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From Skeptic to Believer: How "Mind Magic" Changed My Manifestation Practice

Have you ever rolled your eyes at someone talking about manifestation?

I used to be that person. Then I discovered James R. Doty's "Mind Magic" through Mel Robbins' podcast, and it transformed my understanding of what many dismiss as "woo-woo" into something grounded in neuroscience.

Unlike the vague "think positive thoughts" advice that floods social media, Doty's approach bridges the gap between mystical manifestation and cognitive neuroscience. As a skeptic and a lifelong learner, I didn't just listen to the audiobook—I bought a physical copy to highlight and dissect (fellow note-takers, you know the feeling!).

The Science Behind the "Magic"

What sets this book apart is how it explains manifestation through brain science. Here's one of my favorite insights:

"We can now speak about manifestation in terms of cognitive neuroscience and the function of large-scale brain networks."

The book introduces fascinating concepts like "value tagging" – our brain's method for deciding what gets deeply imprinted in our subconscious. When we visualize our goals while experiencing positive emotions, our brain's reward system gets activated, making those goals more likely to materialize.

My Personal Practice

I've developed a dedicated journaling practice focused on intention-setting in the weeks since reading. Each morning, I write down my intentions and visualize new experiences that reinforce how these intentions may play out.

I've noticed something remarkable: having clear intentions makes me spot opportunities I might have missed before. It's like turning on a flashlight in a dim room – suddenly, you see what was there all along. This heightened level of consciousness can help you make better decisions that align with your envisioned destiny. It also guides me to say “no” to things that do not align with my intentions.

I keep visual reminders in my workspace and maintain a separate journal just for tracking these intentions and the "coincidences" that follow. I am curious to see where this process takes me. I have also integrated the six-step framework below into my Inner Quest cohort course to help people clarify their unique career strategy.

The Six-Step Framework

Doty outlines a practical approach to manifestation:

1. Reclaim your power to focus your mind

2. Clarify what you truly want

3. Remove mental obstacles in your mind

4. Embed intentions in your subconscious

5. Pursue your goal passionately

6. Release expectations and open to magic

The Audible version includes a six-week program at the end of the book where Dr. Doty narrates meditations and actions to practice these concepts.

🌟 My Nuggets from the book

"Manifesting is essentially the process of intentionally embedding thoughts and images of the life we desire into the subconscious."

"We can now speak about manifestation in terms of cognitive neuroscience and the function of large-scale brain networks."

"To manifest consciously, we must learn how to reclaim and direct the power of our attention and understand the physiological mechanisms that allow us to direct that attention, as well as the obstacles and false beliefs that limit our power to do so."

"The way our goals get embedded is through a process called value tagging, the brain's way of deciding what is significant enough to be imprinted at the deepest levels of the subconscious."

"When we practice visualization, we conjure powerful positive emotions, and these cue the selective attention system to tag the goals we desire as highly valuable and associate them with our reward system."

Please share your comments below on how you have used manifestation and any best practices that would be valuable to others.

🧠 Thanks for reading Graymatter!

- James

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These are books I have read, and most include personal notes.

• My notes are not a summary of the book. They are derived from highlighted sections that resonated with me.

• These notes do not replace the book. You need to read the book to gain a full context and derive meaning from relevant content.

• I use these notes to re-read and reinforce the core ideas so that they continually shape my thinking and actions. These notes are convenient on my phone when I am traveling.

♟️ Business | Entrepreneurship | Strategy

The New New Thing : A Silicon Valley Story – by Michael Lewis

The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment – by Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton

Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change – by Mark Benioff

Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy – by Joan Magretta

Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great – by Jim Collins

🚀 Career

How to Deliver a Great TED Talk: Presentation Secrets of the World's Best Speakers – by Akash Karia

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition – by Robert Cialdini, Ph.D.

Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion – by Robert Cialdini, Ph.D.

Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time – by Keith Ferrazzi

Never Split The Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended On It – by Chris Voss

Now, Discover Your Strengths: The revolutionary Gallup program that shows you how to develop your unique talents and strengths – by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D.

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction – by William Zinsser

Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story – by Jerry Weissman

Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade – by Robert Cialdini

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World – by David Epstein

Reinvent Yourself – by James Altucher

Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future – by Dorie Clark

Shift Your Mind: 9 Mental Shifts to Thrive in Preparation and Performance – by Brian Levenson

Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by America's Best Companies – by Robert B. Miller, Stephen E. Helman, Tad Tuleja

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change – by Stephen R. Covey

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich – by Tim Ferriss

The Artist’s Journey: The Wake of the Hero’s Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning – by Steven Pressfield

The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done – by Peter Drucker

The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, Updated and Expanded – by Michael D. Watkins

The Practice: Shipping Creative Work – by Seth Godin

The Power Presenter: Technique, Style, and Strategy from America's Top Speaking Coach – by Jerry Weissman

The Startup of You (Revised and Updated): Adapt, Take Risks, Grow Your Network, and Transform Your Career (2022) – by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles – by Steven Pressfield

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life – by Ozan Varol

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers – by Tim Ferriss

Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work – by Steven Pressfield

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful – by Marshall Goldsmith

Who’s Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success–and Won’t Let You Fail – by Keith Ferrazzi

Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness – by Tim Gover

💰 Financial & Wealth

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness – by Morgan Housel

❤️ Health & Self-Care

💥 Leadership

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results – by Morten Hansen

Discover Your True North – by Bill George

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead – by Sheryl Sandberg

Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: Managing in a Downturn – by Ram Charan

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – by Simon Sinek

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business – by Patrick M. Lencioni

