Elite Performance

Why Bother …

by Joseph Riggio · Sep 23, 2015

(… or, what is liminality, and what’s it got to do with you???)

It happens to everyone … the kind of trauma that causes a set-back, or downright stops you in your tracks.

The trauma doesn’t have to be big, although it might be, but even a small trauma can:

slow you down …
cause you to question yourself …
break your confidence …
lead you into a state of depression …
or … shut you down completely

My trauma knocked me right off the tracks … and at first I didn’t even know it!

In fact my trauma wasn’t a single trauma it was a series of three traumas that came one on the heels of the other in just a few short years … first a huge financial set back (in excess of $1,000,000 USD) … then major disruption and decline in my business to the point where we had virtually no new clients for almost a full two years … and finally, an overwhelming personal tragedy that virtually brought me to my knees.

What’s interesting is that virtually no one knew that these traumas had this affect on me. Looking in from the outside I seemed to just keep going, but the reality was that for a few years “my get up go, just gone and went.”

I knew on the inside that I just wasn’t particularly motivated to take the big steps forward I also knew that I was capable of, but couldn’t get myself to achieve.

This was the worst part … knowing that I was capable of doing so much more and not being able to get to it.

I was stuck.

I even knew what to do … but I just wasn’t doing it.

In my GETTING UNSTUCK program I talk about this as “Unconscious Limitations” … what you don’t know about yourself that holds you back from …

becoming yourself fully
doing what your capable of doing
realizing your full potential

… and …

getting the kind of results and outcomes that are possible when you’re operating at your best

This is how I was caught after one too many traumas to shake off quickly … as I was always used to doing in the past.

I was experiencing “liminality” …

Liminal Space

A “limen” is the smallest possible thing you are capable of detecting, or the threshold condition for an effect to begin.

Liminality refers to the “in-between” … when you are no longer in the world as you knew it to be, and you’re not yet beyond it to the next thing either … you remain “in-between.”

After a trauma, we’re almost always experiencing “liminality” and find ourselves stuck in “liminal space” … in a state of transition, not knowing where you are anymore nor where you going … at least not fully, or with any sense of deep comprehension.

What’s interesting to me is what causes us to experience trauma …

failing to succeed where we thought we would … or should
an off-hand, stray comment that leaves us reeling
personal loss like a failed relationship or a death
failing health, an accident or serious medical incident
financial, career or business set-back … or outright failure

When we look closely we might recognize that we experience sensitizing imprints on a regular basis. While we won’t experience everything bad that happens to us as a trauma, some of them are … and those are the ones that create set-backs in our lives that we may find difficult or impossible to get over on our own.

When this happens we’re experiencing “liminality.” … we feel lost, or even trapped, in a maze of our own making.

The Apathy of the “Lotophagi”

We may seem to have amnesia about our part in constructing the labyrinth we’re trapped in, usually because the construction happens in the blink of an eye … literally faster than we can think.

So when we realize stuck in liminal space, we seek the guide that will point the way out, or a map that shows us where we are, where the exits are located, and the paths open to us to get from here to there.

Sometimes we spend so much time in the labyrinth that we begin to become comfortable living within it, and it begins to feel like home to us. This is the mythical danger associated with the sophoric lotophagi, i.e.: the lotus eaters of the Homeric epic the Odyessy.

”I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of 9 days upon the sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships.

When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches.

Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.”

The great seduction is to fall asleep, like Odysseus’ men in the land of the lotus eaters, to our own predicament, and to fail to notice that we are in the maze. Then when we arise from our slumber, finding it as hard as Odysseus’ sailors to leave the place where we find ourselves. Yet desperately seeking to find a way back home.

Coming Back to “Home Base”

When I awoke from my own dazed condition, and found myself deep in liminality, I realized I had to shake off the desire to doze again … peaceful in my apathy. I knew I wanted more from life than to coast through, because I had seen some difficult days.

The question was how to revive myself to a fully awake state. I knew that the first few steps would be the most difficult of all … and yet these were also the most essential steps I could … and would … take.

I also knew to that to fully enliven my drive to rediscover myself I had to fight the urge to accept the obvious as evidence of truth … I had to dig beyond that to my core, to reawaken my essential self.

So I set up a regimen that associated a sense of recursive, iterative inquiry to linking intention to action. I think the fundamental ground of performance is linking connection to action.

1) Remembering to link intention to action became my first step out of the maze.

Because I couldn’t discover what I didn’t know and couldn’t see for myself I had to work with what I had access to, my perceptions, my decisions, my behaviors and the results I produced.

2) Noticing the sequence that connected my perceptions to the results I produced, through my decision and behaviors, became my second step.

Then I knew to improve my performance, i.e.: to improve the linkage between my intention and the action I took, would be to record and measure the value of each link in the chain. I had to create a system to measure the value of the steps I took in moving through the sequence of perception, decision-making, behavioral response and results.

3) Establishing and tracking the metrics of my process became the third step beyond the threshold of the liminal space that had trapped me.

Once I could track the movement of my process in real time using the metrics I had established I was able to begin thinking about how to improve the process. Using the data I was tracking and gathering I began altering the things I was doing seeking to identify the things that made a difference.

4) Building a feedback loop using the information I was uncovering, and refining my process by focusing on what worked and eliminating what didn’t, became the forth step to improving my performance.

Now I had the skeleton key to the final step in my perfomance improvement process … the path out of the labyrinth of liminal space … uncovering what I could not see for myself.

While I still couldn’t notice what I couldn’t see for myself, my process left a trail of evidence I could and did begin to track that pointed to the invisible. Although my unconscious limitations remainded beyond my ability to recognize, I could notice for the contexts where I found myself getting limited … this proved to be the key to unlock the gate that freed me.

Instead of trying to figure out what was going on that was unconscious for me, I began noticing where I was limited and what my behavioral responses were in those contexts … then I began changing my behaviors without worrying myself about why I had behaved as I had before.

5) The final step in finding my freedom and fully regaining myself was choosing to do what was not automatic or familiar … I began exploring the idea of becoming comfortable with uncertainty, even the chaotic … and choosing intentional and unfamiliar actions that were most likely to produce my outcomes, even when they were counter-intuitive.

Following these steps I began rebuilding my business and my life. It took a little while but I woke up completely and re-discovered myself again. In fact in many ways my life today is more completely aligned with who I most am more than ever before.

It feels like the first time I can honestly say I’ve truly come home to myself since I was a child. I’ve regained the surety of being myself in a way that is usually associated only with the innocence of youth.

Yet, what may be most interesting to me is that I feel like I’m more aware of the dichotomies of life than ever before … and, in my newfound innocence I find myself simply able to accept them as part and parcel of life and move on.

Escaping the Maze … Beyond the Labyrinth

Now I’ve begun refocusing the work I’m doing too. It’s the same process I’m working with, but the focus is on choosing to limit what I’m doing with it and for whom.

I’ve been moving toward working with people and organizations in liminal space for the last few years, and I’ve amped it up even more recently.

These are folks who are in transition themselves, or lost between transitions.
Maybe it’s someone who is moving between jobs, or coming out of corporate/organizational life and trying to discover the next thing for themself.
I’m finding that I’m attracted to folks who are deeply confused about where they are in their lives, while doing their damnest to remain where they are and doing what they do … and not so strangely they’re attacted to me and the work I’m doing too.

Usually this is about going beyond the discovery phase and onto how they relate to others … leaving behind some of the folks who are most familiar to them … and making new connections, or reconnecting, with people who have now become important in their lives in new and exciting ways.

Sometimes the work I do involves groups or teams of people. I love helping people learn how to go beyond competition to collaboration … and to develop the communication tools necessary to begin performing at an elite level.

The most complete expression of the work I’m doing these days, the MythoSelf Process Professional Training, though is actually teaching the process to people who want complete access to it in their lives for themselves and to share with others that are important to them. Those who get hooked even stick around to become skillful enough to become certified MythoSelf facilitators themselves.

FWIW I’ve never felt more complete or satisfied!

I tell you all this to let you know if you’re struggling with liminality yourself there’s a good chance with some persistence you could come out the other side even stronger and more fulfilled than ever.

The hardest part of the journey is always taking the first step as they say … yet, it could be as simple as waiting at the edge of the river for the ferryman, ready with coin in hand to be ferried across the threshold to the other side.

When you get there look me up …

Buona Fortuna & Abundaza,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
New Hope, PA

P.S. – I’m running another session of GETTING UNSTUCK, the live webinar series, starting on October 13th. If you’re interested in learning more stay tuned and I’ll get you the details … if you can’t wait drop me a line.

Mirror, Mirror …

by Joseph Riggio · Oct 25, 2012

We always see what we want to see, from inside who we think we are … until we don’t

I’ve been following the Lance Armstrong debacle since it began … in 2004. That’s when the sponsor of the Tour de France offered a $5 million dollar bonus to the winner, and immediately demanded that Lance Armstrong be charged with doping and forfeit the prize when he won the race. It’s a joke …

Not just the demand in 2004, but the entire fiasco of pursuing and charging Lance Armstrong with doping. Not because he didn’t do it … I don’t know for sure … and neither do you … but because it doesn’t matter!

Let me begin at the beginning for you … early morning today. I’m going to assume that you woke up, at some point went into your bathroom, or toilet, and looked into a mirror. Who looked back? Who did you see in the mirror? That’s the beginning … knowing who you are.

“I’m not afraid.” …

Of course this is ludicrous because almost no one knows who they are, not because they can’t …. because they won’t. This is the most terrifying thing you can possibly do, i.e.: confront the truth of who you are, experience the “real” you.

Think of Luke Skywalker and Yoda asking him if he was afraid to go into the tunnel to confront what was down there, and after Luke assures him he’s not telling him, “You will be … you will be” … that’s the reality of looking into the mirror and seeing who’s really looking back.

