Friends,

If you tune yourself to the frequency of answers, you can find wisdom anywhere.

Saturday was the last day of my first 90-day book writing boot camp. As I was preparing my final words for my brilliant students, I was studying various perspectives on the subject of clarity, curious to see what the great philosophers had written on the subject.

I came across a quote from the modern thinker and sports ball savant Venus Williams. It didn’t seem on topic at first, but I read through anyhow. She’d been asked how it feels when she’s playing a great game and it begins to rain, stopping momentum and forcing her to sit on the bench.

Counterintuitively, she said: “Rain is good for me. I feel like I achieve clarity, actually, when it rains. The longer I have to sit and wait, the clearer my game becomes to me.”

I was instantly reminded of the bull in its querencia, the bullfighters’ wisdom that if you let a bull take a pause, get out of reactive mode and recalibrate, it taps back into its natural strength and power. It does what it was made to do, and will run through anything in its path. It becomes unstoppable.

But I was also reminded of so many conversations I’ve had with my friends and students, the people I think of as “impatient uplifters”: ambitious and successful in their day jobs, seeking to live conscious lives and lift others up, yet always feeling like they’re behind, like they’ve not yet hit their stride in life. Like they’ve not yet made enough money to leave their corporate job or shadow career.

Those who are doing their life’s work, often feel they’ve not yet figured out how to be as successful or play as big a game as they were put here to be or play. Because life got in the way. Or their childhood wiring gets in the way. Or they’re good at one piece of the puzzle, but they’ve never quite gotten (or made) the break or the traction they seek.

So they feel behind. Sidelined. Benched.

I’ve been there myself, despite having had an all-hit career. And that’s precisely why this quote was so meaningful to me. Because I’ve been there, yes, but that was then and this is now. Now I have crystal clarity. I can see how every single shadow career, every seemingly more than good-enough-but-not-quite-right career path, every job I disliked and even the ones I loved, every personal crisis, drama and trauma, every obstacle and delay was really another moment (or season) on the bench.

Each moment was good for me. In each season, I achieved greater and greater clarity. Because I had to wait, my “game”, my long-term vision and my immediate next steps, are now completely clear to me.

So if you’re feeling behind, or like life has sidelined you over and over again, take heart.

And take a sacred pause.

That pause might be for a moment, or an evening. It might be for a week or a season. But take the time to stop doing and achieving and “getting things done”. Just be. Even for one evening.

‘Be’ with the feeling of behind. You don’t have to push against that feeling, or spring into making some action plan because you feel like doing something, anything, will make you feel ok. Yes, sometimes clarity comes by taking one step toward what feels like it might be resonant and expansive, and seeing what happens. But you don’t have to earn your place on this planet by doing. Sometimes, the best plan of action when you’re not clear what to do next is to take a pause and let those feelings of behind, anxious, scarce – whatever – sit right next to you on the bench.

When you stop trying to do things to outrun those feelings, you recoup the energy you’ve been putting into that struggle.

And with that energy, you can do loads of things. Way high up on the list of uses for that energy: allow what you’ve learned to integrate. Whether your recent season (or whole life) has been characterized by wanted experiences and emotions, unwanted experiences or both, catch this principle: there’s a life adventure to be had in allowing your experiences to clarify your game for you.

And catch this principle, too: the unwanted experiences often hold more power to clarify your game, to clarify what you do want, than the walk-in-the park parts of your life.

So, you might be feeling like you’re behind. Like you expected to be “further” by this point in your life, or like you’re not all the way grown up yet (even though you’re plenty grown).

Or maybe you feel like the twists and turns of life keep getting in the way of you walking fully into your calling?

Take some refuge in the community, the collective of impatient, ambitious uplifters, almost all of whom have felt this way at one time or another. I’ve known industry leaders, people millionaires many times over who still say they feel ‘behind’.

Channel your inner bull: take a pause, stop reacting, recalibrate and tap back into your natural strength and power.

Then, channel your inner Venus and remember: you’ve just been getting clearer on your game.

That’s how you’ll become unstoppable, in divine timing. Because that’s what you are.

NOTE #1: I’m currently building a course on how to make bold career transitions successfully and soulfully. If you’ve been thinking about making a career move and you have a question you’d like me to answer, just hit reply and send it my way. Thanks in advance!

NOTE #2: I’m teaching a series of four, LIVE 90-minute transformational business and marketing classes on Creative Live on May 24th:

• How to Build and Market Products that Change People’s Lives
• Rethink Your Content Marketing Strategy
• Rethink What you Sell and Who you Serve
• Build a Customer Journey Map that Drives Engagement

There are a few ways you can participate:

• You can stream the classes live, for free, on May 24th. Use the links above to register for access.
• You can buy access to watch them on-demand anytime you want at the same links.
• If you happen to be in the Bay Area, you can apply to be part of the live studio audience! The audience will get breakfast and lunch that day, plus free access to the class (both during and after broadcast). (And of course, you get to be there in person, ask questions, and be a part of the course!)