The Leader's Voice: How Your Communication Can Inspire Action and Get Results! – by Crossland & Clarke

The Vision Driven Leader: 10 Questions to Focus Your Efforts, Energize Your Team, and Scale Your Business – by Michael Hyatt

The Will to Lead: Running a Business With a Network of Leaders – by Marvin Bower

Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life – by Stewart D. Friedman

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell – by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Who: The A Method for Hiring – by Geoff Smart

🏷️ Product Management & Marketing

Crossing the Chasm – by Geoffrey A. Moore

Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value – by Melissa Perri

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products – by Nir Eyal

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love – by Marty Cagan

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days – by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses – by Eric Ries

This is Marketing – by Seth Godin

Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want – by Strategyzer

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon - by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr

💪 Self-Help & Personal Transformation

Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds by David Goggins

Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave – by Ryan Holiday

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Third Edition – by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, Emily Gregory

Discovering Your Personality Type: The Essential Introduction to the Enneagram – by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 – by Travis Bradberry

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ – by Daniel Goleman

First Things First - by Stephen R. Covey

Greenlights – by Matthew McConaughey

How To Live: 27 Conflicting Answers and One Weird Question – by Derek Sivers

How to Win Friends and Influence People: Updated For the Next Generation of Leaders - by Dale Carnegie

Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life – by Nir Eyal

Man's Search for Meaning – by Viktor E. Frankl

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success – by Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D.

Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward - by Dr. Henry Cloud

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking – by Susan Cain

Reflections on Happiness and Positivity – by Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum

Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable – by Tim Gover

Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution. – by Brene’ Brown

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know – by Malcolm Gladwell

The Compound Effect: Multiply Your Success One Simple Step at a Time – by Darren Hardy

The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature – by Robert Greene

The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything – by Neil Pasricha

The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life – by Chris Guillebeau

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World – by John Mark Comer

The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

🤖 Technology

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig

Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Applications to Computer Science by Philip N. Klein

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning – by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris

Data Warehousing in the Age of Big Data – by Krish Krishnan

Data Structures & Algorithms in Python – by Roberto Tamassia, Michael H. Goldwasser, Michael T. Goodrich

Exploiting Linked Data and Knowledge Graphs in Large Organisations – by Pan

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide: Storage and Analysis at Internet Scale – by Tom White

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control – by Stuart Russell

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die – by Eric Siegel

Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling for Linked Data, RDFS, and OWL – by James Hendler, Fabien Gandon, Dean Allmang

Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment – by Jim Sterne

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations – by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, & John Willis

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win – by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

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On my never-ending quest to be the best version of myself and experience life to the fullest, I was curious to learn the science and practicality of getting happier by reading the book Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier by Harvard Professor Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey. I relate to the idea that “happiness is not a destination; happiness is a direction.” I learned that happiness is something we need to practice daily. Even in the face of obstacles, there is an agency to manage our emotions and double down on the macronutrients of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. This is the inner work we must do first. Then, we are in a position to build the life we want by turning outward to family, friendships, work, and spiritual life.

In the following paragraphs, I will share curated content from the book and my nuggets of how I may be putting these ideas into practice. Change only happens when we learn the art and science and then apply this knowledge in our daily lives. I encourage you to derive your nuggets from this book and become happier in the process.

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Managing Your Emotions

You can’t be happy - though you can be happier. And your circumstances and your source of unhappiness don’t have to stop you.

We can also stop believing that our individual problems are the reasons we haven’t achieved happiness.

The biggest reason people don’t get happier is because they don’t even know what they are trying to increase.

Happy feelings are not happiness; they are evidence of happiness.

The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

Enjoyment takes an urge for pleasure and adds two important things: communion and consciousness.

All addictions involve pleasure, not enjoyment

🌟 My nugget: Given that pleasure is fleeting and solitary, seek out friends and family to share experiences that are memorable.

The second macronutrient of happiness is satisfaction.

It’s how you feel when you do something difficult - maybe even painful - that meets your life’s purpose as you see it.

If you don’t suffer from something - at least a little - it doesn’t satisfy you at all.

🌟 My nugget: Embrace and lean into challenging work where I will grow - the easy path is not the path.

The third macronutrient is the most important: purpose.

Without purpose, however, we are utterly lost, because we can’t deal with life’s inevitable puzzles and dilemmas.

When we do have a sense of meaning and purpose, we can face life with hope and inner peace.

🌟 My nugget: Allocate my time, energy, and focus on experiences where I can practice my craft that exudes my purpose. Resist the opportunities that offer rewards unrelated to my purpose.

Getting happier, in other words, requires that we accept unhappiness in our lives as well, and understanding it isn’t an obstacle to our happiness.

The secret to the best life is to accept your unhappiness (so you can learn and grow) and manage the feelings that result.

Happier is not a state of being, but a state of doing - not a thing you wait around and hope for, but an achievable change you actively work toward.

You feel the feel, then take the wheel. You get to decide how you’ll respond.

🌟 My nugget: We have the agency and strength to understand our emotions and not allow them to control us. Observe my emotions from a distance and learn to understand what they mean and how I should respond.

You can’t choose your feelings, but you can choose your reaction to your feelings.

Metacognition (which technically means “thinking about thinking”) is the act of experiencing your emotions consciously, separating them from your behavior, and refusing to be controlled by them.

Evolution favors the people who love learning and rewards them with pleasure.

🌟 My nugget: Be curious about life and ask interesting questions. Engage in experiences where I learn every day.

Between the conditions around you and your response to them is a space to think and make decisions.

Journal your experiences and feelings over the course of the day. Also write down how you responded to these feelings, and which responses were more and less constructive.