Don’t be afraid though, you’re unlikely to ever confront that reality. Society has organized it to make sure it’s so unlikely that the vast majority of people on the planet, we’re talking 99+% will never even consider it.

You’ve been conditioned to accept “reality” as society has framed it for you, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Despite that fact that you are confronted daily by the insanity that the consensus reality you live in presents to you … war, famine, genocide, environmental decimation … the list could on, but that should suffice for my example … you continue to believe that what you’ve been told is “how it is” … and you go on believing

“Listen to your parents … be a good boy or girl … get a good education … listen to your teachers … be a good student … graduate from a good school … get a good job …be a good worker … find a good person … be a good partner … have a family … raise your family … be a good parent … take good care of your family and yourself … be a good wage earner … put money away for the future … be a good citizen … pay your taxes … be good … be good … fit in … fit in … fit in.

From “State of Perfection, Your Hidden Code to Unleashing Personal Mastery” by Joseph Riggio, I.M. Press 2011

I’ve been on about this idea for years, i.e.: you are conditioned to “see” the world through a set of beliefs that have nothing to do with what’s real. The beliefs you have are just that, i.e.: beliefs, NOT a representation of what’s real.

The beliefs you hold for the most part were inculcated into you before you ever began doing anything like “thinking for yourself” … and by the time you could “think for yourself” … it was too late.

Instead of thinking you simply repeat the patterned responses installed into you by others … first at home – parents, siblings, family … and then more at school – teachers, administrators, coaches, friends … and that continued with your “normal socializing” – news programming, conversational dialogue … and deepened when you entered the working world and were told by employers and coworkers how things worked … and you believed. You had no choice.

From your point of view the world as it was represented to you was/is more “real” than any evidence your senses present to you. For instance many of you “believe you have political views that are your own” … WHAT A F*$KING JOKE!!!

If you believe you are a Democrat, Republican, Liberatarian, Social Christian … whatever … you are just another puppet in the system, and you don’t even know the puppet master pulling the strings … BUT YOU BELIEVE DAMN IT … YOU BELIEVE!

“This time we’re going to see some real change!”
“This time my guy/gal is going to change things.”
“This time we’re going to take back government and restore … equality, peace, fairness … whatever …. to the people!”

You’re going to pull the levers you’ve been trained and inculcated to believe you should. You’ll do this because you think you have an opinion, and that your guy/gal represents what you believe.

This time it’s going to be differnt … right? BULLSHIT!!! This time it’s going to be just the same … only more so. Until you wake up it’s always going to be someone else pulling the strings, and you’ll dutifully believe, because it’s all you know … despite that niggling sensation that something else is going on.

**The F*$KING Joke Is On Us …**

I don’t know if Lance Armstrong doped, but I know he’s the scapegoat for the system, for the society this time around. Hell, somebody’s got to take the rap … somebody’s got to be held accountable right?

There you are in your comfortable chair reading this thinking, “Well he’s a cheater, he doesn’t deserve that fame, money, praise!” Well here’s what I say to anyone who’s thinking that, “You self-righteous prick!” You’ll cheat on your taxes, maybe cheat on your wife or husband, take a little “extra time” off of work now and then, surf the Internet on company time (heck, maybe your surfing right now) … and you have the audacity to get all high and mighty with Lance???

Well as your throwing stones from the porch of your glass house let me share one more thing with you.

We live in an age which demands that we destroy our heroes.

And, like just about everything else that’s going on we’re doing it “legally” … letting the lawyers, judges and courts replace our sense of personal ethics and morality

The general rule is that if it’s not illegal it’s not wrong … you can do what you want as long as you aren’t breaking the law or getting caught. AND … if you happen to be wealthy enough or connected enough, nothing is against the law or wrong … you’ll walk. There are a thousand and one examples of this, if you’re really interested you don’t need to look too far, but start with the bankers … try a search for Jon Corrizine, former NJ Governor and before that Goldman Sacks guy.

In the meantime let’s get back to Lance Armstrong. He’s guilty as charged right? A doper, a cheat … and he deserves all that’s coming to him, right???

Well here’s a bit more from the record of the sport of cycling …

“His ultimate legacy most likely is out of our hands. Fans who may not yet be alive will decide who he was. To us, today, Eddy Merckx is the greatest cyclist who ever lived, not a fraud who tested positive for a stimulant while leading the 1969 Giro d’Italia and had his 1973 Giro di Lombardia win stripped for the same. Joop Zoetemelk is the hardman who started and finished 16 Tours—a record—and won one. He’s not a reprobate who was caught doping at the 1979 Tour, received a paltry penalty of a 10-minute time addition, and maintained his second-place podium spot. Jacques Anquetil is the five-time Tour winner who in 1961 took the yellow jersey on Stage 1 and wore it all the way to Paris, not a boastful cheater who said, during a French television interview, “Leave me in peace—everybody takes dope.” And Fausto Coppi is il campionissimo, the champion of champions, not an admitted doper who said on Italian television that he only took drugs when necessary—”which is nearly always.”

We live in a different age, one that may not allow the forgiveness of Lance Armstrong, that may hold him to be the creator rather than the product of the era he reigned over. We might even judge this champion’s cheating and lying too vile to permit the remembrance of the part of him that, even now, convinced that he doped to win the Tour, I can’t stop being a fan of: the plain fact that he was, as even his bitter enemy Floyd Landis told me when we spoke last year, “a badass on a bike.”

Excerpt from: “Lance Armstrong’s Endgame” Bill Strickland, Bicycling Magazine

Like I said, “We live in an age which demands we destroy our heroes.”

We can’t allow anyone to rise above the mediocrity that we’ve been trained to become a part of ourselves. It won’t work if some folks are allowed to be “better than others” … even if by dint of hard, relentless work and talent. The corporate hegemony won’t stand for it … if you haven’t seen it yet watch, “Rollerball” … the original with James Caan and John Houseman, I was sixteen when I first saw it, and I got “IT.”

Well, I’m tired of looking the other way.

Lance Armstrong, was a “badass on a bicycle” … he’s still one of my “heroes” … and that’s that … THE END.

Joseph Riggio, Princeton

It’s Almost That Time Again … MythoMania 2012

28 – 30 November, Wednesday – Friday
10 AM – 5:30 PM Each Day

This is your opportunity to experience some of the unique MythoSelf Process work, engage with MythoSelf trainers and facilitators, hear about some of the latest developments in the MythoSphere from Joseph Riggio, Ph.D., Architect & Designer of the MythoSelf Process and Soma-Semantics … as well as others who are busy applying and developing the MythoSelf Process model

… AND it’s all ALMOST totally FREE!

Full Details Here: MythoMania 2012

The Folly of Education

by Joseph Riggio · May 19, 2012

… begins when you leave behind your will to pursue your personal fascination.

The cost ~ only your Bliss!

Beginning with books

I still remember some of the books I read before I was ten years old …

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary
The Voyage of the “Beagle” by Charles Darwin and Millicent E. Selsam

and of course … the Boy Scout Handbook, as well as many others.

I remember reading for as long as I can remember. Of all the things my parents did for their children filling the house with books and a love of reading was among their greatest gifts to us.

While we weren’t particularly wealthy or even well off, we were comfortable. My dad was a steadily employed blue collar, middle class worker … a carpenter by trade. He worked for a division of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and on occasion did some extra work on weekends to supplement his income as well. But I can’t remember ever being told I couldn’t have a book I wanted.

In addition to the books in our home my mother was a fan of encyclopedias, and I remember the encyclopedia salesman coming to our house one day and selling my family a set of World Book Encyclopedias. This set became a staple of my research for many school projects and papers throughout my elementary school years. The set also continued to grow with each edition of the Year Books. Over the years my mother also added specialty encyclopedias on space exploration, animals, geography and even a set of The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau encyclopedia. So information overload isn’t something new to me by any means.

Even with all the books and encyclopedias we had in the house I was a frequent library rat, spending hours perusing the shelves of books there. I was really fortunate to attend a school from Kindergarten to 8th grade that had a library annex housed at the school. We had regular library classes all through my school years, where we learned how to use the lib ray, including the card catalog (only some of you who are old enough will actually remember using card catalogs I’m betting … or maybe even a library for that matter!). We also learned how to do research, find and request books that weren’t available on the shelves of the small library at our school, and we had the opportunity to check out books during these classes as well.

By about the fifth grade I had read every book in the children’s section I was interested in and got special dispensation to move into the adult stacks, with the caveat that I couldn’t check out any books with “adult” themes … but the rest of the library was now available to me. The first thing I remember reading was a book by Shunryu Suzuki, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” because I was interested in Karate and Kung Fu … remember this was around the time of Bruce Lee and the Green Hornet. Just after that came “Kung Fu” with David Carradine too that started airing when I was 13. That was the perfect age to be completely entranced by Kwai Chang Caine … and I was as hooked on martial arts as any other red blooded American boy could be at that time.

So here I was about to enter high school with books leading the way …

I went to a semi-elite catholic college preparatory high school and started what was then still a classical college prep curriculum … four years of history, math, science, foreign language, classical studies (including religion and philosophy), social studies and history, english literature and language studies … you get the idea I’m sure. In high school every year we had a book sale and in my Freshman year I picked up a copy of a book by W.D. Norwood called, “The Judoka” … it proved to be a life shaping book for me … and I’ve read it a dozen time since then.

However, what I also found out was that I could read books that were just above my punching level and still make sense of them. It was during those years, impelled by my classical studies teacher that I read Homer and Virgil, and then went onto read other classics on my own like Dante’s trilogy. I also became fascinated with science during that time and began reading deeply there as well … and I’d been reading as much philosophy as I could get my hands on since I first read Suzuki, both Oriental and Western philosophy. By the time I graduated high school I had a substantial canon of great works under my belt, as well as some pretty substantial science and literature. By the end of my high school career I was also beginning to read and study mathematics and logic on my own as well.

