved requires not just increasing mastery of what you’ve already mastered, but often learning an entirely new way of being.

What are the ideals that you need to embody in order to live the life you want to live?

What are the skills you need to acquire in order to embody those ideals in the circumstances you’re in that will transform your life?

Who can you serve with these changes?

Nothing to report, except that we are still searching for a business to buy.

We’re getting educated, we’re narrowing our focus, we’re practicing our searching abilities.

This is the year I buy my first business.

Why buy?

Running businesses have revenue on day one, which means after the purchase, you could just do that, instead of keeping your existing job and trying to do both at the same time.

And then when it scales up to running without you (the main goal) you can get the next one.

As I look back over the last year, I realize that a lot of it was about fighting burnout.

“Can I keep doing this, over and over again?” “Where is this all headed?”

Granted, I didn’t get huge outcomes from this work.

But I did start rediscovering my agency.

And I started seeing places where something inside of me was holding me back— protecting me from disappointment and embarassment.

And that is still there to some degree, but now I’m seeing it clearly.

I’m also seeing clearly that other unseen forces were pushing me forward. Forward into places I didn’t really want to go or care about arriving at.

Do I need to be a millionaire? No.

Do I still want a bit more time in my days and weeks? Yes.

But I also recognize that there are even more complex desires at play here. If I didn’t have to work all day, what would I do? Would I be thrust into some of the chaos of home life, with some of the problems our kids are currently struggling with that doesn’t fall primarily on my shoulders?

If I accomplished this goal, would my job no longer be what gives me the days mostly to myself in my office (something I both love and hate)?

None of this really matters in some sense.. If you know you want to do something, you just go ahead and do it.

And if you want to get unstuck, just go ahead and start doing something.

But if you’re constantly sabotaging your own efforts, and you’re lacking the stick-to-it-iveness you need to succeed…

The inner work becomes unavoidable.

And that’s probably a good thing, because you’re what’s making you so miserable in the first place. Not your circumstances.

At the end of this year, I realize that all I really need is hope.

Hope that every day, the small actions I do, like fixing a hole in the wall, or cleaning something, actually make a difference.

And that it’s worth doing.

And it is. It makes me someone who can keep a house maintained and provide a good place for my family. It keeps my exterior order in place, which helps my interior order.

When I have hope, I can just do what’s at hand.

I can just do the most obvious work, and trust that God’s got it in hand.

Having gotten nowhere and somewhere at the same time. Ending up in the same place, but perhaps being more grateful for it.

We had a lot of fun last year. We went to France. We tried some things.

I finally got a promotion at work.

Yet, I still feel the call to go on to something else.

And also feel the weight of everything that’s going on, and that weight sometimes makes me want to avoid everything, and keep plugging along, blindly, numbly, without too much hope.

Hope is a certain kind of pain – you want something to happen, but it’s not there yet, and it’s only because you believe you’re going to get that thing that you keep going.

Without hope, pain is unendurable.

And life is filled with pain, which makes life unendurable.

So – the question is what one should hope for.

What’s your hope rooted in?

Better be something that gets you through it.

Of course, the only thing that really works is to hope in God.

But even after you have that, you’re still going to have to spend your life in some way or another, and that requires smaller forms of hope, in things that need to happen on the way.

I’ve been exploring IFS (Internal Family Systems) and discovering it has an awful lot that makes sense (at least experientially), although perhaps it’s a bit crazy in terms of an actual description of what a person really is.

But the one thing that really resonates is when we have a lot of internal points of view that are fighting with each other, creating tension, blocking us, getting really out of control.

Overcoming yourself IS ACTUALLY really hard. There is something inside of us that puts up massive resistance to change. In the IFS model it’s the homeostasis of the system.

In other words, the devil you know.

You can force yourself over the hump sometimes, but sometimes you push yourself so out of balance, things have a way of snapping back violently.

A gentler approach, a present loving approach… that’s what allows deeper insights to lead to lasting change. Understand the system and what it’s built for the sake of getting and avoiding, and help it to get there.

All that being said, I’m still very tired, and change is taking a long time. There’s os much to do in the “What we already have” space with kids etc, that doing something new is really not happening at the moment.

That slowness of progress is exhausting. Things feel hopeless at times.