🌟 My nugget: expand my daily journal to reflect on feelings and their meaning.

You can’t alter history. You can, however, change your perception of it.

The reason your memories change is that you construct stories of past events from fragments of memories in accordance with your current self-narratives.

The fact that your current conditions and feelings influence how you reconstruct memories gives you a lot of power to change your understanding of the past.

🌟 My nugget: Be brave to learn from the painful events or failures of my past by reprocessing the memories with new knowledge that may change the meaning and free me from its chains. You often hear advice that thinking about your past wastes time - I used to believe it, too. I experienced some tough times in my past, and the meaning I gave them drove me into deep depression, anxiety, and fear. Over many years, there were experiences that I could not explain. I eluded myself into thinking that it was I was to blame. Then, years later, I read a few books and learned more about a few topics that freed me from my past, as many of those issues had nothing to do with me. I had reprocessed events I could not explain that now all made sense with my newfound knowledge. The baggage weighing my mind and body down for many years was set aside on the road to lighten my load as I pursue my future.

First, when you experience intense emotion, simply observe your feelings.

Second, journal your emotions.

Third, keep a database of positive memories, not just negative ones. Reviewing it when you feel down or out of control.

Fourth, look for meaning and learning in the hard parts of life.

In your journal, reserve a section for painful experiences, writing them down right afterward. Leave two lines below each entry.

After one month, return to the journal and write in the first blank line what you learned from that bad experience in the intervening period.

After six months, fill in the second line with the positives that ultimately came from it.

🌟 My nugget: Stay committed to daily journaling to observe emotions and memorialize my life's positive and adverse events. There is always a nugget to learn, and it may require time for this gold to reveal itself.

You often don’t have to accept the emotion you feel first. Rather, you can substitute a better one that you want.

Gratitude isn’t a feeling that materializes in response to your circumstances. It is a life practice.

The best way to start practicing gratitude is by including it in the journal you use to be more metacognitive.

Look at these grateful memories regularly - every day or at least every week - to remember and train your mind to do this automatically in difficult moments.

Another technique for increasing gratitude: contemplate your death.

🌟 My nugget: Add 1-2 things I am grateful for each day in my journal. Tomorrow is not guaranteed - make the most of the day you have been given, and spread goodness and value in your work.

Consuming humor - enjoying jokes - brings joy and relieves suffering.

There’s a world for believing you can make things better without distorting reality: not optimism, but hope.

Hope involves personal agency, meaning it gives you a sense of power and motivation.

First, imagine a better future, and detail what makes it so.

Second, envision yourself taking action.

🌟 My nugget: Believe in yourself, and take massive action. Prove the naysayers wrong.

To become a more compassionate (and thus happier) person, start by working on your toughness.

To be tougher in the face of another’s pain doesn’t mean feeling it less. Rather, you should learn to feel the pain without being impacted to act.

Being self-compassionate means doing the hard things that you actually need to do, notwithstanding your feelings.

🌟 My nugget: care for others and do hard things that align with your purpose.

Focusing less on yourself and your desires will make you happier.

First, avoid your own reflection.

Second, stop judging things around you so much.

Third, spend more time marveling at the world around you.

To manage emotions, almost all of us need to work to care less what others think about us.

Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.

The prison of other's approval is actually one built by you, maintained by you, and guarded by you.

Envy, in short, is a happiness killer.

First, focus on the ordinary parts of other’s lives. The main way we water that terrible weed is with our attention.

Second, turn off the envy machine.

Third, reveal your unenviable self; stop trying to be envied yourself.

🌟 My nugget: Be curious and present about the world and people instead of yourself. Be authentic, and don’t care what others think or have.

Building What Matters

Thomas Aquinas listed what he called idols that occupy our days and waste our lives: money, power, pleasure, and prestige.

These idols all stand in the way of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

The four idols are distractions to numb us to emotional circumstances we dislike and feel we can’t control.

Emotional self-management lowers the attractiveness of these distractions.

This is where to spend the time, attention, and energy released by emotional self-management.

The four pillars are family, friendship, work, and faith.

Oprah: I have learned to live my life so I’m attached to the work I do and the things I create and the people who matter to me - but not in a way that involves expectations.

Family

Conflict is the cost of abundant love.

Acknowledging family conflict is good, because it improves communication and gives you opportunities to solve problems.

First, do try to read minds.

Second, live your life, but don’t ask them to change their lives.

Third, don’t treat your family like emotional ATMs.

Take the lead by treating your family the way you do your friends, both generously giving and gratefully accepting emotional support.

🌟 My nugget: Accept that there will be family conflict and be the leader in creating a trusting space for open communication that leads to better outcomes for the whole family.

The fact is that the more we achieve compatibility, the harder love gets to find and maintain.

Romantic love requires complementarity - that is, differences.

First, seek out differences in personality and tastes.

Second, focus more on what really matters.

Third, if you are dating, let humans make your matches instead of machines.

🌟 My nugget: Be open to meeting women who are different from me and learn about their world.

Negative culture in a family can make problem-solving impossible, so there is no growth or learning, just chronic unhappiness.

To achieve greater happiness and freedom, we all need to abandon these sorts of partial forgiveness.

Four successful forgiveness strategies that family members use to heal a relationship after a transgression or conflict has occurred: discussion (Let’s talk this through so I can let go of the hurt”), explicit forgiveness (“I forgive you”), nonverbal forgiveness (such as showing affection after a fight), and minimization (which involves classifying the transgression as un-important and simply choosing to disregard it).

First, when you’re choosing forgiveness, remember that resolving a conflict is not charity - it primarily benefits you.