One of the downsides of all this reading was that college classes were utterly boring to me for the most part, and I skipped far more than I attended. The end result of that was a doomed college career that ended pretty much before it started. The upside was I had much more time to read what interested me … a pursuit I engaged in vigorously, some might even say with abandon.

The first twenty years … and the following thirty …

Well … if I were to sum up the first twenty years of my intellectual journey I’d have to say it was all about consumption. I was taught and learned to be a consumer of information (a practice that I continue, sometimes feverishly, through today). That all came to a screeching halt for me as I attempted to “do” college. The insistence that I spend another four plus years consuming more information was beyond me. I had mega dosed on information and needed to move beyond inputing to outputting, but the challenge was no one had taught me how to do that other than to simply regurgitate what I’d consumed cramming for tests, like an information bulimic.

What I wanted … nay, needed … was a means to digest the information, assimilate it thoroughly and create something anew. So upon leaving the grand institution of higher education I began a different journey outside of those hallowed halls. I began to pursue the integration and innovation of knowledge, far better for my psyche than the mere accumulation thereof. I learned many lessons along the way … one being that it’s a harder task to leave behind the information you’ve consumed to create something new from it, than it is to repeat it upon command like a favorite pupil of some tenured professor … or maybe better put the lapdog of the same.

I also learned that there’s a price to be paid for NOT SPEWING FORTH ACCUMULATED INFORMATION UPON COMMAND IN FAVOR OF CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO OF THE INFORMATION KEEPERS. Specifically, I learned that the ability to document that you’ve attended the requisite classes, passed the requisite tests and bear the imprimatur of the institution where you paid your dues is more significant that possessing the knowledge or skills declared by such imprimatur.

For the last thirty years I’ve continued to seek my own way, deepen my knowledge and skills, integrate and innovate upon the information I’ve consumed … and pay the price of not prostrating myself before the alter of higher education. In these past thirty years I moved beyond being a mere consumer of information to a developer, designer and architect of information … making output more critical in my learning strategy than input. I even committed myself to earning a doctorate and writing the requisite dissertation to document the research I completed along the way.

While the price has been high, flaunting my lack of pandering to the popular notion of education as documented by the receipt of parchment alone … the payoff has been equally high.

Keeping the Status Quo

If the achievement of pandering to the social and political pressure to document ones knowledge, skills and expertise by attaining certification from an “accredited” institution is possessing the paperwork to prove it, the achievement of not pandering to the professorial elite is possessing the resiliency to pursue what cannot be documented by others because you choose to blaze a trail not yet broken.

Make no mistake about it by the way, the pressure to attain the documentation of institutional certification is well regulated and overseen by the political establishment, virtually guaranteeing that only those submitting to the conformity of consensus will ever be allowed to practice their chosen arts. The exceptions to this rule are extraordinary if you do the math. The most concrete examples are the statistics following the success of those who possess sheepskin versus those who do not … the evidence is overwhelming that if you submit to the mind numbing experience of the classroom you will be marginally better off than your peers.

I put forth that the reason for this prejudice against those who are self taught and self made is both social and political.

Beware the professionals! First there is the protectionism of the tribe of the defeated. Those who have endured the hazing of higher education do not want the doors to their private clubhouse swung wide open to the riffraff who would seek to join them if they didn’t erect the barriers of entry. They live in abject terror of having their sacred protected territory taken from them by those who merely possess extraordinary capability, skill and expertise, but lack the proper documentation. In an every widening gyre they seek to sweep to themselves a greater share of the pie they perceive to be their unique purvey to possess.

Next, you have the money these professionals gain by protecting their turf so studiously that is then poured into the political arena, e.g.: AAJ, the American Associate for Justice (formerly the Association of Trail Lawyers of America). This tribe, the AAJ, has over fifty thousand members who contribute over five million dollars a year to political campaigns in the U.S. individually, in PACs and as soft money. In addition they spend an additional 3+ million dollars lobbying politicians each year to further their professional ambitions and protections. This kind of financial juggernaut creates a political wall that’s virtually impossible to circumvent. By example while campaigning for President, Barack Obama made clear that the favored tort legislation of the AAJ would not even be a topic of discussion if he were to be elected. As a result trial attorneys remain one of the most well compensated professions in the United States, with many of the tribe becoming deca and centi millionaires. The cost to the average American, untold ..

In the United States of America, like in so many of the first world countries around the globe, the politicians are in the pockets of the wealthiest members of the societies they supposedly represent … and as a courtesy to their patrons they keep the gates of opportunity open enough to create the illusion of entry, but closed beyond that to all but the privileged few. One of the “tricks” of this crowd is to promote the c0-illusion of the “equality of education” both in terms of access to education and the myth that an education creates equality economically and socially … nothing could be further from the truth. Education creates compliance first and foremost. While this conclusion is not something I cooked up on my own, I agree with it wholeheartedly.

It takes a rare and unique individual to overcome the indoctrination of education, or to fail to be indoctrinated by education in the first place … and those who escape this fate will pay a price, like Ulysses paid for his hubris against the gods … forced sometimes for decades before they can claim a place to rest their weary bones.

The Way Out …

Despite what may so far appear to be a demoralizing tale of education there is both an upside and a way out. First the upside …

Those early years of education are actually quite crucial to become a self-directed learner (the way out by the way …). The trick is not getting caught by the system while you’re learning the essentials. Yes, you know what they are ...the three Rs, reading, writing and (a)’rithmetic. However I’d add in three more, the three Ms … movement … music … and making, in school these three become physical education, dance and sports … music … and fine and practical arts.

If you can gain the skills without losing your soul you can find the egress from education (the key is escaping formal education … not self-education, which is the key to succeeding beyond the limits the system inscribes). The treasure to be mined with these skills in found in both books (more on that in a moment) … and now via the world wide web (or the Internet if you prefer), but there’s a caveat … you must learn to “punch above your weight”

Punching above one’s weight: Meaning: Competing against someone who you are no match for. Origin: The different classes of contestants in boxing matches are distinguish by the weight of the competing boxers – heavyweight, middleweight, lightweight, flyweight etc. The sport is regulated so that only boxers of the same weight fight each other. Someone from a lighter weight wouldn’t be expected to have much chance if ‘punching above his weight’ against a heavier fighter. The term is often used figuratively in situations where someone finds themselves competing outside their usual class; for example, the Irish comedian Graham Norton described that, since becoming well-known, he was able to attract better-looking partners than previously and that he was ‘punching above my weight’ when it comes to relationships. – http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/290900.html

When it comes to self-education punching above your weight means learning to read and benefit from books and material you have no right to expect to understand. Whilst anyone can learn to do this it requires a commitment and dedication to achieve.

Recently I ran a program in California where the group asked me to teach them how to read much faster (up to three times faster in about two hours, and up to 4000 words a minute after some diligent training). However, reading faster is not the same as reading better … and it’s reading better that makes a bigger difference!

To read better you have to learn how to extract the information you encounter … AND you have to learn how to interpret the information so you can apply it yourself.

One of the keys to reading better is learning to contextualize the information. This means learning about the author of the information. learning about the audience the author intended the information for, learning abut the purpose the information was intended to serve … and learning about both the sources and the subsequent extensions of the information authored. When you know how information was developed and aimed you’ll be better able to incorporate it for yourself.

I want to share with you a seven step “Secret Code” about how to read a book and learn the most you can from it that I’ve been using for years …

You must leave your learning about learning behind …

In order to become and succeed as a self-directed learner and independent scholar you must stop trying to impress the teacher. This is not about being about to regurgitate what you read … the standard learning protocols of memorizing the dates, names and places is irrelevant. Instead of consuming and absorbing facts and figures, focus on digesting and assimilating concepts. Put your attention on mining for ideas and finding the critical notions the author is building. The key question to ask yourself at this point is, “How is this information relevant?”
Start with the knowledge you’re seeking to gain …

Read everything you can about the book in the book before you read the book. Read the table of contents (yes, “read” the table of contents – familiarize yourself with the chapter headings and the way the author has sequenced the material in the book before you begin reading it), read the forward and preface if they exist (these two elements of a book will outline what someone familiar with the author and their work think about what the author has written, and what the author or maybe an editor thinks about the material in the book – this will put you into the right contextual frame before you even begin accessing the content of the book), read the back cover and the inside flaps if they have copy (this is the place the author and publisher create what they think will draw in readers and what they think the book is mostly about on a practical level), read the author’s bio (this is essential contextual material to further set the frame for reading the book), and make sure to read the epilogue if there is one (this is a real trick to getting the essence of the book out of it … because you know where the book is heading before you read it, as you read it more of it will make sense to you along the way). By the time you get done doing this preliminary reading you’ll feel like the book your about to read is an old friend.
Let others lead the way …

Before you dive into the book contents proper go and read all the reviews you can get your hands on (or that you can stand if there are just too many). You want to get a sense of what others think about the book and what it has to offer to set the proper context for you to extract the most from the book you’re about to read. Reviews … especially those with spoilers, lists and those pros and cons outlines that have become so popular in some places … are hugely helpful in gaining a sense of the material you’re about to delve into yourself. If you’re lucky you’ll come across some reviews that will compare the book you’re about to read with others in it’s genre and/or others by the same author … this will place the book in deep context for you. If you are up to it take this one step further and do an online search for the book and the author and see what you can find out about them from whatever sources show up, e.g.: Wikipedia. When you read reviews and such compare them to one another to see where the commonalities and contrasts are between the comments. Armed in this way you’ll free up enormous amounts of cognitive energy worrying about “getting it” that will become available to you to decide what you agree and disagree with yourself, parsing out the meaning from your own point of view and most significantly determining if you want to make the investment to finish it once you’ve begun it (or possibly even before that …).
Make it your own …

In my opinion this may be the most important step of them all. WHILE YOU’RE READING A BOOK MARK IT UP! Literally put your notes about the book in the book next to the information you’ve read that inspired your own thinking. Keeping your books pristine is perfect if you’re a lending library, but as a private owner make the books you own your own … MARK THEM UP!!! If you come across something you want to get back to again fold the corner of the page … I love my dogeared books. If you see something worth remembering highlight it. If you have a way of making sense of something the author writes other than via their words feel free to write your own words next to theirs. If you are reminded of something from somewhere else put it in the margin as a reference to what you’ve just read. You’ll really feel like you own the book when you’ve contributed a substantial amount of writing to the author’s in the margins.

