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Time To Come Alive

After reading The Tools by Barry Michels & Phil Stutz, I decided that I liked the idea of having tools to access in your mental tool shed that helped me move through the day. I am still practicing Bring It On, Active Love and Jeopardy. And I looked for more tools, which I found in their newer book, Coming Alive.

What makes these tools great, like the last ones, is the ease of implementation. Instantaneously, you can change your state by following simple steps. As the saying goes, it is simple and not easy. The hardest part of using these tools is remembering to use them. Each requires you to pause before responding or taking action. And that takes practice.

The tools in this book focus on becoming the best version of ourselves by tapping into our innate wisdom:

The belief that an invisible animating energy underlies our existence is
thousands of years old. Unlike our modern, mechanical notion of energy, which we understand via mathematics, this is a living energy that we feel inside us. In Eastern religions, this energy, or Life Force, is known variously as prana (in Indian philosophy and medicine), lung (in
Tibetan Buddhism), and chi (in Chinese philosophy and medicine). In the Old Testament, it was called ruach, the breath of God, which gave mankind not only life, but the spirit to evolve. (pg 11, Coming Alive)

By experiencing this energy deeply, we can come to see the Life Force around us expressed in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. They are the true forces that make life meaningful:

To put it simply, Truth reveals your path, Beauty inspires you to walk it, and Goodness enables you to spread virtue along the way. It is on this path that you gain the greatest reward: you know who you are and why you are here. Your soul finds its true place in the universe. (pg 230, Coming Alive)

Come Alive!

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More Tools For Improvement

As a coach, I have shelves full of self-help, personal development, and life-affirming inspirational books. They usually come from recommendations, curiosity, or the need to find an answer–or another answer. The Tools by Phil Stutz & Barry Michels came from all of those incentives. Brian Johnson of Optimize.me often extols the value of Stutz’s Tools, and I am often looking for an exercise that might help my clients.

This book provides simple and profound tools to inspire us to have a great day, every day. There was one tool that was really a knock on the side of the head reminding me that I probably have most of the answers already. I need to practice them.

The tool is called Jeopardy. The chapter on this tools starts with a persuasive argument:

This book puts a special power in your hands–the power to change your life. There’s only one thing you need to do–use the tools. As a reward for doing this, you’ll discover a better and newer version of yourself. Who doesn’t want that?

I certainly assumed my patients did. The tools I gave them worked as promised; they became more confident and creative, more expressive and courageous. The results were so good, I was completely shocked by what happened next: almost every patient stopped using them. I was stupefied. I’d shown my patients the path to a new life and, for no good reason, they’d stepped off it–even the most enthusiastic ones quit.

pg 181, The Tools, Phil Stutz & Barry Michels

Convicted. I have shelves full of similar books. They all promise a better life and all we need to do is use the information that is inside.

This is one of the few books, of its genre, that I am determined not to collect dust. To help me practice using their tools, I have installed a habit. When writing my daily plan in the morning, I add at least one of the tools to my to-do list (grateful flow and active love are easy ones to incorporate). Now, in order to complete my day, I need to check it off as done or I need to move it to the next day where I am reminded to do it. And, I don’t let two days go by when I have not practiced using the tool.

These small practices have brought some extra sunshine into my world. And I will have to see what other tools on my shelf that can fuel my growth.

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Comfort Zone or Prison?

This morning I was reading about my comfort zone in Tools by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels. It spoke of the challenge of living a life of possibility when I am stuck in my comfort zone. And then I read this:

The Prisoner (I)

My hand has one gesture left,
to push things away.
From the rock dampness drips
on old stones.

This dripping is all I can hear.
May heart keeps pace
with the drips falling
and sinks away with them.

If the drops fell faster
an animal might come to drink.
Somewhere, it is brighter than this–
but what do we know. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

It is dark, quiet and lonely in my comfort zone. Stutz refers to it as womb-like. That analogy is apt for some comfort zones. Initially, when I feel my comfort zone, it is warm and soothing. I can gently sway in the heart-beat-rippled pool. Comfort.

Sometimes, though, when I feel the pull of desire for something that is outside my comfort zone, this womb is a prison with water-smoothed walls. I’ve heard it said that change happens/comfort zones are breached, when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change. What a difficult place to be in! Perhaps that is why my comfort zone becomes like a prison: pain to stay; pain to leave.

Here’s a thought.

In the fantasy novel, The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, the narrator, Kvoth, is a storyteller. He tells a story of a mythic hero, Taborlin The Great. Taborlin is held is a prison made inescapable by magic. Though, he wouldn’t be call Great, if he didn’t escape. How he did it was by calling the name of the stone and it fell away. He named the “thing” blocking his path and it no longer stood in his way.

“When he awoke, Taborlin The Great found himself locked in a high tower. They had taken his sword and stripped him of his tools: key, coin and candle were all gone….

“Now Taborlin needed to escape but when he looked around, he saw his cell had no door. No windows. All around him was nothing but smooth, hard stone. It was a cell no man had ever escaped.

“But Taborlin knew the names of all things, and so all things were his to command. He said to the stone: ‘Break!’ and the stone broke. The wall tore like a piece of paper, and through that hole Taborlin could see the sky and breathe the sweet spring air. He stepped to the edge, looked down, and without a second thought, he stepped out into the open air…

“So Taborlin fell, but he did not despair. For he knew the name of the wind and so the wind obeyed him. He spoke to the wind and it cradled and caressed him. It bore him to the ground as gently as a puff of thistledown and set him on his feet softly as a mother’s kiss.” (The Name of the Wind)

Back to my comfort zone…

Consider what it would feel like to name the pain or fear that is keeping us locked in our comfort zone. The unknown becomes the known. And the known can be made to fall away, or solved for, or made small and ignored.

Is our greatness waiting outside our prison?  In time, they may tell stories of us too.