Second, widen your conflict-resolution repertoire, especially when what you have tried before isn’t working.

Third, don’t dismiss minimization too quickly; abandoning a conflict rather than trying to solve it is the perfect solution.

🌟 My nugget: Family conflict happens; be courageous to understand and forgive. There are likely stories you are making up in your head that make it worse. Create a safe space for discussion and forgiveness.

The true action of love is to stop avoiding problems and simply look outward and say what you see - to be courageous and work toward a family that can take it.

Families where people bottle up their feelings and beliefs are not at their best, because they can’t bring their full selves to the party.

The point of honesty is having enough love for others to be precisely who you are, with complete transparency, even if it is difficult for both of you.

First, before being honest, solicit and accept honesty from others.

Committing yourself to honesty starts with a commitment to be honest with yourself, and an effort to seek out and accept complete honesty from others, especially loved ones.

Second, offer truth to heal, never to harm.

Third, make the truth appealing.

🌟 My nugget: Honesty is essential for the family bond and love. Confront problems with the truth and eliminate the need for any lies in the family.

Friendship

Friendship accounts for almost 60 percent of the difference in happiness between individuals, no matter how introverted or extroverted they are.

You need at least one close friend besides your spouse, and there is an upper limit of perhaps ten friendships that you can realistically spend enough time on to regard them as close.

There is one type of friend almost everyone has: the friend from whom you need or want something.

These are what social scientists call “expedient friendships” - with people we might call “deal friends.”

One of the best predictors of well-being in middle age is being able to name a few truly close friends.

With your list of real friends - and people you would like to be on that list - make a concrete plan for staying in touch and seeing one another.

🌟 My nugget: Contact at least one close friend a week. Get out of the house and make more friends in the Austin area, unrelated to my work.

Samudaya teaches that attachment is the root of human suffering.

To find peace in life, we must be willing to detach ourselves and thus become free of sticky cravings.

The humility to admit when we are wrong and to change our beliefs can lead us to make more friends and get happier.

First, admit quickly when you think you are wrong.

Second, welcome contradiction.

Third, start small.

🌟 My nugget: Be open to learning about beliefs and opinions from your friends. Be willing to let go.

The most important predictor of late-life happiness is stable relationships - especially a long romantic partnership.

The important thing for well-being is relationship satisfaction, and that depends on what social scientists call “companionate love” - stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.

First, lighten up.

Second, make the companionate love more about the two of you, and less about each individual.

Make we your default pronoun when talking with others.

Look at disagreement as something we need to find time to fix, instead of as me being attacked by you, which is a disturbing emergency.

🌟 My nugget: Seek a long-term relationship to live a long, healthy life with someone who believes in the companionate principles of stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.

Technology that crowds out our real-life interaction with others will lower our well-being and thus must be managed with great care in our lives.

Research has shown that deeper conversations bring more well-being than short communications.

First, choose interaction over vegetation. Make use of device options that inform you of the time you are spending on social media and the internet.

Second, create a communication hierarchy. Make an effort to meet in person. The more face-to-face communication people had with others, the more understood they felt and the more satisfied they were with their relationship.

🌟 My nugget: Meet friends in person as the top option, then a visual or regular phone call. Seek friends who desire deep conversations.

Work

Job satisfaction and life satisfaction are positively related, and causal: liking your job cause you to be happier all around.

To build a career that makes you happier means understanding yourself.

Your pay and benefits are what are called extrinsic rewards.

You need extrinsic rewards to get by, but you need intrinsic rewards to get happier.

Rather than relentlessly pursuing a “perfect match” career, a better approach is to remain flexible on the exact job, while searching for two big things.

The first is earned success. Gives you a sense of accomplishment and professional efficacy.

And this leads to the second, related intrinsic goal, which is service to others - the sense that your job is making the world a better place.

🌟 My nugget: Seek work that leads to achievement with pay and benefits to sponsor my dreams. Continue my pursuit as a world-class coach to serve others - helping people unlock their true potential in this short life.

Relying on extrinsic rewards lowers satisfaction.

It can even lock you into the wrong career trajectory for decades to come. This is because it makes you pursue a career path that is wrong for you.

🌟 My nugget: Resist paths that do not align with your purpose and offer only extrinsic rewards.

Despite the extolled virtues of maximum work, the costs will almost certainly outrun the benefits, as they do in self-medicating addictions.

The burnout, depression, job stress, and work-life conflict will get worse, not better.

Workaholism can lead to secondary addictions, such as to drugs, alcohol, or pornography.

There are solutions to work addiction, according to Harvard professor Ashley Whillans.

She recommends three practices starting with a “time audit.” Keep a careful log of your major activities - work, leisure, running errands - as well as how long you spent on each one and how it felt.

Next, Professor Whillans recommends scheduling your downtime.

Finally, program your leisure.

Treat your walks, prayer time, and gym sessions as if they were meetings with the president.

🌟 My nugget: Record all activities on my Outlook calendars and color code to distinguish tasks. Add non-work activities in advance, so I have something to work toward and enjoy.

It is all too easy to lose your true self to a representation of yourself that is your job title of duties. This is what is called self-objectification.

Humans are capable of objectifying themselves in many ways - by assessing their self-worth in terms of their physical appearance, economic position, or political views, for example - but all of them boil down to one damaging core act: reducing your own humanity to a single characteristic, thus encouraging others to do so as well.

Recognize that you will never be satisfied as long as you objectify yourself.

First, put some space between your job and your life.

Make some friends who don’t see you as a professional object.

Striking up friendships with people who don’t have any connection to your professional life encourages you to develop nonwork interests and virtues, and thus be a fuller person.