NOTE: FWIW I love e-book readers for this reason, e.g.: Kindle, Nook, Kobo … because they let me mark up by books with ease. I highlight, I add notes … I can source external information while I’m reading via hyperlinks and built in tools like dictionaries hearing the pronunciation of words that might be unfamiliar to me. I can even access my highlights and notes separate from the book itself with some readers, e.g.: Kindle, and if I want to print them out as a study file, I may even have the facility to share my highlights and notes with others, or engage in discussions around the book in social forums supported by the e-book technology, e.g.: Kobo VOX social reading technology.
“Do Over!”

This one is simple and easy … but you have to make the commitment to do it. Once you’ve read the book AND MARKED IT UP go back and first re-read your highlights and notes. Then add to them as you see fit. As you’re doing that copy your notes out to a suitable medium, e.g.: index cards, a digital notebook (Evernote is my current favorite for this) … whatever, as long as you can sort the information into categories (or tag it in a digital medium to access via search later on). You want to be able to re-access your information at a moments notice later on without re-reading the entire book. If you do this diligently you’ll find that in a short period of time you’ll have a true scholars cabinet of notes you can use for any number of purposes, e.g.: research, writing, preparing for a speech … refreshing your memory while your reading another book … winning arguments … . Finally, after about three weeks of letting the book sit, re-read it quickly again, even just scanning it and allowing yourself the freedom to only read word for word those sections that catch your attention. After you do this the contents of the book will be yours to keep.
Extending the journey …

Here’s where it begins to get really interesting …

After you finish the book that was “above your punching weight” when you began you’ll be ready to read another book or two of the same, or even a higher level, within that category. This is a “trick” that every serious independent learner I know uses. They literally use the first book in a category to prepare themselves for further reading, research and study. Depending on their intention, e.g.: familiarity with a topic or mastery of the topic, they take the journey as far as they need/want to … but I don’t know anyone, including yours truly, who stops at the first book and leaves it there if they care about the topic at all. Most independent scholars I know and virtually every expert I can think of, buy many, many books within a topical area of interest, often all at the same time, amassing a large collection of books that will give them a depth of knowledge almost equal to the authors who wrote the books they’re reading. However, I’ll keep it simple … make a commitment to read at least one additional book the author recommends or uses as a primary source (they will share this information in their bibliography, and sometimes in the text as well).
OUTPUT!!!

Okay, now you’ve done the requisite homework and you’re ready to step beyond the learning phase to the action phase. Find some way to apply the material from the books you read as soon as possible after you read them. If you can use the material personally or professionally do that, if you can join in a conversation or dialogue about the material do that, if you can write about the book and what you got from it do that (you can always write a review in one of the online bookstores or review sites), if you want write a blog post about the book and it’s contents.Regardless of how you take the words from the page and make them real find a way … do something applied with the contents beyond “having read the book” and you’ll be building one of the most powerful habits you can possibly have as an independent learner and scholar. The purpose of all this work you’ve put in is for you to have a better life … the real magic is becoming truly free of the habituated idea that you have to learn from teachers or experts … and making the information practical, pragmatic and/or applicable in your life will make it all worthwhile.

When you’ve taken your first book and applied these seven steps of the “Secret Code” I’ve outlined above you’ll never be outclassed or out punched when it comes to learning again …

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.

Princeton, New Jersey

Your Life Story – Coming Full Circle

by Joseph Riggio · Mar 28, 2012

Your Life Story and Self-Leadership … Uncovering the Path to the Results and Outcomes You Really Want

I’ve been at something for the last twenty five years or so that I think is wonderful … a model that’s literally life changing.

For twenty of those twenty five years I’ve been engaged in spreading the word formally in terms of my professional pursuits and passions. Yet I’ve remain troubled by how challenging it has been for people to catch the essential, profound value in their Life Story without struggling through trying to understand it first. For quite some time it’s been clear to me what the challenge has been, but that hadn’t necessarily made it any clearer regarding what to do about it.

But, I’ve begun to get it – I think …

Let me jump ahead for a moment, and then I’ll step back to basics.

The advantage of the model is that once you have internalized it and own it everything in your life becomes easier, if not easy.

Your relationships become more alive; i.e.: instead of dealing with a sense of distance and aloneness that can be present in even the most intimate relationships there is a continual sense of being connected, instead of dealing with conflict there is a growing sense of harmony and good will, instead of wondering where the initial spark went in your relationships there is a renewed kindling of the energy that sustains relationships and keeps them sparkling.
You pursue your passions and live your purpose; you naturally uncover what fascinates you and pulls you forward into your own life, rather than chasing some external definition of success you begin building momentum towards experiencing intense satisfaction, you begin to measure success by your contributions and the rewards associated with creating rather than consuming
You experience the wealth of pervasive well being; you begin to express a renewed sense of self esteem, you gain confidence in yourself and your ability to act, you release the limitations that hold you back, you know without question what it is to act in your own self interest in a way that doesn’t impose your wants and needs on others, you live every day to the fullest, you are happy without needing a reason to be or doing anything about it
Your performances become extraordinary; you make high-quality decisions without hesitation or doubt, you take action immediately in the direction where you intend to produce results, you are able to evaluate the results you are getting and reset without attachment to limiting beliefs or dogma, you gain a clarity that makes situations and interactions transparent to you, it becomes obvious to you what to be doing next without worry or concern about what you don’t know or what will happen beyond what to be doing in this moment

When most people read this list of bullet points they typically think that it sounds too good to be true … then they think, “What if my life could really be that way?”

What I can tell you is that I began learning about living within and from this model formally in the late 1980s. Before then I’d read many books about various spiritual and philosophic traditions that suggested a life that included the kinds of things I’ve written about above, but failed to experience any of it fully. However, after becoming immersed in the essence of the model I’m referring to as I apprenticed with my mentor Roye Fraser it become evident what I’d missed and what was missing from all the various studying I had done in the past.

Of course the answer was simple, it always is …

But simple isn’t necessarily easy!

Now I’m not going to bore you with twenty five years of learning that it took me to get to the point I’m at in my life today. I can sum up where I am in my life today by offering you this …

My life today IS simple … and living it IS easy, because I got “IT” … “the one trick.”

In the interest of full disclosure it took me a good seven years to get “IT” – the one trick I called out above. Yes – it was a long time, but the journey was enticing, engaging and exciting all the way. There were moments of pure wonder and joy along the way. There were challenges as well, but with a sense that they were just steps on the path. What I started out looking for and thinking I would be pursuing and gaining turned out to be utterly wrong. What I found turned out to be unexpected and delightful … and as I approached the end of that phase on my journey I realized that I’d gained mastery of a body of knowledge and skills, and just as importantly I’d realized more than I’d hoped for regarding the life I found myself living.

Then I went from maintaining my primary focus on being an apprentice to stepping beyond learning to living the life of a journeyman.

In this new phase of my life as a journeyman an entirely new set of challenges confronted me …

Again, in the interest of respecting your time I won’t go into details. Where I found myself most limited was in conveying the essential life changing concept that I had internalized and was operating from in an ongoing way easily to others. I didn’t want others to struggle for seven years to get “IT.” This became my new question, i.e.: how to convey this simple idea and make it easy for others to *incorporate.

(Incorporate Incor”po*rate, a. [L. incorporatus, p. p. of incorporare to incorporate; pref. in- in + corporare to make into a body. See Corporate.] Corporate; incorporated; made one body, or united in one body; associated; mixed together; combined; embodied. [1913 Webster])

Facing the Dilemma

It took me many years to figure out what the dilemma was … i.e.: making something that was essentially simple easy. The dilemma was that I had been taught it technically so that I could eventually master the form and replicate it with others.

Facilitating the model is NOT the same thing as living the model! Wow, what a concept!!!

While my knowledge and skills were significant after a formal seven year apprenticeship at the knee of the master … the ability to translate what I now knew and could do was based in a technical model, Oy! … that made it so much more complex than necessary. So I went back to the drawing board (architect speak, old habits die hard as they say …).

For the next ten years I was consistently refining and revising the way I worked with and presented the essential model, which by now I had named the MythoSelf Process. During this decade of refinement I realized a few things and had to build an integrated set of tools for the work I was now doing with clients, a toolset I called Soma-Semantics, referring to the singularity of the body-mind experience and the way that’s represented. The body is experienced and expressed somatically, and the mind is experienced and expressed semantically. Anyone wanting to do the work I was now doing would have to master the knowledge and skills to read the signals and interact effectively at both the somatic and semantic levels. This part of what I do had to remain technical, but to get the outcome I intended … to make the simple, easy … all the rest need to become as non-technical as possible.

The question that remained was, “How?” … how do I make the simple, easy?