Apply to be part of the live audience, here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfRahOe738s6CvZ76dkBzKbgMcRfw3Owfpiq8EKFUQV4AOm-Q/viewform

Head up + heart out,

TNN

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

Friend-o-mine:

I recently saw the film director David Lynch give a talk about meditation. (He creates renowned bizarro flicks, including Twin Peaks and Eraserhead.) During the Q+A, a Lynch film fanboy got up. This guy couldn’t care less about meditation. His favorite director was in the house, and he’d been given a mic, so he gushed with gusto.

“David, I love your work. You’re my favorite director and Mullholland Drive is my favorite film. My brother and I watch it over and over. But we have a question about this one part. We disagree on what’s really happening in it.”

Homeboy proceeded to set forth the nature of the fraternal dispute.

David let him finish. Then he answered, saying something to this effect:

“Thank you so much. I’m glad you like the movies. I was done creating Mulholland Drive when I finished editing it. Now it’s your turn to interpret the movie as you like.”

Takeaway: Require your audience to co-create with you as they engage with your creations.

The next day, I went to see the radiant Erykah Badu perform. She did a shout-out for “all the 90’s babies in the house”. After their uproar died down, she elaborated. “Listen. I wrote this song when I was pregnant with my own 90’s baby, and I wrote it specifically for you who were born in the 90s. I’ve been waiting TWENTY YEARS for you to be emotionally and intellectually ready to understand this song. I’m so glad it’s time.”

Takeaway: Trust your audience to receive exactly what they need from your work, all in divine timing.

Here’s the last one: I just got back from a delightful trip to Spain. We started in Barcelona, took the train to Figueres to visit the Dalí’s museum, and then made a final stop in Madrid. In Barcelona, of course, we immersed ourselves in the work of the City’s cherished son, Antoni Gaudí. We stayed next door to La Pedrera, had an architect walk us around town for a few hours and teach us about his work, and of course, visited Sagrada Familia.

Gaudí was exceptional in (at least) one important way: he eschewed straight lines as man-made and, thus, necessarily inferior to the God-made curves and lines of nature. So his buildings are swooping, soaring, colorful, curvy devotional works of art: including and especially Sagrada Familia.

If you’ve been to Barcelona or even have ever talked to someone who has, you know the headline about Sagrada Familia: construction began in 1882 and construction continues today. Current eta for completion is 2026 (no typo).

Gaudí’s unusual style rendered it impossible for his projects to be built strictly from blueprints. Instead, he built miniature-scale plaster models, and his assistants constructed the buildings from that. As he began work on Sagrada Familia, only completing a couple of corners in his lifetime, he moved into the church full-time and spent his last few years feverishly working on models for the project.

Catch this: He didn’t even aim to complete the building. His sole mission and focus was to communicate his vision by completing the models so someone else (or many someones) could complete the building.

What struck me was the clarity of Gaudí’s vision and the purity of his motivation, his total devotion to providing a grand place of worship for everyone, rich and poor (not the norm at the time), knowing full well he could never live to see the day of its completion. In the basement of the basilica, we found this quote I loved. He said: “It is not a disappointment that I will not be able to finish the Temple. I will grow old, but others will come after me. This will make it even more grandiose.”

Takeaway: You can’t build anything grand by yourself. Learn to love that. Get good at collaborating, communicate the vision clearly to your co-creators and trust your team to create something more grandiose than you ever could on your own.

Here’s the deal: Those of us who feel called to do transformational work, to lead transformational businesses or market transformational products, can get very hung up in fretting about what the audience will think, whether they’ll love it or hate it, and how on earth we’ll ever get it all done.

But I found a massive chunk of fresh creative power when I got to the place where I stopped fretting about audience reactions and started creating what I feel inspired to and what feels alive for me while I’m creating it. When I feel engaged and alive while I’m creating something or giving a talk, my audience will feel that, too. It happens over and over again.

On the other hand, worrying too much about how something will be received before I write it or say it has a chilling effect. It stops the flow. It’s like trying to edit something as you write it. Your brain can’t work in flow mode and edit mode at the same time. And worrying about the audience reaction to something while you’re creating that thing is like asking for editing input from hypothetical folks in the future.

It’ll pinch you right off from your internal pipeline of inspiration.

Our job as creators and leaders is to stay in that place of feeling engaged, create what feels alive, edit and shape that with wisdom, experience and judgment, and then put it out into the world and continue to shape it with the collaboration of the audience.

Like many of you, my art is my business. I create because I am called to. I create to express myself fully and freely. And I create with the objective to uplift, engage and spark wanted change for my readers, customers and clients. Passive content consumption does not transform people’s lives; content + action + connection does. So I create content and experiences that spark people into action and connection in their real, everyday lives.