The great irony is that by trying to be special, we end up reducing ourselves to a single quality and turning ourselves into cogs in a machine of our own making.

You are not your job.

🌟 My nugget: Embrace a holistic identity that includes work and all the other roles I play in life. Build more relationships not related to my professional work.

Faith

Transcendental beliefs and experiences aid dramatically in our efforts to get happier.

It makes us happier by taking the focus off ourselves and putting it instead on the Majesties of the universe.

Most importantly, the path of transcendence is an adventure, a spiritual expedition that can add a kind of excitement to our lives beyond anything else we have ever experienced.

Oprah: What I’ve observed over thousands of conversations is that Life is always speaking to us, trying to urge us toward the best version of ourselves.

Religious belief is strongly correlated with searching for - and finding - purpose in life.

Now, close your eyes in meditation or prayer. You become truly present in this moment of your life - you are mindful.

The most important part of starting (or supercharging) a transcendental journey is, well, starting.

First, keep it simple; like slipping into a religious service and sitting in the back, observing without judgment or expectation.

Second, read more.

Third, let go.

Serve the tenets of the divine, seek the ultimate truth, and thus work to make others happier rather than yourself. Only then will you be more successful in your own quest.

🌟 My nugget: Commit to 15 minutes of spiritual or philosophical thinking/ reading daily.

Now, Become the Teacher

To put the ideas into practice, you have to remember them. Here’s how to do that: teach what you’ve learned to plastic platypus.

If you can explain something coherently, you will absorb the information and remember it.

Teaching a subject is the most reliable way to learn it deeply.

Our world needs advocates and warriors to help the millions suffering without relief.

So many still believe that there is no hope as long as there is pain in their lives. Find the people in your life in this situation. Be their hope.

Don’t hide your own struggles. Use them to help others understand that they are not alone, and getting happier is possible. Your pain gives you credibility, and your progress makes you an inspiration.

Crystallized intelligence is an increasing knack for combining complex ideas, understanding what they mean, recognizing patterns, and teaching others.

People should hold different roles throughout their lives that complement each type of smarts - but always tending toward teaching and mentoring as the years pass, because that is your increasing natural strength.

In life, we do best and are happiest when we rely more on our wisdom as we age.

To embark on a project to get happier, and to do the work to manage your emotions, is to say that you love yourself enough to make this investment.

And to become the teacher of what you have learned is an act of abundant love toward everyone in your life.

Start each day saying, “I don’t know what this day will bring, but I will love others and allow myself to be loved.”

The key to progress isn’t perfection, it’s to being again, and again, and again.

Every day is a new day, another opportunity to pick up the hammer and go back to work.

🌟 My nugget: Share my life experiences and wisdom so others can benefit. Teach others who have lost hope that they have the agency to take the wheel. Be the professor. Be the coach. Love those who cross your path.

Details on Amazon

Details on Amazon

Details on Amazon

This book truly blew me away. When we see successful people, we often think they came from money, attended the best university, or lived in the affluent part of town growing up. Matt Higgins debunks all that and more in Burn the Boats, including settling for the slow progression to the top. His vulnerable storytelling captivated me, explaining how to own your journey, pursue a path on your terms, achieve success, and burn the boat to pursue your next endeavor with joy and conviction.

The book reminds us: “The greatest regret people have on their deathbed is that they never pursued their boldest dreams.”

Burn the Boats provides the blueprint for pursuing dreams with ambition and how a compelling why? is needed to bring true satisfaction.

And while his achievements to date are incredible by any measure, his deep empathy for helping others on their journeys inspired me the most.

“There is simply no higher use of my life than to help others on those journeys.”

“We all have choices to make. Do we intervene, or do we look away? Even a small gesture can alter the trajectory of someone’s life, if perhaps just supplying hope in darkness. Now I can be that ray of light for someone else who desperately needs it.”

Thank you, Matt Higgins, for sharing this gift that challenges us to inspect our lives and gives us the courage to burn the boats!

My Notes

To accomplish something great, you have to give yourself no escape route, no chance to ever turn back.

We are so out of practice tapping into our own internal navigation systems that when we’re about to make a bold move, our first impulse is to undercut it with a backup plan.

If you’re someone who’s worried you won’t succeed, you’ve already failed.

Greatness doesn’t emerge hedging, hesitating, or submitting to the naysayers that skulk in every corner of our lives.

Studies have convincingly shown that backup plans hobble us on the road toward success - the abundant choices end up rendering us paralyzed.

The key to unlocking potential is to embrace your highest competitive advantage: you are the only one who has the full story of your life. YOU are the one subject about which there will never be a great expert in the world. And so, of course you will see your part forward before anyone else will.

The best dreams are the ones that energy from somewhere deep within you.

“I don’t want to hear what you want to be. I want to know who you want to be.”

Most of us talk ourselves out of sticking with our instincts.

Before we can burn the boats, we have to be confident in who we are, unafraid of being felled by the forces gunning for our demise.

To make progress in our lives, we have to ignore the negativity and pursue our ambitions no matter what anyone else is saying.

Self-talk has been proven to list us up - but it depends on how you do it.

Notice I referred to myself in the third-person: “Matt, you belong.” Using your own name, rather than “I,” lets you self-distance in a way that makes the pep talk more likely to resonate.

Your shame can become your strength, too. Whatever you worry is holding you back is just a part of your story.

The difference between victory and defeat is leaving the losses behind.

On the other hand, if you love yourself, and you own your story, you can turn your pain into the asset that drives you, not the anchor that drags you down.

No one will reward us for how much we cowered in the face of fear or buried ourselves in the traumas of the past.