I needed a simple structure that was completely non-technical if possible … and then I found it right there under my nose! For years I had been calling the work I was doing the MythoSelf Process, in part based on the influence of Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology. I understood the nature of mythological form, and the way we are neurologically organized to respond to it. I got how we encapsulate our experience into autobiographical narratives that become for us our Life Story, the all and everything we believe to be what is, how things are and reality itself. Our stories are more real to us than the sensory evidence we experience … dang it, there it was right in front of me!!!

Now I had it … a way to make the simple easy! K.I.S.S.

Keep it simple stories! That was the key … it was already all there laid out in the work I was already doing for the past twenty years! The stories are the key, I already knew that. Specifically, the stories that people tell themselves and others are for them the reality they live – change your story and you change your life. What remained was to find the way to move someone from the story they were currently living from to a new and more powerful story … the essential Life Story that was theirs and theirs alone.

The essence of what I’d learned from Roye, in addition to a massive set of powerful changework skills, was how to help someone shift from what he called “the inhibitory state” to “the excitatory state.” One of his ways of referring to the excitatory state was as the Ready State, a state from which anything is possible and you are ready to act. Using the model and skills I’d learned working with Roye that became easy, i.e.: getting someone to the Ready State. When they were working with me it was even easy for them as well. The challenges was stabilizing it over time.

When someone experiences the Ready State they are blown away … literally in that moment their life changes completely. There is no sense of limitation or inhibition. There are no problems. Opportunities seem abundant and the way forward becomes clear. A sense of pervasive well being radiates through you and from you. Everything and anything seems possible from the Ready State, and yet there is no sense of stress or urgency surrounding what needs to be done, or what you want to be doing.

Over time I began referring to the pattern that people operated from when they had accessed and were living from the Ready State as their Success Blueprint. This resonated for many people and it made what could be a complex idea simpler and more accessible. That was a start …

The challenge that still remained however was that it took people days, weeks, months or even years to get “IT” sometimes. There are so many potential inhibitions to address if you think you are supposed to be living from some kind of extraordinary, superhuman state … whether you call it the Ready State, or Being At Your Best (as some folks still inaccurately like to refer to this state of being) … enlightened or whatever. Believing that there’s anything you need to change about who you are so that you can live a life worth living, and accomplish the things you desire, isn’t only foolish it’s foolhardy.

Thinking you first need to become someone other than who you are right now, right here in this moment without changing a thing about yourself is foolhardy because A) it cannot get you what you want (you can’t have to be someone else before you begin because using that logic you can never begin), and B) the cost is just too damn high (you will spend years chastising yourself for what you are not, for what you haven’t accomplished, for all your faults … and then you’ll blame others for being in collusion with you in your faults, eventually you’ll even pay the price of ill-health and emotional distress or complete breakdown).

The evidence of the cost of holding a negative self image has been mounting for years. The sources of perennial wisdom have touted it for millenia, and now medical science is catching up and confirming the high cost on our physical well-being. As we continue to unfold how human neuropsychology works we are finding out that a negative self image literally inhibits us from functioning fully.

It is essential to shift our perceptions, beginning with our self image, if we intend to achieve anything like the levels of health, well-being and elite performance we’re capable of … and the fundamental key to making this shift is held in our Life Story.

Now we’re getting somewhere!

How To Shift Your Life Story

This part of this posting could be a book unto itself … but I’ll skip over all the parts about how you get your Life Story, how it’s initially imposed upon you, how you compromise the essential and unique story that is your own, how you get stuck in believing your less and less capable than you are, how you begin pursing a path that has nothing to do with who you are, how you learn to measure yourself by arbitrary and external markers of success. (If you want to read all about that, and the way out from under it too, get my new book is coming out next month … “The State of Perfection: Your Hidden Code to Unleashing Personal Mastery”)

I’ll jump right to what I found out when I resolved the dilemma of making the simple, easy.

There are really two parts to this, i.e.: making the simple, easy.

The first part has to do with how to do it. I’ve already begun to make it clear that the key is in the stories we tell that are collectively our Life Story. Your Life Story is the wholeform gestalt worldview you possess, i.e.: how you see yourself and the world, including people you interact with … what all that means to you.

You are limited in what you perceive by your Life Story, and from what gets through you create meaning.
The meaning you create … about yourself, about the world, about others … determines what you will do, i.e.: your behaviors that form your acts.
These acts are what create the results and outcomes you produce in the world, and these become the life you live.
Your experience of the life you live, i.e.: the results and outcomes you produce by your acts, starts the cycle all over again feeding your perception and sustaining your Life Story.

The recursive loop that follows from your Life Story is a powerful mechanism keeping you in the life you are living. If you want to have different experiences in any part of your life, or your life overall you have to begin with your Life Story.

The second part has to do with the primary distinction I learned working with Roye, i.e.: the shift from the inhibitory bias to the excitatory bias. This distinction is remarkably precise, but for most people confusing or even meaningless. Before someone can make meaning of what I mean when I say, “Shifting from the inhibitory bias to the excitatory bias.” they need to be educated in the terminology I’m using.

Technical terminology, or jargon, makes something that’s essentially simple and potentially easy, unnecessarily challenging.

The way out of that conundrum of jargon is finding the way to express the essential concept in common terms. That was the breakthrough I needed!

Let me start again with the essential concept of shift the Life Story from an inhibitory bias to an excitatory bias. Instead of getting lost in what that means or might mean think of it this way …

You can either be in an open frame of mind or a closed frame of mind.

In an open frame of mind you are seeking information and withholding judgement until you have all the evidence you need to reach a reasonable and useful conclusion about what to be doing, if anything needs to be done at all. This applies to information about people, places, things, activities and even information itself. Rather than working from pre-existing frameworks and old evidence to generate meaning in the moment, you remain open to what is actually happening and create meaning on a situation by situation basis, allowing yourself to update the story you are acting on in real time.

This is a really powerful way to move through the world. Imagine how different your relationships would be if you literally dropped all your preconceptions and began tracking for the evidence about who someone is and how they are being in real time. For instance, how would your relationships be different if you didn’t blame others, hold them responsible for your experience, or place a burden of your expectations on them? This doesn’t mean that you don’t hold people accountable for their actions, you do … and at a level that’s probably higher than you ever have before. What it does mean is that you don’t burden them with the past and you allow them to move forward with you. It also gives you the personal freedom to exit from relationships or interactions that don’t work for you without needing to blame others or have explanations beyond what’s not working, i.e.: you don’t need for them to be bad so you can be good.

Now you can extend the idea of operating with an open frame of mind to any other consideration as well. In the work I do with business and organizational clients teaching them to operate with this kind of clear thinking provokes creativity and a remarkable focus on getting results. There is no wasted energy on the ordinary “people problems” that often interfere with getting the outcomes everyone claims to want. Entire groups or people begin to self-organize to create extraordinary outcomes. And you can begin to play with where else and how else operating with an open frame of mind would show up in your life.

The excitatory bias is a reference to the underlying neurological state that someone has when they are in an open frame of mind, but its not necessary to understand the neurology to live from this powerful position yourself. What is important is learning to recognize how to lead yourself to an open frame of mind when and where you need and want to get results and outcomes that are meaningful for you. This has become the basis of the work I do and the way I now do it with clients, individually … in groups … and in organizations.

What shifted most significantly from the way I was working ten years ago to today has been the level of non-technical, conversational process I now use. What I’ve found has been that there’s no need whatsoever for the process to be technical in any way whatsoever … unless I’m engaged in teaching others to facilitate the process, and even that has become far less technical in the way I approach it today.

Literally the best way is the most conversational way in my opinion. I’m finding that the old ways, work the best. Like sitting around the fire, sharing stories, after a long day with family and friends … the process I now work from allows my clients to experience the shift they want without even necessarily knowing how or what has happened, but knowing without question that something dramatic has occurred by the results and outcomes they get, and the way life has become for them.

What I’ve found over these many years of pursing what I call my passion and purpose is that to make something simple is only the first step, despite the enormity of that step. Making the simple, easy can be another thing entirely. In my case this quest has been more than two decades long to date … and worth every minute. What I’ve learned in these years is that what I thought of as mastery before is only the beginning in many ways … making the simple, easy is worthy of a lifetime’s investment.

It’s often amazing to me how life is so much like a wheel coming full circle …

How Modern Business Models Developed

by Joseph Riggio · Feb 22, 2012

It Isn’t Always Obvious How Modern Business Models Limit Entrepreneurship … Or What To Do About It … But There’s A Postmodern Eject Option That Will Set You Free

[This particular post is dedicated to the real and aspiring entrepreneurs out there,
especially my brethren who are the creators, compilers and consorts of information ...
and it's distribution to the people.]

As Always, I like to start near the beginning …

In the case of looking at modern business models we need to look to the great monarchies and empires that grew out of the dawn of the Agricultural Era. There were a number of forces that shaped societies at this time, including the ever present economic forces driving the behaviors of men (Author’s Note: assume the term “men” is used here and throughout for convenience sake referring to all of humankind, i.e.: children, women and men).

By economic forces we can begin with the fundamental necessities required for sustaining and nurturing life, including creating a context appropriate to successful procreation. Prior to the Agricultural Era the evidence we have uncovered points to at least two previous phases of evolutionary development in human systems, a “Hunter/Gatherer” phase and a “Hunter/Horticulturist” phase. Sometime during these phases of human development basis social tenants were being programmed into the basic biological machinery as well as the social machinery. Essential remnants of the developmental process that imprinted itself on the human species remain in place today, e.g.: competition and altruism.

The primary social evolution mechanism during this phase transition from “Hunter/Gather” to “Hunter/Horticulturist” to “Agriculturalist” included the ability to create larger groupings leading to the first of many city-states and subsequently empires. The primary driver of this development was the ability to create wealth in the form of excess food resources, freeing individuals for specialization beyond food production in the population. From this consideration we can make the argument that the first rudimentary elements of what we think of today as business began to evolve within the social fabric.