So you can see why La Badu’s, Dir. Lynch’s and Sr. Gaudí’s comments prompted me to think about business and marketing and even my team through a fresh lens. I’m moving into a season of program-design and product-building at SoulTour having made a big shift.

Instead of trying to solve so-called business “problems” or overcoming “challenges”, we’re answering these questions:

• What if we trusted our audiences to co-create with us, in the way they activate our content in their own lives?
• What if we trusted in the universal law that everything is always working out for the expansion of ourselves and of humanity?
• What if we applied that to the way we interact with our customers and our audiences?
• What if we trusted that the right customers will come to our work at the right time, and would engage with it in a way that would ultimately work out for their good and ours?

What if we created what feels alive and resonant, after having studied and immersed ourselves in our customers’ journeys and listening to their hopes, dreams, wants and needs?

• What if we then put it out to them, in an highly valuable, but imperfect, state?
• And then, what if we took the feedback we like as a green light to invest more and do more of that, and the feedback we don’t like so much as course correction, instruction about what to do less of
• What if we viewed our audiences, customers and employees as co-creators or collaborators, instead of as the tough nuts to crack we so often envision them to be?

The shift to viewing your audience, customers and team as co-creators and collaborators does a number of things. It shifts the whole energy of your business, for one. Things get more light and playful. Possibilities expand. Innovation becomes the order of the day. It feels more like answering questions than solving problems.

It also shifts the whole energy of marketing, in particular.

It makes it less fraught, less life or death, less win or lose. It turns every piece of marketing, every marketing message into an invitation to your prospective co-creators.

And there are two essential components of an invitation.

An invitation is, first and foremost, a summons. This creative summons, the business and marketing kind of summons, tells your audience your presence is requested by a certain someone, at a certain time, in a certain place.

But an invitation is also a welcome: a preview of the delightful thing you’ve written or created or built for your audience. It’s the message that look, I created this beautiful thing for you. Just for you. I’ve lit the fire, plated your favorite food, turned on your favorite music and when you get here, you’lllove it.

Catch this principle: When you write something and put it out into the world, start your podcast or blog, create an MVP version of your product, or market whatever your work is to market, you are doing nothing more fearsome than sending out an invitation to co-creation. You’re beaconing out a signal to the readers, listeners, watchers, audience members, customers and even partners, employees and investors who will want to play this game of business and life with you, to co-create with you.

The overarching lesson of The Badu, Dir. Lynch and Señor Gaudí is not only to trust your creative process, but to trust the co-creative process. You’ll create with more ease and joy, and you’ll create more grandiose, more impactful, more beautiful things that way.

Head up + heart out,

TNN

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

Good morning Friends,

In the last few weeks, I’ve had a handful of different people ask me the same exact question:

Q: How did you get so prolific?

Q: How do you write so much and have it be good?

Q: How are you so insanely productive?

Reflecting on this, I realized that I’d given a different answer every time.

A: I meditate every day. And I practice free-writing. I call these my flow practices. They open my pipeline for inspiration, which I’ve learned to turn into inspired action immediately.

A: I’ve cultivated something I call Monk Mode, and I take vows, cloister up and create sacred space for my deepest, most important work when it beckons.

A: I get help. And I hire well. Even when I’m “hiring” volunteers.

A: I’ve systematically unrepressed myself, gotten clarity as to my personal purpose and focus and crafted an entire lifestyle that supports who I really am and why I’m on this planet.

And I wasn’t even done. There are a handful of skills and beliefs and actions—which I think of collectively as ‘practices’—that have really flipped the ‘prolific’ switch on for me over the years.

I thought I’d share them under this umbrella of Practices of the Prolific. And they’re not just for writers. They work anytime you want to turn your thoughts into things.

Here’s the first one I want to share. I call it IMPERFECTIONISM.

I have a solid, internal spirit of excellence. I want the things I create to be beautiful and impactful. Excellence is doing your very best, whatever that is on a given day, in a way that constantly expands your capacity to create.

Excellence is expansion.

But excellence is not perfection.

When it comes to creating a book, film, organization, community, family or life you love, “spirit of excellence” can slippery slope its way into “perfectionism.”

And that’s not good. Because perfectionism stops you before you ever start. Perfectionism shrinks down the exact boldness it takes to create new things: the boldness that is the essence of creativity and innovation.

Awhile back, between books, I started reading about writing. And I came across Anne Lamott’s book, “Bird by bird,” in which she urges writers to dive into the process of creating something she calls an SRD: a shi!$y rough draft.

When I started writing to write a SRD instead of trying to write a brilliant masterpiece, the whole game changed. The prolific switch flipped to ‘on’. Because when you’re aiming to write something great, you unintentionally activate an unholy trinity of blocks fueled by perfectionism: Inner Editor, Inner Critic and Inner Censor. If you allow these energies to take over, they’ll have you writing a single sentence, then agonizing, rewriting and ruminating over that sentence. You can lose a whole day (or week) that way.