Anytime you are depending on someone else’s behavior for your prosperity, there is risk.

But it’s never going to be easier to take a gamble than it is today.

If you wait to act until others validate your vision, it’s far too late.

Backup plans can make you feel safer and help you cope with uncertainty, but they also reduce the likelihood that your primary goal will ever be achieved.

You can’t waste your mental energy looking for a way out or an alternative plan. All of your energy needs to be directed toward your goal or you’ll never reach it.

Fantasies are always to be taken seriously. When your brain is telling you something, don’t dismiss it.

Some people tell me they can’t go all in because they have to feed themselves. But they’re missing the point. Use your common sense to mitigate risk. Have a second job. Have a third job. Going all in is different from having no downside protection.

But you do have to commit. When you create backup plans, and the more plans to back up your backups, your hedge becomes your crutch.

We’re all supposed to understand the virtues of spreading our risk, of not putting all our eggs in one (unproven, uncertain, guaranteed). But I believe you dilute your doubt by cultivating your conviction.

The degree to which you diversify should have an inverse relationship with how convinced you are of your success. It is counterproductive to spread your energy across a landscape of opportunities such that you can’t actually invest your full set into any of them.

You need a healthy dose of fear - but not an excessive amount - to perform at your best.

Self awareness is the greatest source of value creation entirely within your control.

If you look at your day and see that it’s mostly filled with tasks you’ve already mastered, you’re too comfortable.

You need to really understand your why. What’s at stake? Imagine yourself on the other side, having done it, and done it will. Think about the person you’ll be, the way you’ll feel, and the opportunities that will unfold.

If you won’t give things up to reach your goal, it’s probably the wrong goal.

When it comes to achieving professional success: make yourself indispensable at whatever task you are assigned, no matter how menial or seemingly trivial.

I order to win big, you’ll need to be able to turn your fear into action, using anxiety like a tool, letting it drive you higher and higher.

A partner is either a force multiplier or an energy vampire. There’s no in between.

Almost every uncomfortable situation can be reframed by substituting two little words - have to - with get to.

Imagine the truest and fullest disaster playing out, and then get practical. What do you need to put in place to make it through?

Thinking it through gives you a plan, and frees your mind from focusing only on the fear.

Never be limited by what things look like today. You can always reverse course tomorrow.

Crises force us to act. They give us no choice but to summon all of our strength and will because we know that the alternative is that something will be lost.

You need to structure your big bets in life to give yourself time to be right.

The biggest job of a leader is putting great talent in place and helping them shine.

Winners iterate.

The reality is that everyone has a leverageable asset - a quality, a circumstance, a story - that can move them due north to their dreams.

I tell people who just go laid off: Your edge is that you are now untethered to fixed assumptions. You’re free. It’s hard to look at the world with clear eyes when you’re trapped within a system. With all options on the table, you can start anew and really figure out what ought to come next.

I see so many people who think they need to earn their next move, to pay their dues, to wait for the world to recognize their potential and pluck them from their current role into some dream future that I can assume you is never going to manifest itself.

In reality, the greatest spoils usually go to the ones who refuse to submit to a typical roadmap.

Before deciding you need to take a small step instead of a big leap, ask yourself: What makes you think this is the necessary sequence of events?

The incremental approach is why I urge people to escape corporate hierarchies whenever they can.

Never look at one job to satisfy every career aspiration.

Taking risks is simpler when you’ve already taken risks.

I forget that the point isn’t to keep moving, but to maximize the heights you can reach in every pursuit.

Picture your highest ambition - and then take the first step.

Marshall your strength, your courage, and everything in your past that has led to this point, and start moving.

The most important thing we all can do is understand our own gifts and where we fit in the mix.

Burning the boats can put you in a position to find what stirs the most powerful feelings within you.

Burning the boast is about owning the journey.

It’s about giving yourself the best opportunity to divine the path that’s right for you, manifesting your dreams no matter what they are, and seeing them through no matter how far-fetched, silly, or implausible they might seem.

⭐️ This is the real secret of a life and career you’re excited to attack each morning: you need to find the path that allows you to fully be yourself, express yourself, and unleash your power in its fullest form.

The dirty little secret of a successful life is that you can never actually get to a happy place to stop working, stop trying, stop aiming for more.

Success and contentment are built on perpetual pursuit.

The joy isn’t in the life of leisure, it’s in the struggle, the pursuit, the purpose.

It’s hard, and that’s why it’s rewarding, and that’s why it’s worth doing.

To live a life of perpetual growth, you have to leverage what you are doing today to move you closer to what you want to do tomorrow - even if that means doing two, three, four, seventeen things at once.

Your point of greatest leverage is when you’re busiest.

Not when you’re desperate for someone to say yes so that you have a new purpose and something to do.

You don’t need to have all of the answers mapped out before you embark on a big move.

You need to be open to allowing ideas, people, and serendipity into your life.

You can pick your cause, and it doesn’t really matter what is is, as long as it sparks something within you.

What am I uniquely positioned to do that no one else can?

What insights do I see that no one is acting on?

What makes me special, and how can I leverage that to the greatest extent possible?

What, in my heart of hearts, do I really want to do?

The greatest regret people have on their deathbeds is that they never pursued their boldest dreams.

For burning the boats to bring you true satisfaction, there needs to be a why? behind it - a goal that makes all the striving worth it.

The joy is absolutely in the journey, but you still need to be propelled by a purpose large than personal enrichment or ego gratification.

We all need to give ourselves a chance to realize the ceiling of our talents, to find the limits that we’ll never quite reach, to know ourselves and to appreciate our power to make things happen.

