Living our dreams begins by telling people about them.

What dreams do you have?  Who can you share your dreams with?

Human beings enjoy traveling through life without taking great risks. Our monkey brains attempt to protect us by seeking safety and security of the known.  In reality, they only support a life of limited growth and status quo. To live our dreams, we must create an environment where our monkey brains view our dreams as a safe and secure as a known entity.

How do we do that? The answer is simple and only requires courage to get the process started.

Are you ready to live your dreams?

Try this experiment.

• Write down your dream in one or two sentences.
• Make a top 10 list on how achieving this dream will change and enrich your life.
• Over the next 48 hours, share your dream and the top 10 list with as many people as you can
• Ask the person to summarize what you said in 3 words
• Thank them for their time and ask them to support you in your journey
• After each interaction, record your impressions of the conversation.

After you have completed this experiment, come back to this post and share your impressions.

What pattern emerged in the conversations?  What happened to you as you repeatedly told the same story?

Are you closer to living your dreams?

No related posts.

The last couple of posts (Re-Gifting, Unwrap your gifts )  have focused on bringing your natural gifts into the forefront of your life. In doing so, we share ourselves in a more authentic way.  We show up in every interaction and situation consciously bearing our gifts.  People recognized what we have to offer and crawl out of the woodwork to receive what we have to offer.  Maybe they always have, but now we are keenly aware of it.

There is something different about it this time around.  Even though we are uncomfortable sitting in the spot light, we like the new-found attention.  It’s an odd, strange feeling to moderately enjoy attention.  We feel good about ourselves and passively seek more. Our old habits and voice tell us to escape back to the safety and comfort of a quiet place. We know this no longer fits our description of who we are.  We no longer want to keep our gifts from the world.  We want to share them and experience all the great feelings this attention bring to us. We crave more.

What do we do with all this new-found glory?

The answer is simple….we take our gifts and we apply them to the things we CARE about most.

A much harder question is what do you CARE about?

CAREs are our highest-level needs, our inner burning desires, or our own personal conditions for satisfaction.  They are ideals that we live by (i.e. I am a loving husband), things we are passionate about (i.e. I am helping others find their passion for life), or lofty goals (I am saving money for my kid’s college tuition).  Living by our CAREs is intrinsically part of our lives.

The more we embody our CAREs; the more purposefully we act and the more meaning we have to our life. We take ownership and responsibility for our actions and in-actions. We begin to reduce our emotional attached to things that are not aligned with our CAREs. We invite playful energy and lightness into our daily lives. Our daily intentions, actions and commitments are clear and resolute.  We are aligned with who our soul desires us to be.

What you CARE about?

Related posts:

1. Are you ready to unwrap your gifts?
2. Creating Flow Through Our Cares
3. Re-gifting: Offering our gifts to the world

As autumn approaches, a new NFL football season begins with high expectations and visions of ticker tape parades in February.  Suddenly without warning, men have access to a dormant passion hidden inside them.  We transform into a confident, focused, determined, strong-willed, highly competitive, and vocal super humans.  We act with passion and purpose.  We are men chasing the immortality of winning our fantasy football championship.  Nothing will stand in the way of our opportunity to reign supreme.

If you have ever participated in fantasy football, then I’m sure you have witnessed this sudden transformation.  You know the person; he is the quiet unassuming one.  His social circle is small.  He eats lunch at his desk or goes to lunch with the same people every day.  He blends with the scenery and his global corporate value is relatively unknown. People perceive him as weak and alpha males crush his manhood. Joe desperately needs to man-up.  Will the real Joe please stand up?

We are in luck; a new fantasy football season is right around the corner.  In effort to be one of the boys, Joe joins a league.  He hopes leverage his participation into becoming a member of the pack.  He studies hard. He reads every publication.  The journey starts slowly…he drafts well and has a good 1^st season. There are some small successes.  People who don’t normally talk to him, talk to him about Fantasy Football. His experience builds confidence.

The following season, Joe oozes with confidence and determination. He is going to win it all this year.  He works hard and becomes a draft expert.  He is rising to Fantasy Football stardom and will be a contender year after year.  Fantasy football becomes the single most important thing in his life. Joe becomes a self-professed expert and rock star in the field.

Joe builds a reputation as a strong fearless competitor.  Mel Kiper would be deeply impressed with his fantasy football prowess.  He dominates the multiple leagues he plays in. Neither format nor competitor can crush his passion and success. Team owners from other leagues seek his advice on which players to start, waiver moves to make, and trades to consider.  If Joe could monetize this consulting, then he would have quite the business.  He is a recognized leader in the field without a doubt.

Mean while back in the real world, nothing has changed.  Joe is still part of the scenery.  His fantasy football expertise has not translated into off the field success.  His passion and determination are fading. He is left questioning why.

What went wrong for Joe?  How could Joe leverage his fantasy football success into personal success?

Joe is reading this posting and anxiously awaiting some candid feedback.  Please put on your creative thinking hats and help him.  Joe looks forward to reading your comments.

No related posts.

My thirst for learning is embodied in my being.  I was born with a burning desire to learn, and learn at break neck speed.  At times, I feel like I am never going gather information fast enough to quench the thirst of my parched body.  If you have ever neared the point of dehydration, then you can relate to the energy I feel percolating inside me.

Why do I enjoy learning so much?  Learning creates the space for me to expand my perspective, be more curious about life, challenge my current belief structure, open myself to new possibilities, practice my actively listen and communication skills, and live in the world with a beginner’s mind set.

My learning is driven by whatever interests me at that moment in time.  Some topics ignite an intense passion, while others stimulate so little interest, I cannot read the first sentence.  When passion arises, each and every point of view on the topic is interesting and engaging.  I experience flow.

In 1990, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi authored a book entitled “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.” At a high level, Csikszentmihalyi believed people are most happy when they are in a state of Flow. To further explain this concept further, I have borrowed the below citations from Wikipedia.

“Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.”

“Csikszentmihalyi identifies the following nine factors as accompanying an experience of flow.

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Not all are needed for flow to be experienced.”

“In an interview with Wired magazine, Csíkszentmihályi described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Flow is where our attention, motivation, and situation meet.

This begs the question, is our personal happiness determined by whether or not we live a life of focusing our energy and attention on what we deeply care about?

The concept of “Cares” shows up in our everyday society through various life forms, from values statements, manifestos, mission statements, advertisements, etc. For example, the coffee shop I am sitting in right now has a big banner ad stating “97% of the world’s coffee beans aren’t good enough for us, or you, honestly.”  In this case, the brand is communicating what matters most to them is using only the best possible beans to make their coffee.  The rest of the ad hopes you will embody the same “care” and only purchase coffee from this coffee chain.

It doesn’t matter what terminology you use to describe what is important to you; what matters most is you learn what you “Care” about so you can live everyday in “flow.”

What do you care about?  What matters most to you?

Related posts:

1. Opening the door to our cares
2. Resistance is the doorway to action
3. Unwanted Behaviors