But it only takes a few hours here and there to make fresh progress, and start to see that something can actually be done.

I hope we make it through the winter season of sickness in good enough spirits, and come out with a few things closer to action than before.

The fear that we’ll be successful!

What a wild idea!

But what does success, really big success, do for us?

It cuts us right out of the life we know, and into the adventure of life, a life that we cannot even begin to control. A life of grace, a life of being on the edge of it all.

These are serious fears. But they’re not the real fear. Not the
Master Fear, the Mother of all Fears that’s so close to us that
even when we verbalize it we don’t believe it.

Fear That We Will Succeed.

That we can access the powers we secretly know we possess.
That we can become the person we sense in our hearts we
truly are.

This is the most terrifying prospect a human being can face,
because it ejects him at one go (he imagines) from all the
tribal inclusions his psyche is wired for and has been for fifty
million years.

We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are.
More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear
that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice
tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the
capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our
flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it’s
true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass
through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous.

We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove
worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us. What will
become of us? We will lose our friends and family, who will
no longer recognize us. We will wind up alone, in the cold
void of starry space, with nothing and no one to hold on to.

Of course this is exactly what happens. But here’s the trick.
We wind up in space, but not alone. Instead we are tapped into
an unquenchable, undepletable, inexhaustible source of
wisdom, consciousness, companionship. Yeah, we lose
friends. But we find friends too, in places we never thought to
look. And they’re better friends, truer friends. And we’re
better and truer to them.

Do you believe me?

Somehow you have to be able to risk the life you know to move forward.

I’ve been considering this question with a new lens.

Sometimes, who we need to be in order to accomplish our goals is someone quite different than who we are now.

I personally would love to be able to flip a switch internally and suddenly act out of a new way of being.

But this is not how things are.

Things are more nuanced. The switch can flip, but the actions must be taken to create the person you need to be, and that creation happens through habit formation. It happens from the choices we make every day that reinforce and form that new way of being.

It’s not just thinking. It’s not just action.

It’s the embodied expression of your ideals – which happens through the actions we take in our life.

It’s living our ideals in our day to day life and in our obligations.

And it’s making the decisions that create new trajectories. But we still have to walk those paths.

There’s no magic, only possibility. But the creation of possibility can itself seem like magic, because it animates all sorts of exciting new actions in our life.

I have my second entrepreneur coaching client starting this week. And my first has been going well, with lots of performance breakthroughs, and lots of progress.

In my own life, I’ve started coming up against the very deep personal issues that define the territory everyone must eventually go through in order to really master themselves.

I’ve met such an overwhelming amount of internal resistance in my endeavors, it’s been hard to move forward.

I’ve been working to reengage at work, and in my own life, and to stop feeding negative thought patterns.

I’ve started to realize my cynicism, victimhood, and depression are all just coping mechanisms to try to connect with people, get rest, and have fun.

There are parts of me that just don’t get expressed, and when I stay bottled up too long, a lot of interior energy starts to come out in bad ways, when really I just need to hang out with friends and sleep and exercise.

When you’re not enjoying life, the resentment and depression can start to build so that you can get the courage to say no to something.

But what if I just said no in the first place, because I was less worried about letting people down?

So I’m trying to put my head back on in the right way, and make good choices each day.

I’m working to recognize what’s already good about my situation. Rewriting bits and pieces instead of trying to flip the whole table all at once.

I’m building a coaching business.

We got back from France, and we loved it. We’re going to go again, God willing, and the mrs is learning the art of venoisserie from the French baking book.

I’m continuing to get over my crazy, and learning to be peaceful.

The question is when do I want to take dramatic action? When do I want to go crazy and build this business that could catapult me into a new lifestyle?

Maybe now. I think the answer is now.

We are now in the middle-to-end of a 3 week trip in Europe, we are on an adventure with our family.

The mrs bought tickets, and we suddenly had to get lodging, trains, and some new clothes for everyone (because we hadn’t been getting out of the house enough).

What could life be like if we just made decisions and took massive action on everything?

I wish I could say everything is different about me, but I’m still struggling to discover the meaning and purpose that God has for me.

But even still, being in France is amazing, with all the croissants and coffee and great food and beautiful architecture.