But when you aim to write an SRD, the whole point is for the writing to be bad. So you turn off Inner Editor. Deactivate Inner Critic. Tell Inner Censor you’ll see her later. And then something incredible happens. You realize that there really is a pipeline of infinite intelligence trying to flow through you and to you at all times. It has all the energy and every idea you’ll ever want or need. And it’s already in you.

But you can pinch yourself off from the pipeline with fear, grudges, self-criticism and (you guessed it) perfectionism.

When you aim to write an SRD, you give yourself permission to write something bad. And then you had better buckle up, because the pipeline opens up and inspiration flows in.

Catch this principle: your brain cannot work in flow mode and edit mode at the same time. Everything great that was ever written was essentially written in flow mode. Then the brilliant, final piece was sculpted and edited out of that. That’s the beauty of the SRD. It allows you to have the voluminous output AND the blissful experience of creating in flow mode. It’s harnesses the incredible leverage of inspired action.

You can come back around and edit later. That’s how it comes to be that the SRD is the prerequisite of basically everything great.

Then there’s the matter of practice. Practice hours come as a happy accident of writing in uncensored, unedited flow mode. And they trigger another happy accident in turn: you get good. Over time, your SRDs start to be way, way less shitty, so to speak. They might even start to become good. And then great. This makes the dreaded chore of editing way less burdensome, with time.

That said, if you write to create an SRD, you might learn to love the entire creative process—including the editing—instead of just holding your breath through the whole thing to get to the beautifully polished final draft. You might start to feel that writing helps you process your world and manage your own chemistry. And that editing what you write is the final fun of sculpting the clay of your own creation.

And surprise: this ain’t just about writing. It’s about creating ANYTHING. There’s even a version of the concept of the SRD that applies for business and especially for tech businesses: the MVP or minimum viable product. [I wrote more about that in this video on what I call Lean Life Methodology.]

For the past few months I’ve really been focused on Lean Startup and Lean Life Methodology, as I’m working to get SoulTour fully up and running. I’ve been practicing being ok with rolling out bits and pieces of the vision, exposing them to the market and using customer feedback to build the launch-ready version.

Reid Hoffman (VC and founder of LinkedIn) has become the Anne Lamott of my entrepreneurial journey, by way of this quote:

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

I use this standard all the time to give myself permission to put things out the door that are great, but not perfect. Because if I wait for perfect, I’ll have waited too long to learn what I need to know to make the next right move. And I’ll have underserved my audience, who is requesting things I can deliver now in an excellent, but imperfect, way.

On the other hand, when I just begin and launch the imperfect thing, I get crystal clear on what to create next. I see what works and what doesn’t, I see how the audience responds, I see how I feel about it once it’s in the world, and I get a level of clarity about the next step to take that I’d have never had just sitting in a room soul-searching for concrete, granular action items.

For me, the concepts of the SRD and MVP far transcend my writing and my business. Now it’s an overarching lens for my whole life. I’ve rebranded it IMPERFECTIONISM. As I move through the world and through the timeline of my life, I make it my goal to create beautiful, impactful, imperfect things.

I’ll throw the gathering at my house while the backyard is overgrown. I’ll launch a limited version of the ad campaign before the product is fully built, so I can connect with the customers that are drawn to it and learn how best to serve them. I’ll film a video at my desk with my phone, instead of in the studio with a production crew.

Now mind you, I still embody a spirit of excellence. So the content will be .

But I’d rather write an inspired book every year than a perfect book every 10.

Because perfect, as the saying goes, is the enemy of done. And that makes it the enemy of people like us.

SoulTour in the news: I’m on the tail end of my mostly unplugged Europe > East Coast vacation, so imagine my surprise when SoulTour was covered by Forbes!

Much has changed since I gave this interview months back, but the upshot is still right: we’re on a mission to help you care for your soul and live with freedom, growth and joy. Enjoy!

Forbes: How A Spirituality Startup Is Solving Silicon Valley’s Religious Apathy

Head up + heart out,

TNN

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

Good morning, friend.

I’m in Spain this week, so I’ll be brief.

Pues, corto. Porque cuando en España…

One of my go-to morning meditations goes as follows:

Today is the day I pronounce as my day of greatest appreciation.
Today is the day I pronounce as my day of greatest awareness.
Today is the day I pronounce as my day of greatest emotional awareness and emotional response to my awareness.
Today I am pronouncing myself a liver of unconditional love:
Unconditional clarity, unconditional alignment, unconditional attunement.
Today I am tuned in, tapped in, turned on to who I really am.
Today I intend, to the best of my ability, to fulfill myself as I am meant to be fulfilled.
Today I will look for reasons to feel good, and I will find them.
And if I stumble upon something that doesn’t feel so good I will revel in the perfection of my guidance system.
And I will make the adjustment today.

