Posts from — November 2009

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Is the idea of “growing a conversation” some new age, philosophical tactic?  Is it some new technique for having what you want in life?  Does growing a conversation really matter, and does it matter to you?  These are all questions that I’ve found people I work with wonder about.  The answers to these questions are simple: No.  No.  No, and No.

“The Conversation is Growing” is not some new age technique.  Most everything that human beings have created on this planet that exists today was once a conversation.  The car, the skyscraper, the computer, romance, your spouse, your house – all of it – once existed only as a thought.  There was a time when all you could do was talk about your home because it didn’t exist in physical reality.  There was once a time that people could only talk about the idea “cell phone” because “cell phone” didn’t exist in physical reality.  The life you have today is a result of what you talked about “yesterday”.  The life you’ll have “tomorrow” will result from what you talk about today.  Of course, it’s not only what you talk about.  Certainly action is part of the creative process, but how can you take action if you don’t create the action itself first in language?  And what will be the nature of that action?  Will it flow from a conversation for having what you want or will it flow from a conversation of struggling to have what you want?  These are all answers that flow from the conversation you’re having, from the conversation you’re growing.

This is why the answer to the question, “Whether growing a conversations matters?” is no.  Whether you are growing one is not up for debate.  You are!!! You can decide that it matters whether you’re growing a conversation and that will be the conversation you’re growing.  You can decide it doesn’t matters whether you’re growing a conversation and that will be the conversation you’re growing.

Your life doesn’t result from what you’re not doing; it only results from what you are doing.  Creation is an affirmative act.   “Struggling to find love” is not the same conversation as “finding love.”  “Buying the home of your dreams” is not the same conversation as “Struggling to buy the home of your dreams.”  And “Creating a way of life where good things happen naturally for people” is not the same conversation as “Working hard to create a way of life where good things happen naturally for people.”

So before you run out there gung-ho to take action in your life, it would serve you to do a check and ask yourself, “What conversation am I growing … really?”

Now that question matters.

When people ask me what my book A Life Worth Living is about, I tell them it’s a book about how changing your life will save the world.  Typically, when we hear someone talk about “changing our life” or “saving the world,” just one can sound overwhelming.  “Change my life?  My god, I barely have enough time to live my life.  And forget about saving the world.”   Imagine if “changing your life” meant experiencing more joy and ease now.  Imagine if it meant experiencing more happiness and doing more of the things you want to do in life today.  Imagine if the road to these things wasn’t paved with struggle and effort; instead, the road itself was a new road in and of itself – one designed not to just get you to more of what you want one day, someday, but actually designed to give you more of what you want today.

“Alright Bill, sign me up.  But … I don’t see how me having a better life will the change the world?”  When most of look out at the world, we see a lot of struggle and effort.  There seems like so much to overcome and we almost forget that we are a part of the world.  It seems so big, so daunting and the natural response is to question whether our life actually makes a difference.  We’ve become so used to reporting on the state of the world, we forget to take into account how we arrived here today – by many, many people – people just like you – making choices over time of how to live.  What’s missing isn’t another Jesus, or a Mohammed, a Mother Teresa or a Gandhi.  And it’s not because their message was inadequate, it’s simply because there are more of us than them.  To change the world will take the same thing it took to build the world we have – many people living life a different way.  If you can take a step back and see the world as an outcome of design, then you can begin to see that what’s missing is a new kind of expert.

We’ve come to believe that all of the wonderful things we want to experience in life come as a result of hard work and struggle, and it never seems to occur to us that thinking that way has resulted in us becoming experts in the “field” of hard work and struggle.  We are hardcore experts in the field of overcoming that which we’ve created, but that expertise has come at the expense of becoming experts in the things we really want.  It’s kept us from devoting our time, energy and focus to becoming experts in the “fields” of love, joy and fulfillment.  We know how to struggle to find love, but do we know how to ease into love?  Or flow into fulfillment?

The road to becoming a new kind of expert is not a mystery.  You become an expert in these things just like you become an expert in any field: you study it.  The biggest barrier to our education is the barrier between “being and experiencing these wonderful things” and then “living real life.”    “I’ll get to learning something about love, but right now I have to deal with reality.  I have bills to pay.”  Unfortunately, who you are in your “real life” is who you are.  Each moment of life you demonstrate your expertise.

So to begin, examine your life and ask questions like, “What does my life teach people?  What does my life say about what “fields” I’m an expert in?  Am I an expert in how great life can be?  Or does my life demonstrate an expertise in making life a struggle?”  Once you understand where you expertise lies, then you can choose.  “Do I want to continue to be that type of expert?” and if the answer is no, then it’s simply a matter of asking the question, “How do I begin today?  How do I begin today to be the type of expert, the type of person that I really want to be?”

Ask new questions and you will become a new type of expert.

There’s all this talk today about the Law of Attraction or the Secret.  One of the key points in this body of work is that you attract things into your life based on your level of “vibration.”   Basically, what this means is if you’re feeling good, meaning having feelings of joy, enthusiasm and aliveness, you are focused on and attracting what you want.  If you’re feeling bad, meaning having feelings of sadness, resistance or depression, you are focused on and attracting what you don’t want.  For me, the jury is still out on whether there is this universal law of attraction.  Fortunately though, I don’t think it matters because I think the idea of “feeling good” is a useful concept to explore in the realm of design.

