Hello beautiful people!
Let’s find value in — and then release — lower-tier behaviors and relationships!
What isn’t required is staying at a developmental stage longer than necessary.
Of course, we use lots of reasons to stick around in lower tiers: comfort, safety, security, sticking with the status we’ve been assigned in our relationships, fear of success, upper limit problems… you name it!
Since the one person we can control is ourselves — and since you’re here in this course because you want to blow through ANYTHING that might be holding you back — today is all about identifying those lower-tier behaviors, actions, and relationships.
The key to today’s work is dispassionate labeling. Hopefully by now you’ve built a pretty strong muscle for doing this. Without judgment, you’re going to whip out that glorious journal of yours and simply label behaviors, actions, and relationships. Yes, this has roots in our work from several previous days, and with good reason! At this point in the course, this is a refresher for something that should be becoming easy, simple, straightforward, almost boring. In fact if you find this work tedious as you revisit previous days to check yourself for lower-tier idling speed, you’re exactly where I was when I first read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. I was finding myself more often pissed for what wasn’t working in my life than feeling sorry for myself, blaming anyone outside myself, or being certain my problems were simply too damn complex for fixing.
I started by labeling. “This behavior is lower-tier.” “When I choose to be reactive in this situation, I am asking to stay connected to emotions that ultimately don’t serve me.” “My investment of time doing this activity is blocking and distracting me from my purpose on this planet.” “This relationship is lower-tier but I can’t cut it out of my life because OMG he’s my damn brother.” This sort of thing. Label, label, label. Forgive, forgive, forgive. Mindfully choose, mindfully choose, mindfully choose. If you really want to get into some extra credit with this, create a dayparts map so you can plot out with color when you’re in lower-tier-YOU-land and when you’re leaning into the YOU that you’re so craving to become, the YOU who is actually already fully formed and just waiting for more aligned daily choices that support its beautiful fullness, daily.
You are never more trusted to be the leader you are than when you consistently make choices that prove you know you are to be trusted with leadership responsibilities. These choices — whether they are cleaner eating, more consistent exercising, earlier self-submitting, investment in healthier relationships, higher-quality sleep, less social media, more challenging craft classes, daily self-taping, more confident networking, or simply kinder self-talk — make all the difference in not just the perception of the level of your storytelling gifts but in fact in the actual level of your storytelling gifts.
Holy shit… if the quality of your work is directly related to your willingness to do less of the lower-tier behaviors that served you “back then” but that hold you back now? Do you know what that means? You’re giving everyone who ever hires you a raise, right now. You just became more bankable because you’ve chosen to do less of the lower-tier nonsense.
And… when you eat goat cheese now and then, it won’t kill you because you do it once in a blue moon and then get your fine ass back to higher-tier Whole30 living. Trust me on this. Your best you is just one committed set of more consistent next-tier choices away.
’til tomorrow… stay ninja!