It would be a reasonable conjecture to presume that the first elements of business in early societies took the form of services and craft, production of products, access and acquisition to goods, and distribution of goods. While it would also be reasonable to presume that services and craft, along with the production of products came first, the access and acquisition of goods, and the distribution of those goods was unlikely to be far behind. We can place the last of these two elements of business under the heading “trade” for simplicities sake. This model of the fundamental elements of early business models can then be presented simply as a triad of services/craft … production … and trade …

At this time there were only a few ways business of any kind to be conducted …

In a very local model, e.g.: craftspeople serving their local communities … carpenters, potters, healers …

Creating goods to be traded directly, i.e.: barter … or later for the exchange of payment in coin made of valuable metals representing fixed value, typically in direct association with the value of the metal in which the coin was minted, e.g.: copper, bronze, silver, gold …

Trade between kingdoms for precious resources and goods … this trade was the sole privy of monarchs, even when conducted on their behalf by merchants of their choosing.

Back to Basics For A Moment …

However, behind this model was the constant of food production as the basis of all “real” wealth – and in an Agricultural society that meant land upon which the Agriculture depended for the growing of grains, vegetables and fruits, the raising of livestock, or the hunting of game. This was the driving force behind the concept of “real estate” … of the “King’s Estate” … the land is owned by the monarch, and all others have use as decreed by the monarch with taxes applied to the rights of use, i.e.: “real estate taxation” … the “owner” of the land is NOT the one who occupies and or uses the land, the “owner” of the land is the one who can claim taxes for the right of occupation and use. The owner can also always reclaim the land for a higher use, e.g.: eminent domain.

Since the ownership and control of land, the right to occupy and use it, as well as access to the resources contained on or below it … e.g.: fauna, flora and minerals … was (and to a great extent remains) the most essential economic driver another source of economic growth for the monarchies was conquest. As the need to expand the ownership and control of land became more dominant, to sustain the less productive inhabitants of the cities for essential resources, the monarchs were forced to expand their armies and seek new lands for these essential resources to bring back to the cities, with their aristocrats and elites, if they themselves desired to remain in control. This new necessity of supporting a growing elite class placed a new kind of pressure on the system to become more effective and efficient in the arts of war, e.g.: the Roman Legions.

Now a new economic entity sprang into existence as well. The knowledge associated with the building of war machinery and of the conduct of war. New technologies evolved to support the enterprise of war and conquest, including sophisticated communication technologies for the delivery and security of critical messages to and from afar – in this endeavor speed and utmost secrecy could mean the difference between ultimate success and utter failure. Yet, at the core of the massive campaigns conducted by the armies the issues of supplies, especially food, clothing and weapons, remained critical.

Supply Chains and Distribution As An Economic Cornerstone

Once again we can look to the Romans and their feats of engineering, specifically their roads. To a great extent the success of Rome can be directly traced back to its ability to build roads to distribute goods throughout the Empire.

This had two significant functions …

Keeping the armies of Rome supplied so they could conquer and rule in foreign lands
Providing the access to Rome necessary to bring back essential goods required to keep the Roman citizens pacified

In the world of the Roman Empire, Rome was the first mega-city with over a million people occupying it. This population was largely comprised of aristocrats and elites, their servants and slaves, the service providers catering to them, the craftspeople providing skilled labor, and the producers and traders providing them with the goods they desired. This population created far less wealth than they consumed, yet through the control of the surrounding lands they continued to refill their coffers and exert control on the ever deepening maw of Rome’s own resource hunger. This made for a very unstable position for a Caesar unable to keep the provisions coming … so the constant need for conquest and the drain on the essential resources from the conquered to feed the Romans.

Without the technologically advanced engineering required to build the roads that led to and from Rome, and the aqueducts that kept her supplied with clean water and water to wash away the waste of millions Rome would have never survived to build such an edifice to herself. In some ways Rome in her unsatiable hunger for goods created the basis for the modern age of business that depends on the movement of goods as its lifeblood today.

Mid-Course Conclusions And Corrections

Once this fundamental structure was established, i.e.: the acceptance of an elite ruling class, the blueprint for modern society, modern economic structures and modern business was firmly grounded. When we look through the lens of history at a particular angle what we see is that the elite, ruling class was built on the labor of the peasant class who accepted their rule in exchange for the illusion of safety, security, freedom and the potential to pursue a life of liberty and wealth themselves. What the peasant class never realized was the extent of the bargain they were making, or the reality that they were always playing by different rules than the aristocrats and the elites.

The lessons contained in history continue to show that only those who were able to exploit the limitations, weaknesses and gaps in the ruling class’s position were ever able to become part of that class themselves. Before they crossed the chasm of becoming aristocrats and elites, many of those working the chinks in the system to their own ends would have been by definition at best outside the borders of lawfulness and at worst criminals. Staying with this same lens what we can learn is that the most efficient way to cross the chasm from commoner to elite is to do the dirty work of the elites for them, earning you passage beyond the gates yourself.

Modern Banking And The Fleecing Of The Common Man

We can look at the modern banking system as an example in quick review. Beginning with the Medici’s who devised a way for the Kings and Queens of a Catholic European Empire to circumvent the rule of usury to the modern age of centralized banks and fiat money the bankers have aligned themselves with the ruling class to concentrate the wealth of the system at the top. The recent activity we’ve seen throughout South and Central America beginning in the postwar era of 1950’s through the 1980’s and on, in North America in the 1980s, 90s and most recently in the last five years leading up to a massive reformation of the banking industry with massive bailouts based on taxpayer indebtedness bloating the bottom-line of the failed banking institutions that fundamentally corrupted the system, and now the debacle threatening all of Europe with the same re-distribution of wealth upwards are perfect constructs of the mechanisms I’m pointing to here.

Essentially in a central banking environment, like those in most industrialized Western countries, and in the U.S. via the Federal Reserve System (which is neither Federal, holding any reserves, or a system in any real sense of the word), fiat money is created at the demand of a government (in the U.S. via Congressional request for increased funding outside of the requirement of raising it through direct taxation or tariffs), then the “banks” loan that money out at a ratio of many times the funding they hold in reserve (in the U.S. the ratio is about 10:1, i.e.: for every dollar a bank holds they can make a “loan” of ten dollars) and they are allowed by law to charge interest on the loan amount that is payable by debtor.

The “trick” in the system is that they are collecting interest on money they don’t have, so any interest rate is exhorbitant, creating windfall profits. A further insult on injury is that those furthest away from the lending source pay the most for the money they borrow, so the wealthiest borrow as the best rates. When you add in inflation to the sequence it immediately becomes apparent that holding as much debt as possible, borrowed at the best rates possible, becomes a pathway to increasing wealth at an accelerated rate, i.e.: you are borrowing money at a cost that’s lower than the value of the money you will pay the loan back with, and if you are close enough to the lending source you will borrow at preferential rates and your costs can be passed onto those who have to borrow further down the line. In the meantime if you purchased real assets with borrowed money they appreciate while you are paying back the borrowed money with devalued currency … a nice little spiral of wealth creation if you can “get in on it” early enough. One of the best way to “get in on it” is to become a borrower and a lender, borrowing inexpensively and lending expensively, i.e.: become the bank. (Thank you for the examples Mr. Morgan, Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Rothschild …)

The Modern Entrepreneur

Now we come to the crux of my tirade (you did realize this was a tirade didn’t you?). The story that continues to get sold about modern entrepreneurial success is that it is a function of insight, courage, wisdom, brilliance … and maybe some hard work. We also “know” that it’s being in the right place at the right time, and who you know as much as what you know. FWIW I agree with much of this … to a great extent it’s true … until you get to the point where you have to work the system. At some point in the equation you have to find the chinks in the armor of the ruling class and use them to your benefit.

In a modern entrepreneurial system the ruling class is made up of at least three segments:

The political/governmental sector
The financial/banking sector
The existing commercial sector that you seeks to displace

To do this, and to succeed in a monumental way, you have to work the system … often at the edge of criminality, or downright stepping over that line. There are hundreds or thousands of books that document what I’m referring to here. Some of the favorite targets are mega-companies like Walmart, the mulit-national banks, the fiascos like Enron and World-Com. However, when you study the field you’ll find that there is no large business that isn’t tied in with the political and the financial players required to perpetrate their actions.

HOWEVER … this tirade isn’t about that … it’s about what you can choose instead if you so desire … BUT AT A PRICE!

I’ll lay it down simply … to use an oft quoted comment, “If you aren’t part of the solution you are part of the problem”

If you are making your bed and lying down with the players I’ve been decrying then you are part of the problem, even if you only occasionally suck at the corporate teat. You cannot claim you are only a small little guy/gal trying to make a living off of the leavings of the corporate giants and not be awash in the stench of the garbage they put out. Even if you are selective in your takings, and what you do with them – e.g.: charity and philanthropy, you are insidiously continuing the subjugation by the ruling class. Of course the lunacy is that the subjugation I refer to includes your own (I am assuming that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and even Mark Zuckerberg are not reading this … although some Congressperson, Senator or even the Oval Office itself may have readers who keep an eye on things doing it for them).

So how do you opt out … where the lever to eject???

The way out of the debacle is to stop being part of the problem … become a problem for the problem.

Despite their ill-fated attempt the “Occupy” movement had the right idea fundamentally … what they left out was that they thought they were playing on a level field. What they might not have anticipated was that the folks who are much more “like them” then their masters would turn against them, i.e.: the police, law enforcement officials and legal system jumping through the hoops of the puppet masters on Wall Street and in City Hall.