My book A Life Worth Living looks at life from the perspective of design.  It’s unique in that it doesn’t teach you a set of techniques to design your life; instead, it teaches you to think like a designer so that you can begin to design anything in your life.  Feeling good clearly has many benefits associated with it. When you feel good, you’re more in flow with life.  You’re more creative when you feel good.  You’re more open to possibilities and less attached to outcomes.  You’re more accepting of yourself and others.  For those reasons alone, it’s a good thing to develop the practice of feeling good.

From a design perspective, feeling good is relevant because for the most part, it’s why you’re designing what you are designing in the first place.  Think about it: why do you want more money?  Why do you want the perfect spouse?  Why do you want to be able to travel the world?  Because in some way shape or form, you want life to feel better than it does today.  You want to be happier.  You want to be more alive, more engaged in the living of your life.  Yes, you can make more money in your life by struggling.  The cost to that thinking is that once you have the money, chances are you still don’t know how to feel good.

We live in this fantasy that one day when we reach a particular destination, we will magically become these better people.  Problem is that once we get to the destination, we quickly realize that we don’t know how to be better people because we didn’t spend our time educating ourselves.  We don’t know how to be happier.  We don’t know how to be more generous.  We don’t know how to be more caring toward others.  We know how to get the things that are supposed to make us feel these things, but we don’t know how to be those people we dream of being when we arrive at our destination.  And so we are left with in this experience that perhaps something is wrong with us or something is wrong with life rather than just seeing our failure for what it is – a gap in our education.

When we design, we design holistically.  We don’t just want the million in the bank; we have visions of how life will be and feel when we have the million in the bank.  When we plan a wedding, we are not just planning a list of activities.  We are designing an experience.  We are designing how we want to feel on that special day.  When we plan funerals, we are designing a solemn, sacred experience.  We are creating the space to say goodbye to someone we love.  We are designing an experience inside of which we can honor the person’s life.

How we feel is part of the equation, and yet, often times when we set out toward a goal, we set aside how we feel as irrelevant.  I’m not suggesting that how we feel should win out at the expense of building what it is we want to build.  I’m simply saying that it’s time we included it as part of the equation.  It’s time to expand our knowledge base to shift from only answering the question, “How do we build __________?” to answering questions like, “How do we built it while feeling good?” or “How do we build it generously?” or “How do we build it while be caring toward others?”  By answering these types of questions, we’ll not only be building the things we want in our lives, we’ll also be “building” ourselves to be the type of human beings that we dream of being, and that’s a creation worth investing in.

For each of us, whatever the overall level of satisfaction we experience in our lives, chances are there is room for growth.  Chances are you want more.  Chances are you want more joy in your work, more love in your relationships, chances are you have bigger dreams that you want to fulfill, and chances are there is a bigger difference that you want to make with your life.  Regardless of what you want in the future, today your life is in some current state.

Today, if you rate your life overall a 6 (on a scale of 1 to 10), then it’s a 6.  Most of us have been taught that to find happiness the game of life is to move our 6 to a 10.  In my experience, this is not the most efficient way to create more happiness in your life.  Why is that?  The answer is actually quite simple.  First, trying to take a 6 and make it a 10 puts off the joy until another day.  The old, “I’ll be happy when….”  You don’t have to cheat yourself out of the joy of creating your life.  You can enjoy the ride now.  The second reason it’s not the most efficient way to create more happiness is you’re trying to make your life into something it’s not.  A “6” is a “6”.  A “10” is a “10.”  Period.  You cannot change a 6 into a 10, anymore than you can change a car into a boat, or a dog into a cat.  All you can do is create a 10.

To end up with a life that’s a 6, you thought like a 6, you held the beliefs of a 6 and you took action consistent with the thinking of a 6.  Given who you’ve become to date, it couldn’t have turned out any other way.  Some of you will think this is bad news or use this as more evidence that something’s wrong with you.  In fact, just the opposite is true.  This is good news; it’s really good news.  Honestly, it’s great news!  It means that your life didn’t result because there’s something inherently wrong with you.  You life resulted from your thinking.  Period, end of story.   I don’t care what’s happened to you in your life, your life resulted from your thinking.  Until you can fully own that you are the responsible for all of it, every nook and cranny of your life, you won’t fully be able to create what you want.  You’ll just be stuck trying to make a 6 into a 10, and you know how that goes.

Taking ownership of your life, declaring that you’re the author of all of it is not an act of burden.  It’s an act of freedom.   Fully owning your life gives you tremendous power because until you do, you mind is just going to keep fighting with you.  It’s just going to keep telling you how wrong he is or she is or it is or you are.  When you take ownership of it all, your mind quiets.  It sort of stops and says, “Well, alright then … what’s next?”  And when that happens then you truly are free to move on from what you’ve created (a 6) and put your focus where it belongs … on creating a 10!