If you take anything away from the lessons here, I hope it’s my abiding belief in your infinite capacity to just figure it out. Trust me, when your back is against the wall, and there's seemingly no way out, you will find a way.

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Living Untethered is a follow-up to The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment by Michael A. Singer. Although I read the latter books, and there are concepts repeated in Living Untethered, this book hit me as I thought deeper about how samskaras - impressions that stay stuck in your mind, keep you from reaching your highest potential. Samskaras are both impressions we “cling to” that are positive and painful situations we can’t handle when we experience the event. These samskaras distort our current experience.

A core theme is purifying your inside instead of looking for things outside ourselves to make your inside feel good. Letting experiences pass through you instead of creating self-inflicted samskaras is a method to free yourself. Our view of the world gets distorted when we see things through a layer of samskaras that are stored up patterns. My mind can chatter a lot throughout the day. Building the skill of consciousness to view the thoughts in my mind and emotions in my heart from a distance - with me as the subject and everything else as an object - is deepening my presence and enjoying the current experience. The awareness of Self is a spiritual experience. Learning to discover where your thoughts and emotions come from is truly freeing.

My book has many highlights, and the notes below won’t do it justice. I recommend spending the $10 to challenge yourself to go on this spiritual journey.

My Notes

Awareness of Self

Unfortunately, life on Earth rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to, and if we resist, our experience can be quite unpleasant. Resistance creates tension and anxiety, and it makes life a burden.

Only by accepting reality can we work with the flow of life as it passes by and create a better world.

Your relationship to what you see is always one of subject-object. You are the subject, and what you are looking at is the object.

The Conscious Receiver

On a daily basis, you are so distracted by external objects that you rarely remain centered on You.

You are not your body; you are the one who notices the characteristics of your body.

Who is that consciously aware entity inside?

Living Inside

People do all kinds of things trying to make it nice in there.

If you find out why it’s not nice, and you get rid of that, you’re going to find out it can be really nice in there.

People are trying to use the outside to fix the inside - better to find out why it’s not nice inside to begin with.

The Three-Ring Circus

Notice your surroundings coming in through the senses, your thoughts passing through your mind, and any emotions that arise in your heart creating feelings of comfort or discomfort within. These three inner experiences are the arena in which your consciousness plays the game of life on planet Earth.

The problem is there’s an outside world of reality that can come in and cause your thoughts and emotions to be very difficult.

Exploring the Nature of Things

This is the journey before us - to free ourselves from the distractions that keep drawing us away from our greatness and leave us struggling with life.

The highest pash is learning through your daily life to gradually let go of what is distracting your consciousness.

The Moment in Front of You

One of the most amazing things you will ever realize is that the moment in from of you is not bothering you - you are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you.

It’s Not Personal

You don’t surrender the outside world - you totally accept it. What you surrender is your personal, made-up judgment of it.

Your consciousness may be aware of the moment in from of you, but you did not create that moment. You are simply being given this wonderful opportunity to experience a moment in creation. It took billions of years to get here - be sure you don’t miss it.

Mindfulness is a natural, effortless process once you let go of personal distractions. Instead of thinking that the moment in front of you has to be a certain way, you start thinking that it’s pretty awesome the way it is.

Empty Mind

You are capable of experiencing three distinct things: the outside world, the mind, and the emotions.

You can think of your mind as a very high vibration field of energy in which thoughts can be created.

Mind is not the thoughts.

Mind is the field of energy in which thoughts are capable of existing.

So thoughts are not the mind, but they exist in the mind and are formed out of the substance of the mind.

When consciousness is simply experiencing reality as imaged in the mind, that is what we call being in the present moment.

Birth of the Personal Mind

If an inner experience is not neutral to you, it draws your consciousness to focus on it.

When the force of consciousness is focused on a mental object, that object cannot pass through the mind like other objects.

Each person’s trapped mental patterns are unique and very personal.

They come from how we interacted with our past experiences.

Now that you’ve had these leftover mental impressions in your mind, reality has to compete with them for your attention.

Your ability to fully focus on the outer world is going to be hindered by the constant distraction of these inner impressions.

Fall from the Garden

Apparently, at some point you didn’t like certain vibrations, so you pushed them away when they rendered inside. That willful resistance cause them to stay in the mind. That is where personal comes from.

You now have a limited and biased view of reality that will distort all of your experiences for the rest of your life.

Once you create preferences, they will dominate your entire experience of life.

These impressions that stay stuck in the mind are called samskaras.

You just had a beautiful experience, and you ruined it. You ruined it by holding on to it, like the butterfly.

You ruined it by creating a preference about one of life’s experiences.

Whether you use your will to resist or cling, these leftover impressions will stay your mind.

You will come to see that these actors of clinging and resisting determine the quality of your life.

If you are constantly distracted by these samskaras in your mind, you’re never going to experience who you really are.

The Veil of the Psyche

You are not seeing what is actually outside - you are seeing your inner issues projected on to the outside.

You held on to some positive things from the past. The problem is they’re not happening anymore, and that is disappointing.

Your awareness is completely distracted by these stored mental patterns, and you must devote your days and nights to serving them. You can no longer experience reality - you are stuck experiencing yourself.

The Brilliant Human Mind

The first layer is where the rendering of the present external experience is taking place. We can that the here-and-now layer.

The next layer is the stored patterns from the past that you did not release when the external experience was over. We can call that the samskara layer.

But there is yet another layer. This layer is what you are doing with your brilliant mind to try to solve the discomforts created by the samskaras. This is the personal-thoughts layer, and it is the one you identify with the most - you think this is who you are.

