Friends,

[Read on, or listen to today’s Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here.]

“I’m behind” is what, in my School of Upliftment, we call a Scarcity Story.

I know “I’m behind” sounds like an almost meaningless verbal tic that ambitious people say all the time, because everyone really is so busy. But it’s not meaningless, by a long shot.

Chronically saying “I’m behind” both reflects and wires in a sneaky, silent, low-grade belief in unworthiness and scarcity.

“I’m behind” is a script that keeps you feeling like who you are is not enough, like what you’re doing is not enough, and that there is never—and maybe there will never be—enough time or enough of you to allow you to relax and experience the fullness of life.

This particular script—”I’m behind”—keeps you out of alignment with the ‘total trust’ way of life: total trust in divine order and timing, total trust that everything is always working out for you, and, especially, total trust in the process and experience of life, which always brings you exactly where you need to be, exactly when you need to be there.

“I’m behind” is a chronic judgment of yourself as not measuring up to what you think you should be doing or should be producing in a certain time frame, based on who knows what standard.

And lest you be tempted to judge yourself for judging yourself, “I’m behind” is not just something you made up. It’s a cultural lie. It’s a trance—so deep, pervasive and unconscious that we can operate a whole lifetime unaware that we’re holding our own breath, recklessly running to some deadline or waiting for the catastrophe we suspect we’ll create if we miss the deadline. Even when the deadline is self-imposed or imaginary.

Our nature is freedom. So when we start imposing all sorts of deadlines and timelines on ourselves, we almost always internally feel the rise of internal Resistance, our Inner Roadblocks: procrastination, perfectionism, self-criticism, crises, dramas, certain addictions and all manner of playing small ensue. The early evidence that we’re dealing with the Resistance that nearly always arises when we try to live, be or do better is that we start parroting the cultural mantra: “I’m behind.”

“I’m behind” is related to the cultural lie of: I’d better hustle and be perfect and achieve and perform and produce, or Something Very Bad Might Happen.

It’s a cousin of the lie of always waiting for the other shoe to drop, because life can’t really be this good.

It’s a first cousin of the lie that there’s never enough to go around: not enough time, not enough energy, not enough love, not enough money, and the list goes on.

And it’s definitely related to the lie that you don’t really deserve for life to be full of health, wealth, love and self-expression, so you’d better put yourself up to totally unreasonable standards so you can prove to your unworthiness, prove your limitations, prove your hypothesis that you’re going to disappoint yourself, yet again.

Chronic “I’m behind” keeps you tensed up. So it never really helps you bust past an inner roadblock of procrastination or perfectionism. It just keeps you in struggle mode, in breathless mode, in not enough mode. It keeps you entangled in the struggle between you and you.

On the flip side, unlearning the lie of “I’m behind” releases the struggle, so that (a) you instantly feel better and can appreciate the brilliant reality of your life right now, and (b) you re-open the limitless pipeline of inspiration that is trying to flow to you and expand your access to the incredible efficiency and leverage of inspired action. The end result is that you do create (without hard effort or forced so-called productivity) a higher volume of brilliant output than you did before.

Here are a few of my strategies for unlearning this lie of “I’m behind”—in my mind, they bucket pretty neatly into two categories: (1) Spiritual + Personal and (2) Practical. These two categories go hand in hand.

Spiritual + Personal

1. Embrace your inner contrarian. Be counter-culture. Understand that consumer and media culture are built on messages that you’re not enough, and decide to reject these messages. Understand the vast, life-creating power of your words, and stop using them against yourself. Above all else: Stop saying you’re behind, even when that’s what the people around you seem to want to talk about the most. If you need to, think up a new script for redirecting the conversation or affirming that you’re in the just-right place at the just-right time in advance, for when the “I’m so behind, how behind are you” conversations arise.

2. Remind yourself of the rightness of divine right order and timing… and relax into it. In my Writing Challenges, we do this exercise of writing and telling our personal breakthrough stories backwards, so we can connect the dots and remind ourselves of how often we’ve been surprised and delighted at how things turned out in life—how seemingly crappy circumstances turned around, and how when it looked like all was lost, help was actually on the way, all along.

Divine order and timing are real. They are not linear or logical. When you feel chronically behind, it’s because you’re trying to do everything in this life 100% on your own, without the assistance of Source, Soul, Spirit and even the other people that are on your path, waiting to collaborate to assist you. When you learn to radically accept that wellbeing is the order of our universe, that life is a process and that everything really and truly is always working out for you in divine timing and order, you can’t help but relax a bit and dial down the “I’m behind,” because this: you can’t bebehind.