—Esther Hicks

POD: Your guidance system

Do you trust in the perfection of your internal guidance system?

Do you follow what it tells you to do?

Think of a time when you did or did not follow your internal guidance system. What’d you learn?

Head up + heart out,

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

Good morning,

A few months back, I saw an HBO miniseries I’d strongly recommend to anyone interested in creating anything: The Defiant Ones. The four-part series tells the story of music producers and entrepreneurs Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine (the latter of whom got his start producing for John Lennon, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Nicks, among others).

The last of the four episodes is particularly powerful because it contains a bunch of one-liners about creativity, from a bunch of creative geniuses.

Like this one, which I love so much: “Genius can come from anywhere.”

But the one I want us to sit with for today’s prompt came from Iovine himself. He said, of creating anything from music to business endeavors, that the name of the game is to avoid paying attention to anything but your creative vision. He elaborated, explaining that’s why they put blinders on horses, in racing. Otherwise, the horses would look at the horses around them, get distracted and make the wrong step. He spoke this example over footage of a racehorse making a misstep, taking a tumble, getting completely run over by the horse behind him, who then all also tumbled over each other into a hot mess of horses and jockeys.

The parallels between this horse in blinders analogy and your own vision of creating something —anything—in life are fairly easy to see, as are the lessons.

Get distracted by looking at the wrong things, make the wrong step.

Get distracted comparing your life to others’, make the wrong step.

Get distracted comparing your life to the life you thought you were going to live, make the wrong step.

Get distracted comparing your life to what somebody else thinks you “should” do, or what culture says you should do, or what your family has taught that you can and cannot do, or with your own past and. . .well, you get the drill.

In reflection, though, I feel like the distraction point is in some ways way less important than the real principle deeply present in the example of a horse in blinders: the principle of focus.

Focus on your now, make the right step.

Focus on what feels resonant, what feels expansive, move toward that. Make the right step.

Focus on what feels expansive, and that grows. Make the right step.

Focus on what feels purposeful, meaningful, solid and also fun or joyous, make the right step.

Focus on moving into and through the past of least resistance, make the right steps.

Focus on what is noble and right, which you know because it feels that way, make the right step

Focus on growing your capacity, for productivity but also for love and joy and fun, step rightly.

Focus on using your words to bless instead of curse, others and yourself, make steps that result in more blessings, more life and more love. For you and for them.

Prompt of the Day [POD]: Horse in blinders

How does it feel, the idea that you get to be the boss of what you focus on?

Do you give yourself permission to ignore what doesn’t serve you? Do you give yourself permission to focus on what does?

What comes up for you when you think of blinders as a metaphor for your internal guidance system, in that it both steers your focus away and towards the right direction for your steps?

Head up + heart out

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

Note: I told this story onstage last week at the Hustle’s 2X storytelling conference in San Francisco. It was ????. Here’s the audio recording of my talk (15 min.) if you want to listen!

If you’d rather read, carry on!

By now, you might know that I consider myself an amateur doctor. You need surgery? Well, if I can find a YouTube video of it, I’VE GOT YOU.

Anyhow. A little while back I had to see a head and neck doctor for something or other. And while he was in there, I remembered something weird I’d seen during my own DIY doctor stints in the mirror.

I asked him to please look at these weird little bumps I’d seen growing in my throat. I’d asked my own GP about them, and he had no idea what they were but said they looked like “healthy” tissue so not to mind them.

This specialist took one look, stepped back and asked: “When did you have your tonsils out?”

“About 30 years ago,” I replied.

“Well, what you have here is a pretty rare case of tonsillar regrowth,” he diagnosed. Tonsillar regrowth, I would learn, is a completely harmless but completely bizarre phenomenon in which one’s tonsils can make little efforts to grow back after you’ve had them out. Physicians think this only happens when the original tonsil tissue was not completely removed.

They don’t grow back all the way to full size; in fact, we’ve been calling my tonsil spots “tonsil buds” or “tonsil nubbins.”

But catch this principle: something that was natural and innate in my body was cut out (with good reason, at the time). And that thing so insistently demanded to have its rightful spot in my body that it is growing back, fresh and healthy, over three decades later.

Takeaway #1: Your body is a miracle. It is marvelous. An actual wonder. We focus so often on our aches and pains and cellulite. But ever since that day last year, I cannot stop thinking of my body as this marvelous contraption that is so self-correcting in the direction of its own well-being and healing that it will try to grow back what’s been cut out.

Takeaway #2: What is inborn in you, the innate gifts, talents, callings and destiny with which you came here, can never be totally cut out. Never. Not by failures, not by age, not by even discouragement, or doubt or fear, unless you allow that to happen. Not by a bad childhood. You might think you are too old or too traumatized or too something to do the dream that’s in your heart, but I invite you to try on the belief that these things have all been preparation.

