Have you ever had a great experience that gave you a glimpse of your Highest Self? An experience that had you convinced that your life would never be the same, you were going to take this feeling and live from that place from now on?
This phenomenon can be created in a number of ways:
- A Spiritual Retreat
- A Great Sales Conference
- A Weekend Training
- A Camping Trip in a Stunning Natural Setting
- and many others…
You felt grounded, you felt motivated, and you felt ALIVE!
Driving home you VOWED to yourself that THIS is how I am going to live from now on.
And then…. you go back to your life.
And the elevated feeling and vibration that you loved having so much fades away over the ensuing days and weeks.
The two very different feeling states, the Peak state of aliveness and the Mundane state of the routine, seem to have turned into just one continuing (ever so slightly elevated) mundane life.
You feel flat, you are having a life but too much of it is devoid of the verve that you had experienced. Your life has returned to a lower vibration.
Then, down the road, you see another program that will be the next big thing that will fundamentally change your life for the better.
The question is: Is this cycle inevitable?
I am going with NO.
What is the ‘life hack’ that breaks the cycle and gives you the best chance to keep and build on the Aliveness that you experienced at the retreat?
Coaching.
Yep, this strange new occupation that is popping up everywhere. Coaching.
My coach, Tripp Lanier, recently described coaching as,
helping you build the practices, behaviors, actions and choices that pull you up to the altitude you really want to be at.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free
See, the initial great experience opened you up to the new way of seeing the world and yourself. But the distractions of modern life are designed to keep you stuck. Hence the cycle.
Coaching is a powerful tool that enables you to stabilize and normalize this elevated awareness and aliveness that came from these peak experiences. It happens through consistent conversations. And by having a person in your corner whose reason for existence is to serve you in raising and maintaining your elevated level of awareness and aliveness.
This Coach can also help you develop a KATA. A KATA is a term borrowed from Japanese martial arts but now used more generally,(from Wikipedia):
In Japanese language kata (though written as 方) is a frequently-used suffix meaning ‘way of doing’, with emphasis on the form and order of the process. Other meanings are ‘training method’ and ‘formal exercise’. The goal of a painter’s practicing, for example, is to merge his consciousness with his brush; the potter’s with his clay; the garden designer’s with the materials of the garden. Once such mastery is achieved, the theory goes, the doing of a thing perfectly is as easy as thinking it.
Coaching and a regular KATA help us to make permanent the way of doing and the way of being that we rose up to. Hence they are the #1 Life Hack available to us all.
To paraphrase Rumi,
There is a field, out beyond the mundane and routine, I will meet you there.
Share our memes! Be sure to include this link to The Good Men Project campaign on IndieGoGo: bit.ly/GMPIndieGoGo
—Photo Credit: Flickr/Roderick Eime