I was hoping this blog was going to be a place for mrs and I to reflect on our year together as it happened.

And that there would be huge things to report at the end of the year.

And there are some big things that have happened. There’s been massive shifts, and I may be embarking on a new career that is both exciting and a bit scary to me.

We have gotten over our hesitation to spend our money on doing the things that we want to do.

After years of complaining that my office was crowded and messy, I finally bought what I needed to buy to make it a more human environment, and now I have everything here I need.

After years of complaining my workshop was crowded, I finally am doing the project to create outdoor storage so I can move a bunch of things out of it.

After years of wanting to be financially independent, I am finally free to do that or not, but it’s not something that’s bothering me per se. I have the freedom I was looking for now, without needing to stop working. I’m free to do what I want, and I’m doing more and more of what I want all the time.

It’s not the change I started off aiming at, but it’s a big change, and there’s been real growth, and I am not the same person I was at the beginning of this journey.

Am I disappointed that I didn’t (yet) make a million dollars?

Not really. I might start pushing on those things again, but for now, I’m exploring doing the things I want to do, and I may do some things that are way scarier than the things I was initially avoiding.

I’m different, and I even see ways I could be radically more free, and radically more engaged in my life. I see a path to Really Living and I just need to keep taking the steps on that path.

Money, it turns out, was never really what I was after. It was the freedom to do what I want, and I discovered I have it. The desire for money evaporated after that, except insofar as I have enough to keep creating the life I want for my family.

So now the question is – what’s the dream for the life I want for my family, for myself, and what would that require?

That’s something I’m working on getting clear on, but I don’t need to know everything to take smaller actions to make things better.

I hope to develop a clear vision for a future, but I hope to also be comfortable just doing something fun and challenging and keeping my options semi-open. (i.e. 3-6 month sprints, instead of 5 year plans). I’m not that into 5 year plans, because I know I get bored and need something new.

Why label that as bad? Just let it be what it is until I really need it to be something else. Maybe work with myself instead of try to change everything about me.

You get to choose who you are, but you don’t get to choose all of who you are. Some of it is what God gives you, and some of it is what you do with that.

Your choices are unlimited but still constrained. The constraints aren’t always clear, which is why you have to have an adventure to find out who you can be.

So – onwards to the rest of the adventure, and if it seems worth posting an update here, I will.

I’m not being consistent with this blog, because it no longer represents to me what I want to do on an ongoing basis.

However, what I have gotten from the experience of coaching is this:

I am free. I can do this or I can do that, and I don’t need to make up a story about whether or not it means I’m lazy or stupid or unpopular or people are going to laugh at me, or that it matters if people laugh at me.

I can be me, and I don’t need to quit my job, and I don’t need to not quit my job. I can, or I could just slowly explore what’s interesting to me and keep taking action on something.

I want to grow because I like to grow.

I want financial independence because it would be nice.

But I don’t NEED either of those. I may want them, and I can take the actions to get them, and I can do it simply.

I can be simple and direct, and not create a lot of extra steps between where I am now and where I want to go.

I don’t need to be an online marketer to find customers. I just need to connect with people and solve problems and create value.

I don’t need to be anybody else. I can be me, and that can be enough.

I can be imperfect, and I don’t need to fix anything about myself.

I can be perfect, and still improve.

In short, I can just be where I’m at without making a whole thing out of any of it.

Am I that way all the time? No. I still get caught up in the internal head chatter. I still have lots of insecurities.

But I have glimpses of a more genuine and authentic way of being, where the false self can die, and pass away, and I can just be present to what God asks me to do at every moment, without “having too much to do”, because I can just be where I am doing what I’m doing, and let that be “what I have to do”.

So – definitely some growth, and from these changes I have started to see new results in how I am, and what I do, and eventually there may be some lagging indicators (like more wealth) but I don’t have to prove myself to myself. I feel free.

I did an exercise yesterday, where I placed myself in the future where I already had what I needed. I already accomplished what I wanted.

“You already have freedom. Now what do you do?”

“You already have friends and community. Now what do you do?”

“Your health is amazing. Now what do you do?”

“Your house is a wonderful oasis you bring friends to, now what do you do?”

I realized a few things.