They have honed you, burnished you and thicken your skin. They have tenderized your heart, but also strengthened it. They have helped you get clear on what you don’t want and what you do want. They have helped you become more wise. More loving. More you.

You’ve been prepared.

And now the world needs you. You feel it. I know you do, or you wouldn’t be here. People like you, people who seek out inspiration—which means to breathe in, take spirit in—they tend to be uplifters, too. Just like me.

Prompt Of the Day (POD): Tonsillar regrowth

Do you have a dream or a calling that has been dormant, or has just not been an area of focus, for any reason?

What is it?

Name it. Detail it.

What do you need to be or do or release in order to let it regrow, to breathe fresh life IN to your dreams?

Friends:

I learned something recently about bullfighting that I found fascinating and relevant for you transformational leaders and people who just care about creating a more beautiful world.

This thing came to my mind time and time again this weekend as I witnessed the transformational leadership of the children at the various Marches for Our Lives:

>> The leadership of Emma Gonzales, who has been truth-telling like a wise old woman and mightily holding power to account for weeks now, since Parkland.

>> The leadership of MLK’s little 9-year-old granddaughter, Yolanda Renee King, who declared her own dream that “enough is enough.”

>> The skin-tingling clarity and leadership of Naomi Wadler, who spoke up for black women victims of gun violence: the single most likely demographic group to be shot and killed in this nation—TWICE as likely as any other group, according to the CDC. This ELEVEN-year-old called out the sordid truth that “it’s subconsciously embedded into peoples’ minds that somebody with a darker complexion is worth less and their life isn’t as valuable as a white girl or man’s.”

She also stood for her generation, in their power with total and complete lucidity: “My friends and I might still be 11 and we might still be in elementary school, but we know. We know life isn’t equal for everyone and we know what is right and wrong. We also know that we stand in the shadow of the Capitol, and we know that we have seven short years until, we too, have the right to vote.”

But back to this thing I learned. In bullfighting, there’s a concept called querencia, from the infinitive querer: to desire. As you can imagine, when a bull goes out to fight, he’s 100% on the defensive: he’s reacting to his circumstances and entrapment, he’s reacting to the matador’s provocations, he’s just constantly reacting out of his own fear and rage.

As powerful as every bull seems (and is), it is actually at its least powerful when all of its actions are reactions.

But during any given bullfight, there’s a place in the arena where the bull can find a momentary home: a place of safety where he can take a moment, stop reacting out of rage and reclaim his natural strength and power.

This spot in the ring and in the bull’s mind is called his querencia. It is both geographic and metaphysical. And it is no joke.

The bullfighters say that once a bull takes the opportunity to pause, recalibrate, stop reacting and tap into its true power, an incredible transformation takes place, just that fast. Allow a bull to stop and find its querencia, and it becomes unstoppable.

Ernest Hemingway even observed and wrote about this:

“A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring, a preferred locality… It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home. It does not usually show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on. In this place he feels that he has his back against the wall and in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.”

— Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

I believe that’s what we witnessed, if we were paying attention, this weekend. These children have been in the fight. Virtually all of them were born after Columbine, in a world where school safety has always been a more or less oxymoronic phrase.

But in their brains and hearts and spirits, they’ve found their querencia. They are no longer simply reacting to this shooting or that allegation. Sure, they are on a mission to uproot some of what’s broken in our nation. But they are solidly claiming their power to proactively create the world they know is possible; a world in which children can really be the heroes that create a world that works better for everyone.

They are in their querencia, and they are unstoppable. The world will have to expand and adjust to them, not the other way around. It already is. See, for example, today’s NYT piece from Justice Stevens encouraging these young ladies and gentlemen to keep it up and consider casting their eyes on a much bigger prize: the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

Catch this principle: when you stop reacting and get clear on who you really are and why you’re really here, when you stand in your querencia, everyone and everything must take notice and either get on board or get out of the way.

It doesn’t matter whether the change you are here on this planet to help make is in the lives of a hundred million constituents, a hundred customers, the 40 kids in your classroom or the two in your own home. It’s all worthy of life force. The truth is that you came here on a mission, and judging that mission is a repressive endeavor. Endeavoring to get clearer and clearer on what it is, on the other hand, is extremely worthwhile.

That’s what transformational leaders know, and that’s what they learn how to do. We are creators, not reactors.

Head up + heart out,

Friend-o-mine:

I’m generally good about not getting sucked into internet rabbit holes, but occasionally I indulge my word nerd-dom and just go there. In this week’s installment, I became curious about the phrase “pull out all the stops”.

The visual associated with that phrase in my mind’s eye was very clear. It involved a steep, San Francisco hill with a car parked just a micron downhill from the peak, just the way I’ve parked mine a million times: gear shift in ‘P’, parking brake engaged, wheels turned into the curb (just in case).

But then some unknown person, for some unknown reason, releases the parking brake.

No big deal.

Until said unknown person also slides the shifter back a couple notches, from P to N.