Remember, once these folks get to City Hall they are no longer one of you! When politicians pass laws that discriminate preferentially for themselves they are declaring that they have entered the hall of the elites and you are not entitled to sit beside the table with them, e.g.: the healthcare bill in the U.S. that excludes Federal politicians … Congresspeople, Senators, Presidents … all get preferential treatment over the citizenry … and that was a Democratic initiative!

So you opt out …

You set up shop for the people directly … and you co-opt the resources of the elites. You use their distribution systems to get your goods to the people, you use their communication tools to spread your message, you take advantage of their financial systems to build your own position … just enough.

This last bit is critical … JUST ENOUGH … because when you cross the line to more than enough it’s very hard or impossible to come back. However, when you realize that JUST ENOUGH is really enough there’s no way to control you anymore. You don’t need or want the bigger house. You don’t need or want the prestige car. You don’t need to display your wealth to prove you possess it .. and you begin playing a different game.

The new game you play is riding the waves of the system rather than being caught by them. You set up and run your own thing. learning how to become a part of and to tap into communities of your own making … by invitation or creation. You decide independently, apart from the system’s approval, certification and licensing process, how you will run your life … and part of that is the kind of business entity you establish.

The whole “lifestyle business” movement is a part of this idea. The most basic expression of it however is a harkening back to the days of old in the marketplace, where you are serving a “local” audience that knows you and your personal credibility and mark mean something to them. Yet in the modern expression of this idea that local market is not confined by geography, but is instead comprised of islands of values, beliefs, philosophies and concepts in common. Like the first traders you become a “global” citizen belonging to many tribes, not just the one defined by and imposed upon you by the ruling elites.

Once you learn to surf the system staying on the boat just doesn’t make sense … maybe it’s time for you to consider what it will take to jump ship and take back the oceans.

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D., Princeton, NJ

Architect & Designer of the MythoSelf Process and Soma-Semantics

P.S. – If you want to spend some quality time finding the eject lever, opting out and landing well take a look at my page here, How I Work, check out the links for the practice areas I specialize in, and then let’s talk.

Mentoring In The Wild

by Joseph Riggio · Feb 19, 2012

Getting Advice From A Great Mentor Isn’t Just Useful …
It’s Damn Indispensable If You’re Serious About Discovering What’s Possible On The Path

Mentoring is the process of renting your brain to someone else to use for a while as their own…

– Alan Weiss, Ph.D.
Author of “Million Dollar Consulting”

Mentoring 101:

One of the most significant things that you can do is to allow yourself to receive input from people who have been down the path before you, that you find yourself walking in this moment.

These people know what is on the trail. These are people who understand what is about to come up that you can’t see because it is not visible – and the only reason that they know it is there isn’t because they can see it, but because they have been there before and they know the obstacles, they know the traps on the trail. These people have seen the traps before and they can anticipate from the gleanings in the wind where they’ll be before they see them again. These people also get that even those things that are visible and recognizable to them are sometimes not visible or not available to be seen by someone who hasn’t seen them before.

On the other side of this coin these people also have the ability to sniff out opportunity in the fermentation stage, before it the process finishes and reaches completion where others become aware of it. This gives them the advantage of being where the opportunity will be before it appears. Instead of running with the pack to get to the opportunity after the fact, these people are sitting there waiting for it to appear knowing just where to be and when so by the time the pack reaches them they’re already picking their teeth from the meal they’ve already consumed – and the others are left to dine on left-overs.

Essentially a great mentor has a number of well honed qualities, including but not limited to having “been there and done that” with the t-shirt to prove it. In fact having the t-shirt just indicates the smallest essential part of the puzzle, and by itself alone would never justify adopting someone as a mentor IMO.

Far more essential than just having had the experience would be the learning that was ingested and digested along the way – the stuff that has become part and parcel of who the mentor has become. This shows up in the skill set they possess, and even more plainly in their day t0 day behavior – especially in who they are off stage.

Finding a mentor who has moved beyond “talk the talk” to “walk the walk” may be the single most valuable thing you can do in finding and walking your own path when it coincides with they one they’ve learned to walk so well.

I want to share a little example of this unique skill set.

In Addition To The Jersey Devil There’s Another Incredibly Fascinating Character Living In The Pine Barrens Of New Jersey, And His Name Is Tom Brown, Jr.

There is a man in New Jersey here where I live by the name of Tom Brown. He grew up on the edge of the NJ Pine Barrens, and still makes him home there today. Tom is probably the world’s most outstanding tracker.

As a young boy Tom made a decision that he was going to be a tracker. He spent every free minute he had, after school, on weekends, holidays, over the summers … learning how to track from an old Indian scout who was the grandfather of one of his best friends. They went out tracking together from the time he was 15 years old learning how to find animal tracks in the fields, in the woods and along the streams where he lived.

When he graduated high-school, around the age of eighteen, his father confronted him with a choice; “… go to college and get a degree, or get a job and go to work.” Tom choose getting a job … he would be a tracker. The way he tells the story this didn’t necessarily go over so well in his home at the time, but in a few years he proved his ability and was consulting with police, law enforcement and rescue teams around the United States based on his amazing skills as a tracker.

By the time that I met Tom he was in his 50’s, and was incredibly accomplished. He had worked with law enforcement agencies around the world teaching tracking skills. He ran a tracking school in a place called Asbury, NJ on the edge of the Pine Barrens. which is a remote wilderness area near the southern center of state of New Jersey; and he taking executives and put them through a week or two week program where he would teach them wilderness skills. He specifically emphasized the idea of tracking and noticing for information that was present, but to the untrained eye invisible.

I spent a weekend with Tom learning tracking with him and there was a moment in which we walked around a field that surrounded a parking lot. At the edge where the field met the asphalt of the parking lot there was an area about 10 feet or 12 feet wide where the asphalt of the parking lot turned into dirt, the dirt turned into grass, and then the grass entered into the woods. Walking at a normal walking pace, let’s say about 3 mph, Tom was able to walk the perimeter of the parking lot and point out tracks that were present there – squirrel, fox, rabbit. When I looked down what I saw was dirt, dirt, dirt.

Then we slowed down, and Tom took me down to ground level, he put my hand in the track and said, “Feel this. Can you feel that indentation?” Of course it was there and I said I could. He said, “Look at those two little dots. Do you see them near the indentation?” When he pointed them out I could see the two little dots. He told me they were the nails of a squirrel. He could see moving at a walking pace around the perimeter of the parking lot two little dots in the ground that were the nails of a squirrel!

Tom knew that those two little dots he had seen meant that the squirrel that had left those tracks behind was running away from something, because he could see from the length of the squirrel’s stride that it had been running frantically. We then went backwards and he showed me where the fox had been at the edge of the woods, because the grass had been beaten down in a particular way. We went on this way for about 1 ½ hours. It was stunning. Tom could see what had happened in that small portion of the wilderness several hours before like he was looking at in unfolding before him in the moment.

The world that Tom Brown lives in and was obvious to him … inescapably obvious … was completely invisible to me. After two hours with him I was aware that there was a world out there that was still invisible to me, but I was no longer ignorant of its presence. If I chose to spend two, or three, or five years with Tom maybe I could get to the point where I could walk around the perimeter of a parking lot and see the trail, and the markings of the animals that had been there before – but I couldn’t do it that morning.

Despite the fact that I now know there are animal tracks and a story there in the dirt between the parking lot and the grass I still can’t do it. I don’t have the training, or the skills, or the knowledge to even know what to look for in that small space. But if Tom were walking with me on a trail I know there would be so much more present for me in my world than I ever experience as being present for me when I am just walking that trail by myself.

Walking Along The Trail With A Mentor Of Your Own

The same thing is true of walking along any mentor who knows the trail they’ve lived as well as Tom knows how to track. That domain of expertise can be mentoring in the area of business development, the area of specific skills development or it can be in the area of building a life that works. It doesn’t matter what area of domain of expertise the mentor possesses, if they are skillful enough they live in a world that the untrained person doesn’t ever see, let alone experience. Yet, it would be possible to experience the world in that way if they had a mentor who knew how to find the tracks, signals and signs, and was pointing them out along the way.

Mentors see things that are there, and obvious to the trained eye, that simply don’t exist for the person who doesn’t have the skill set they possess. They create leverage in the possibility of learning and growing that would be impossible to access without that expertise. Mentors make this kind of advanced learning and acuity available to you, and I know of no substitute for it. At every turn when I’ve wanted to take the next steps on my own life’s journey, first before all else, I’ve found myself a brilliant mentor to walk the path with me. I still surround myself with mentors, young and old as necessary and required, to guide the steps I take as continue moving forward in the adventure.

If you are really serious and you really intend to make enormous leaps and gains in any area of skill development or improvement in your life … and raise the level of your performance beyond the capacity that you currently possess by performing on your own … find someone who has been there before and to engage them as a mentor doing whatever it takes to allow them to take you to where you aren’t yet, and they have already been.

A Small Bit Of Friendly Closing Advice

(NOTE: This Bit Is Only For Those Who Are Serious & Thick Skinned Enough For The Raw Truth … Proceed With Caution)

I’m sure you get that the message here has been that when you decide to make the leap of faith required to commit and engage on a path of your own … one you haven’t yet mastered but sense a compulsion to pursue … start by finding a mentor who can and will guide you in the journey you’re about to undertake. What I’d like to share in closing from what I’ve learned about taking this advice myself would be this …

Start by keeping your mouth shut. I know some of you will find that advice harsh. Many of you reading this have likely grown up in a culture where you’ve been taught that “learning should be a participative activity” and that “you should be a partner in the learning experience” and other such B.S. that doesn’t apply here at all IMO. In the mentoring relationship the mentor has the expertise that you do not yet possess, but desire to own for yourself. The fastest way to build the skills you desire for yourself almost always means doing what your told (AGGGHHHH!!!! I know you hate that one!).