You are always in the right place, at the right time, to meet the right people, get the right idea, receive the clarity or experience the learning you need to. Period. Always. The only way you can be cut off from this Infinite Intelligence is to crank yourself up with tension, doubt and anxiety. Your job, in fact, is to relax enough to receive your divine downloads, and then to act when inspiration strikes—no matter how small or insignificant the “inspired” idea seems to be, at the time.

3. Practice opening the Pipeline, at least daily. There’s a Pipeline of limitless energy and inspiration flowing through you and to you at all times. Only you, your anxiety, your chaotic calendar and self-talk can pinch yourself off from it. But you can widen it and trigger the flow, too. Meditation opens the Pipeline. Free-writing opens it, too. So does movement, and many other processes and practices, and even certain types of interactions with certain types of people.

Your rule is this: Do things that make you feel spacious and expansive, inside your body, instead of constricted and tight.

When you practice opening the Pipeline every day, inspiration flows more readily and you are less resistant to acting on it. This is critical, because when you are working, creating, crafting from a place of inspired action, you are exponentially more efficient than when you are working in a state of time-terrorized nose-to-grindstone. You actually create more, and more quickly. So you find yourself resolving the “I’m behind” dramaturge from both ends—releasing unrealistic expectations of what you can do in a given time and also actually creating more, brilliant things at the same time.

Practical

4. Don’t try to do more than 5 things a day. I literally limit my task lists to 5 things a day, and 6 larger projects per every 6-week period of time. More than that is untenable and starts the day off with that breathless “I’m behind” feeling. I do allow one of my 5 things to be an email hour, during which I tie up loose ends, reply to emails, and make quick calls.

And no: I don’t return all my emails every day.

But I do write somewhere between 10- and 20,000 words a week, I teach a bunch of live courses, I speak all over the world, and I create beautiful programs and attract incredible students and participants to them. And despite my never getting to (or even aspiring to) inbox zero, the sun somehow continues to rise and set.

5. Use decathexis to create time and space for what you want to do. Cathexis is the time, money and energy you put into any project, relationship or initiative. Decathexis is what we call the time, money and energy you recoup when you put an end to doing something—anything.

If you never feel like you have time for the things that you want to start doing, here’s my super deep and profound lesson for you: stop doing other shit. Prioritize, and stop doing the stuff you’re doing that you don’t care about to free up the time and life force to pour into what you do care about. You’ll find that once you’re doing the life-giving things, they endlessly renew your energy to do more of that.

Call B.S. on yourself, if you hear yourself saying “I don’t have time” to do X, where X is something you really want to do and takes less than a half-hour (like: meditating, or reading).

Seriously: Is that really true?

Are you on Facebook or Netflix, ever? How about this: Promise yourself that every time you feel the urge to check Facebook, you’ll take a 5-minute walk first, or journal or read for 5 minutes, or plank, or whatever it is you say you’d like to do. Do that for a week.

Report back.

6. Seal the leak of context-switching. Bucket deep-thought projects all together, and bucket light-attention projects or meetings together. Switching from meetings to writing, for example, takes a lot of time: up to 45 minutes, according to neuropsychologists. So instead of booking yourself strictly an hour here or there to write and being frustrated that you’re not making progress, book all of your meetings on certain days or in the morning or afternoon, and then book your deep-thought/deep-work time all on certain days, or in the morning or afternoon.

The momentum you’ll create is another way to open the pipeline. And you’ll find yourself being less distracted both during your meetings/light work and your deep, focused, thinky work, too.

7. Don’t try to catch up—reset instead. There are times when deadlines are very important and very real. But we often set them arbitrarily, and then self-flagellate when we miss them.

When you set a schedule for a project and pieces of it take longer than you expect, don’t try to “catch up” if there really is flexibility. Instead, anytime you can, just reset the project calendar and the expectations. Otherwise, that need to catch up will just snowball into a more and more intense inner constriction and you’ll continue to feel further and further behind. “Catching up” almost never really works to stop any procrastination or perfectionism that’s going on, either: It just intensifies the struggle, and shuts off your access to your brain’s highest centers of creativity and inspired innovation.

If you have the power to reset the calendar and the expectations, you’ll find yourself feeling more spacious and also in less judgment of yourself, and you’ll also find that those around you relax, too. So you open up not just your own internal Pipeline of energy and inspiration, but the Pipeline of your vendors, partners, team members, even your family members, at the same time.

Thoughts? Hit reply…I’m all ears!

Head up + heart out,

TNN

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