Hm. Okaaaaaay.

So it’s getting dicey here. But the wheels are still pointed toward the curb. Until they’re not.

You can probably guess what’s next. This curiously motivated hypothetical individual decides to turn the steering wheel as hard as they can in the other direction, creating a situation in which, you guessed it:

ALL THE STOPS HAVE BEEN PULLED OUT.

And once they have, the car that started this story at the top of the hill isn’t there for long. The laws of gravity and inertia take the stage, and an automotive freefall ensues, continuing until the car is stopped by some external force or obstacle or comes to rest on a flat road.

But that’s just what pulling out the stops looks like in my mind. I was curious as to what the phrase actually meant, so I consulted the Interwebs.

Organ-ic origins

“Pulling out all the stops”, as a phrase, originated with organs (the musical ones, not the physical ones). In Old English, “stoppes” were music notes or keys. As time went on and pipe organs became a thing, people started calling the knobs that controlled a given pipe organ’s capacity to play, “stops.”

Pushing in a stop limited the volume and range of said organ; pulling a stop out allowed it to play a wider range of notes and to play louder.

When you pulled out all the stops, you allowed the organ to play at its maximum capacity of both tones and volume.

Forcing vs. allowing

The reason we’re even talking about this is that I’d wanted to use the phrase “pull out all the stops” in something I was writing. So I checked its meaning in the Oxford Dictionary, which said it means “to apply great force”.

But that wasn’t quite the meaning I’d had in mind, so I went back to the very beginning.

You heard me right. I’m calling the Oxford Dictionary out. To “pull out all the stops” is NOT to apply great force. Pulling out all the stops just releases the deep down resistance that someone built into the organ, so you can receive the full benefit of its innate internal capacity.

See where I’m going with this? If you need a more exhilarating example, think about the car scenario: you don’t even have to turn the key in the ignition for that car to go from the top of the hill to the bottom. You just pull out all the stops and let the car and the laws of the universe do what they do.

And same goes for us. For our lives, the things we want to create. For your personal calling.

Here’s the deal: each of us was built with creative power coursing through our veins. Over a lifetime, our families, our society, our culture, even crises and traumas, they wire us with “stops”. We’re not born with them. When was the last time you saw a self-conscious newborn? Exactly. Never.

We are not born with stops. We acquire them.

Resistance (not the good kind)

Steven Pressfield buckets all these stops under the villainous header of Resistance. To be clear, we’re not talking about the good kind of resistance, the political kind. We’re talking about the internal force that derails us anytime we attempt to create something or level up closer to our highest selves.

It’s the force that creates all addictions, including addictions to drama and crises. It’s the force that powers perfectionism and procrastination. It’s the force that gives birth to fear, victim stories, self-medication and self-doubt.

I’ve come to believe that all Resistance has its roots in the deep down dread that haunts most people here in the West, and definitely most leaders and professionals: the acquired feeling that they are fundamentally flawed or that the world is, or both. The feeling that there’s maybe just a little something wrong with them, no matter how much they’ve achieved. Or that, when things are going really well, the chances are good that something bad is about to happen.

This goes back to the phrase I mentioned last week: the trance of unworthiness. My personal nickname for the trance of unworthiness is, in fact, The Big Stop.

Guys, my career has been a heckuva ride through almost every industry you can imagine that sells any form of personal growth and transformation. I’ve worked for some of the biggest and brightest, most transformational companies on this planet. No joke. I’ve had the blessing of leading nearly 8,000 people through my 30 Day Writing Challenges, which started as a passion project and are now part of my business. I’ve seen both their pain and their progress, intimately.

Here’s what I’ve learned: whether you’re trying to learn to mediate or setting a goal in your business or doing a Whole 30, if you are still in the haze of the trance of unworthiness, Resistance will be your enemy.

You know what to do. All of health and fitness media and personal growth literature exists to tell you how to do it. But the issue is not even the logistical how. It’s the spiritual and emotional how. It’s the truth that Resistance will rise up and rear its ugly head.

The more sophisticated transformational programs will call it out, like Pressfield does. And they will cheerlead you to power through it. Overcome it. Resist your internal Resistance.

But it’s so hard. It’s a Battle Royale. Sometimes, you can win it, achieving your goal or getting the thing done you were trying to do. But it’s such a struggle, and it’s hard to struggle like that for long or in different areas of your life. It’s exhausting. More importantly, it’s a battle you can never fully, finally win.

Because there’s always more to do. Always another battle to fight. That’s why some of the most successful people on this planet, by all appearances, still feel so empty. So worried about when they’ll ever get “there” so they can relax, finally.

Good news is, you can deactivate resistance entirely if you go deep enough, and wake up from the trance. You can learn to sit with the discomfort of radically accepting everything about yourself and your world, eliminating all that internal turbulence, judgment and Resistance. I don’t mean to be ok with injustice or to accept bad behavior from others. I mean to practice acknowledging what is true and embracing reality instead of emotionally flailing against it. And I mean from there, pouring the energy you used to invest in the struggle into everything you ever want to create and do and be.