First, my house is not a wonderful oasis, and my health isn’t yet what I want. But I have a great community and lots of friends. I could lean into those areas harder, by simply letting go of the stories that keep me from really committing to the groups I am a part of, the stories that make me keep myself as a bit of an outsider.

And I already have freedom, so I don’t need to make 1 million dollars to get that. I don’t need to pay off all my loans.

I don’t need to protect myself from people, which is perhaps a massive motivation that makes me want financial independence. I think I need to be beyond certain material harms to be truly free to be myself.

But I do not.

I can be free to be myself now. I can truly love people openly right now. I can speak boldly and confidently now.

I can be who I want to be, right now.

So then, when I say “What do I want next?”, perhaps the answer is as simple as finding places in my life where I am not expressing these things.

The answer is perhaps… make your home what it could be. Make your office what it could be. Fix the things in your life that are falling apart, like the hole in the wall that’s been there for 2 years, waiting until you “get time for it”.

Have the faith needed in God that you will be able to be happy no matter what happens, and that every challenge you get is for your good.

What about a bit ambition? What about a big direction?

I think I will start to find that by living every day, authentically.

I had this beautiful experience of a deep and powerful conversation with a close friend, which makes me think that I could truly come from a place of peace, and be powerfully present in the lives of other people.

That I could make a powerful and bold invitation into the deep personal work that changes lives.

And that people really do want that.

But there’s more. There are other possibilities that start to open, as I put down this “need”.

I am realizing that I’m afraid not to have a big “need” for something, because it makes it difficult to navigate life. There is nothing telling me what to do. I have too much freedom, and it makes me uncomfortable.

In order to truly be at God’s disposal, that’s probably the place of freedom I need.

Remember the parable, where the King invites everyone to the feast? One is newly married, one has to go see about some land, and so on and so on. They all have goals that are keeping them from the abundant life God has right now, and so they miss out on what would truly satisfy.

How much then do we miss what truly satisfies us, because we’re putting a lot of obstacles and complexity in the way? What would be different if there was no fear, and no complex stories to protect our egos from the risk of not knowing the outcome of a bold outcome?

What would be possible if we were open to what’s next, to being in our present moment in a posture of relaxed open readiness? Ready to receive the gifts and opportunities God places in our path every day, to be loving and present and appreciative of the people around us?

This journey has not been without benefits.

But centrally, at the core, something is not working.

That something is me. I’m not making this thing happen.

Why?

There is still a story, deep down inside, a rehearsed and well-trodden path, that I am allowing to color my perceptions.

Every day, when you feel “tired” and “unmotivated”, what is the filter you’re listening through?

When “it doesn’t matter”, and “It won’t make a difference anyway”, what is your filter?

Are you defeated before you start?

Who are you when you are this way?

How much of that bleeds into your interactions?

What are you saying to the people you meet? What are you putting out into the world when you’re in that mode?

The deep inner work is the work. Who I am being, who I am consistently, is what makes the biggest difference in my days.

After that, it is the direction I choose, and what I aim at.

But when coming from this weak position, what do I expect my results to be?

I could have many great opportunities, but when I let myself be in this state of mind, I would just look at them with tired eyes, and a weak heart.

Faith and hope are what’s needed. I hesitate to use those words because I hate bungling up theology and life in a confused way.

But it’s true. I must believe that something can and will happen, that it might happen, if I am to have the courage and perseverance necessary to keep going even when there’s no initial evidence that anything will ever work.

You have to start over every day.

Just get back on the path.

I’ve been avoiding the critical tasks, critical conversations, critical activities for starting a business.

It’s really simple – find a customer.

But instead of all that, I’ve been doing a lot of other activities that are like that but not that.

When you find yourself drifting away from what you were going to do, do you say something like “See? That’s it! It proves it. I suck, and I can’t do things.”

Or do you simply gently redirect your attention back to what you are trying to do?

The path is always there, ready for you to take another step.

The struggle isn’t usually on the path, but with the parts of yourself that keep trying to convince yourself the path isn’t what it is, and that you shouldn’t be on that path.

“I’m not good enough to be on that path”

“I don’t have what it takes”

None of that matters. It’s just a story you’re telling yourself.

Just take the next step.

Your energy could be used walking instead of harassing yourself for not walking.

Gently bring your attention and your action to what should be done.

Take a step on the path.