NOW … AFTER YOU’VE DONE IT (unquestioningly) … ask all your questions … make all your comments … have all the disagreements you need or want. Because AFTER you’ve done it you’ll have an experience you can talk about that has depth and value … instead of engaging in mental masturbation about what you think but don’t know yet.

Life Is Not Meant To Be A Struggle …

by Joseph Riggio · Jan 29, 2012

How great would it be if you could leap beyond the things that limiit you in a single bound … like SuperMan or WonderWoman … just by engaging in a powerful dialogue designed to do just that?

Imagine this …

You are perfectly aligned internally and externally so that everything becomes effortless for you … like this manifesting your creativity becomes your natural way of operating … and you perform at the peak of your potential without striving.

What you might be doing with your life and in your life if it were like this for you every day?

But right now it just doesn’t feel like that … things AREN’T COMING TOGETHER EFFORTLESSLY FOR YOU … and some days it may even feel like everything is a struggle.

What you need is a way beyond all that, a way to go beyond the striving to make things happen, to begin operating in a way where the things you most want and need to happen for you just do.

Maybe This Is You … Or At Least Familiar To You

You’ve read all the books …

“The Insider’s Guid To Self Help”
“Seven Steps To Success”
“The Secret To This, That And The Other Thing”
“Financial Independence In Four Hours Or Less”
“I Can Make You Thin, Young, Rich & Happy”

… whatever.

You’ve attended enough classes, workshops, seminars and training programs to earn at least two Ph.D.s …

“Fire Walking To Power”
“Getting Over Your Stuff”
“Being A Success On Your Own Terms”
“Coming To Terms With Terminal Failure”

… once again … whatever.

You hired personal development coaches and business consultants … you’ve worked with trainers and therapists out the gazoo … you’ve done the rounds with NLP, hypnosis, EFT, TFT, EMT … whatever, whatever, whatever.

You even spent weeks, months or years doing Yoga, Zen, Tai Chi, Orgonic Dynamic Prana Breathing Meditation … and the bits and pieces of your life aren’t lined up the way you hoped they would be by now … and you’re still not yet getting the results you want, with the satisfaction you desire … and you’re about at your wits end with it all.

A Bit Of My Own Story

Let me share something deeply personal with you … I get it because I’ve been there too. Back when I was in my late twenties I thought I had it all, but I couldn’t shake the sense that something vital and even urgent was missing.

I was successful, doing work that I liked, was good at and earning a great income. I was married with a two year old son who I absolutely adored, and a loving wife who was a great mother to our son as well. I was healthy, I had a nice home where we lived in a great community … BUT something profound was missing. Instead of being deeply happy about all this, I was deeply unsatisfied with my life and myself. Nothing major enough to call depression or even melancholy … more like a funk that just lingered.

I simply didn’t knowhow to organize myself to feel great about what I was doing or how to change things.

So I began searching. I did everything … the lists I wrote about things you might have tried so far could have been my own.

I sometimes felt like “this is it” that the thing I had found would be the one that would make all the difference. At other times I felt like I’d never get it. What was consistent was that nothing really seemed to make the difference I was hoping for, and I never gave up.

One day, I stumbled into meeting a man who would change my life, Roye Fraser. For the next seven years I apprenticed with him studying and learning NLP, hypnosis and his own brand of amazing transformational work, the Generative Imprint model.

It was truly an epic journey of heroic proportions, a personal “Odyessy” all my own. Along the way there were ups and downs of course, but I always had a sense of moving towards the horizon … I knew where I was aiming, and I knew I’d achieve the outcomes I’d set for myself. More than anything else I knew this was a path with heart for me and I made the commitment to stay the course.

What I found out that was the most profound thing of all was that transformation can and does happen in an instant when someone is ready for it, and when someone is skillful enough all it takes is the right word spoken in the right way at the right time.

Why I Designed My Performance Design Workshop

Performance Design workshop are for folks like you, who know there’s something more that you want and need in life, even if you’re not sure exactly what that is yet.

By engaging in simple, straightforward … and sometimes not so straightforward (remember I’m a master hypnotist) … dialogue I want to help you get unstuck – no matter where you are right now – and make leaps forward in your life. The most amazing thing about my Performance Design workshops are how simple it will all seem after the fact, when you’re living life completely on your own terms.

Here’s what you can expect when you join me and a small, intimate group for a Performance Design workshop:

Attain great clarity about where you are in the moment, what’s limiting you, what you need to be doing next and how to take the essential first steps to begin.
Learn how you are when you are unstoppable, a force of nature so to speak … and how to make decisions and take powerful action from this way of being
Connect or reconnect with your deep intution, a way of knowing absolutely what is most true for you and the way forward to live you life on your own terms without compromise.
Uncover or discover the myth you’ve been living and the story of your life … i.e.: your Life Story that is uniquely your own … then make that the basis for everything else.

What’s A Performance Design Workshop Like?

Maybe what I’m about to tell you about the Performance Design workshop will seem like conflicting ideas to you, but I want to share a little bit about what it will be like …

I’m fairly certain there will be moments where what we’re doing together will be challenging for you because I ask and even insist that you confront what limits you, or because you don’t understand what I’m doing and why I’m doing it … there will almost surely be other moments where you’re intrigued, interested and excited by what’s going on … moments in which it seems to all come together for you and it makes perfect sense.

In the course of our dialogue I can assure you that you will experience a change, you’ll begin to see yourself in a new light … and a pathway to move forward based on what is possible will open for you so you can begin taking the next steps for yourself.

The way we’ll work together in the Performance Design workshop may be the most human experience you have ever had or ever will have. The entire process I’ve built is designed to be purely conversational. Literally, just by engaging dialogue with me and the others who participate in the group you will find yourself opening up to new possibilities and outcomes in your life. You’ll feel old limiting beliefs and baggage drop away as you begin to feel new energy and motivation becoming available to you.

While you are unlikely to be able to explain exactly what happened, or how it happened, as a result of participating in the Performance Design workshop … what you, and others around you, will begin to notice is that something has inexplicably changed for you …

You’ll begin producing results that had eluded you, maybe for years …
You’ll start and complete projects that are filled with meaning for you and bring you a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction …
Your relationships wil change too in subtle ways that you’ll nonetheless recognize as significant.
Maybe most of all you’ll become aware of accessing your intuition in ways that you may have never had access to before … and you’ll trust what comes up as being right on target for you.

Who Benefits The Most From Participating In Performance Design Workshops:

Someone driven to move beyond the status quo and wants to manifest meaningful outcomes on their own and with others
People who are in a process of questioning where they are in their life and what’s next for them on their life’s journey
Anyone who has a sense that there’s something important or special to be doing, but has had some trouble figuring out and defining exactly what that is for them
Executive, entrepreneurs, business owners and professionals who are feeling a bit burnt out and looking to renew their motivation and become inspired again
Folks who are willing to be challenged and to challenge themselves to leave behind what isn’t working and explore a personal path, that doesn’t depend on a step-by-step process

How To Make It Happen

There are three packages and ways to join a Performance Design workshop …

SILVER – Day One of Performance Design with a month of POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE telementoring included, this is enough to kick-start anyone into gear.
GOLD – Day One and Day Two of the Performance Design Workshop, where you’ll establish your direction on Day One and build a strategy for it on Day Two, plus you’ll also get access to a full month of POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE too
PLATINUM – Day One and Two of the Performance Design Workshop, a full month of UA Ruby telementoring including POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE and $1MM Business Building telementoring and two months of 1-to-1 Individual Tailored Mentoring

Get All The Specific Details About Performance Design HERE …

I Know Enough Already …
Take Me Right To The Enrollment Application!

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Elite Performance

(… or, what is liminality, and what’s it got to do with you???)

I was stuck.

Liminal Space

The Apathy of the “Lotophagi”

Coming Back to “Home Base”

1) Remembering to link intention to action became my first step out of the maze.

2) Noticing the sequence that connected my perceptions to the results I produced, through my decision and behaviors, became my second step.

3) Establishing and tracking the metrics of my process became the third step beyond the threshold of the liminal space that had trapped me.

4) Building a feedback loop using the information I was uncovering, and refining my process by focusing on what worked and eliminating what didn’t, became the forth step to improving my performance.

Escaping the Maze … Beyond the Labyrinth

We always see what we want to see, from inside who we think we are … until we don’t

“I’m not afraid.” …

“This time we’re going to see some real change!”

“This time my guy/gal is going to change things.”

“This time we’re going to take back government and restore … equality, peace, fairness … whatever …. to the people!”

The F*$KING Joke Is On Us …

We live in an age which demands that we destroy our heroes.

Lance Armstrong, was a “badass on a bicycle” … he’s still one of my “heroes” … and that’s that … THE END.

It’s Almost That Time Again … MythoMania 2012

28 – 30 November, Wednesday – Friday 10 AM – 5:30 PM Each Day

… AND it’s all ALMOST totally FREE!

Full Details Here: MythoMania 2012

… begins when you leave behind your will to pursue your personal fascination.

The cost ~ only your Bliss!

Beginning with books

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary

The Voyage of the “Beagle” by Charles Darwin and Millicent E. Selsam

So here I was about to enter high school with books leading the way …

The first twenty years … and the following thirty …

Keeping the Status Quo

The Way Out …

To read better you have to learn how to extract the information you encounter … AND you have to learn how to interpret the information so you can apply it yourself.

I want to share with you a seven step “Secret Code” about how to read a book and learn the most you can from it that I’ve been using for years …

You must leave your learning about learning behind …

Start with the knowledge you’re seeking to gain …

Let others lead the way …

Make it your own …

“Do Over!”

Extending the journey …

OUTPUT!!!