That’s what MLK did. And Malala. Gandhi, too. And Michelle “when they go low, we go high” Obama.

It’s what peaceful revolutionaries do.

Next week, I’m doing a private, beta launch of a new program called the School of Upliftment. It will be a year-round collective focused on activating personal growth, creative power and spiritual wellbeing in every area of members’ lives. The objective is to transform the way members manage their everyday routines, bodies, emotions, careers and relationships for the better, helping them turn more of their thoughts into things without the struggle.

In the School of Upliftment, we will cover some foundations of wellbeing, including this revolutionary radical self-acceptance. Then we’ll systematically focus on every area of our lives through the lens of spiritual practice (like meditation and writing), transformational teachings and modern life skills. And we’ll do it all together.

It’s an inner revolution, powered by soul.

Head up + heart out,

Friends:

I’m thinking a lot these days on our purpose and essential nature as human beings. We are in these bodies, on this planet for a brief moment in universal time. It strikes me that, while we are here, we have a unique ability to turn our thoughts and inspirations into things.

In other words, we are creators.

We create companies, cultures, books and music. We create families and relationships and tangible, physical things, products. We also create experiences and lives, sometimes intentionally and other times, accidentally. We create joy and connection.

And sometimes we create fear and drama, disconnection, for ourselves and for others.

I’m playing a game right now where I try to see every interaction with someone as an opportunity to create a deeper connection than was there before. It has caused me to insert many a pause before I speak and be very deliberate about how what I say to my son, my mother, my business partners and my sweetheart, even in seemingly mundane, everyday conversations.

This is related to the First Agreement of don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements. (I see these Agreements as responsible for a big chunk of the freedom and energy with which I live my life.) The First is to be impeccable with your word, which means to understand the profound power of our words to bless or curse and to commit to use your word in favor of love and life.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: we can create life with our words. Have you ever seen how your child or employee or even friend or a person on the street unfurls to life when you connect eye to eye, and speak even 3 words of life on them?

I was walking in New York the other day, and a gentleman with a cardboard sign, dirty face and tattered clothes was screaming vitriol at the flood of humanity that was coming out of the subway station. His rage was so pure it was almost visible. And he was just flooding it, washing it over every person who passed by.

I sort of steeled myself to walk past him. But a few paces before I reached him, I met his gaze and silently shot him a blessing.

IT WAS LIKE HE HEARD ME. He pointed at me, and screamed YOOOOOOOU!

I raised an eyebrow. I cocked my head a bit.

And—I kid you not—his next words came out calmly, clearly and in his indoor voice. They were: “have great energy.”

“YOOOOOOU have great energy,” this man said to me. I closed my eyes, smiled and nodded and walked on. He went back to his regularly scheduled program.

We create. We create connections and things and ideas and life. And we do this, first, with our minds and souls. Then we put our souls on deck, in the form of the things and relationships and businesses and communities we create.

I spend a lot of my time working with leaders and entrepreneurs and creators, helping them get unstuck. What I see many times in people who are stuck on a project or in an area of their life is this: they want to be or do or have or create one thing, but they are at a spiritual standstill because their actions, beliefs, words and energy are in total opposition to what they want, for various reasons.

We can talk about why this happens later, but for now, let’s understand the energy of creation and the other energies that are in opposition, in the interest of releasing any spiritual standstills.

Creating is about bringing to life. It’s about transformation. It’s about receiving inspiration, which is always trying to flow to and through us, and then marrying inspiration with action, immediately.

Creating is not just proactive, yang, domination, force energy. It is also about stillness, receptivity and trust that everything is always working out for you, which allows you to make bold moves and steps toward your creation without fear, which closes off, corrodes and shrinks the inspiration pipeline.

Creating is not about passive consumption. You cannot create while you are reacting. This is why outrage is so distracting, why the headlines and Facebook and Twitter pull so many people off their life’s course. That’s why it’s worthwhile to cultivate the ability to stay calm while everyone else around you loses their head (e.g., when the stock market does what it’s doing right now).

Click to watch on Instagram: What creators do when the stock market dives

And you cannot create while you are judging. This is true whether your judgment is being leveled at politicians, the system, the folks who voted for somebody, rich people, poor people, your mother or even yourself.

See, creating is what you do when you love someone or something enough to collaborate toward the end of their well-being, growth and expansion.

Creating is an energy of love. Judgment is an energy of disdain, of dislike, or worse: hate. Judgment creates turbulence in your system, regardless of who you are judging. It interrupts your ability to receive inspiration and turn it into inspired action. Creation and judgment do not coexist. They just can’t.

You are a creator. Not a consumer. Not a reactor. And not a judge.

Head up + heart out,