The combination of these three layers is what we call the personal mind. Yours is completely unique to you and you alone.

The Abstract Mind

Focusing on the moment is one way to get your consciousness off its incessant addiction to the personal.

The mind is great; it’s just not supposed to e used for storing all of your personal preferences and then thinking the whole world is supposed to match what you stored.

You were given free will, and what you did with your free will was make a mess out of your mind.

Instead of being in awe that the moment in front of you even exists, you fight it to make it match what you want.

Serve Mind or Fix It

The foundational choice we have in life is either constantly control life to compensate for our blockages or devote our lives to getting rid of our blockages.

Use your mind to be creative, inspiring, and do great things.

Don’t let the mind always be thinking about itself and what it wants.

Learn to enjoy life as it is - instead of limiting the ways you can enjoy it to service your past impressions.

Instead of companies the moment in front of you against the preferences you’ve built up in your mind, why don’t you compare it against nothing?

The cause of suffering is desire. In other words, the cause of suffering is preference, deciding how you want things to be and getting upset when they’re not that way.

Willful and Automatic Thoughts

When you store a samskara, an unfinished mental and emotional pattern, that pattern will not sit quietly inside of you. Anything that ever got stored inside your mind, because you resisted or clung to it, is trying to release.

How much energy are you wasting keeping all this garbage inside?

This is the nature of almost of all your automatic thoughts. They are not to be seen as some important truth or great insights into what is really going on. They are simply your mind attempting to cleanse the patterns you have stored there.

Dream and the Subconscious

The part of your mind you’re not willing to look at this what we call the subconscious.

Imagine how much mental power you waste by pushing all that mess into the subconscious.

You who is watching the dream is the same you who watches your waking thoughts and experiences the outside world.

Waking Dreams

The voice inside your head that talks all day is the exact same expressive power of mind that creates your dreams.

Every personal thing that voice says is because of the samskaras you have stored inside. Your mind is trying to release those blockages during the day while you’re still awake.

There are billions of things that can happen in life that don’t match your preferences, and there are only a few that do.

Under these conditions, the probability that life is going to be a negative experience is extremely high.

The more preferences you have, the less you will be okay.

Fortunately, there is a way out - it’s called witness consciousness. If you can learn to sit back and simply watch that voice inside your head, you can free yourself.

Understanding Emotions

The combination of your thoughts and emotions makes up what can be called your psyche, or your personal self.

Emotions are generated by the heart.

Emotions are more like clouds instead of defined objects. They come up and can be like waves flowing over you.

When you sit back in the seat of witness consciousness, it does not require a willful process of watching your emotions. Instead, it’s the simple awareness of what is going on in there. You are simply aware that you hear or see your thoughts and that you feel your emotions.

What’s going on in the heart ends up in the mind as thoughts.

Why the Heart Opens and Closes

First and foremost, understand that you are not your heart - you are the experiencer of your heart.

Your heart is a thing, like an appliance. It’s an appliance that emanates vibrations of energies.

When the heart closes, the energy flow is not strong, and this results in negative thoughts.

If you let it, your heart will go through fluctuations as different situations cause it to open and close.

There is a very powerful energy flow inside of you. For the purposes of our discussion, we will use the traditional yogic term shakti.

The reason the energy flowing through the heart fluctuates so much is because of the samskaras you’ve stored inside.

The activated samskara has taken over your life. If you’re not careful, it will determine your future by the choices you make in that unclear state.

Your samskaras are what cause your heart to open and close.

Dance of the Energy Flow

Remember that your energy is always trying to flow. The only reason it can’t is because it’s blocked.

Your psyche is the net result of all your blockages and how the energy manages to flow through them.

When you become one integrated seer - the single witness watching gall these different things pass by inside - you are centered. You are clear. You are free.

Be the One who sees the many - this is the path to self-realization.

The Cause of Moods and Emotions

An emotion is caused by the shakti hitting the blockages in your heart and shooting out to release the blocked energies.

The Secrets of the Heart

The greatest secret of the heart is revealed when you get rid of the samskaras instead of finding a way around them.

As you remove your blockages, the energy will start to flow freely and love will no longer be something you need or something you look for.

You no longer live solely off what is coming in from the outside.

The Human Predicament

Eventually, we wake up and realize that compensating for what’s wrong is not good enough - we must solve the root cause of why we are not okay.

If you are letting the avoidance of your inner problems define what you’re doing, all you’re doing is expressing your inner problems outside.

The Paradigm Shift

Instead of trying to get the world to match your blockages, you work on letting go of your blockages. That’s the secret of real spiritual growth.

Working with the Heart

Your inability to handle the breadth of these emotions keeps you locked in the human predicament of controlling life in order to be okay.

If you wish to break free and live unconditionally, you must learn to clear out your heart.

Every experience makes you a greater person if you don’t resist it.

If you cling to an object, it stays.

If you suppress it, it stays.

If it stays, it will distort reality.

Neither Suppression nor Expression

The mind is free to think; the heart is free to feel. All of this leaves you at peace, in a state of gratitude. This is the way life is meant to be.

It’s not about doing or not doing anything - it’s about surrendering your initial resistance to what is.

Reality is going to come in, it’s going to hit your blockages, and your mind is going to talk about it. Fine, be that as it may - you don’t have to listen.`

Techniques for Freeing Yourself

The first technique is called positive thinking. Yogananda used to teach that every time you have a negative thought, replace it with a positive one.

The next technique is a very traditional and is broadly referred to as mantra.

“Mantra” means training your mind to repeat a smile work or phrase over and over until it gets stuck in your mind.

The final techniques for freeing yourself from yourself is generally termed witness consciousness.

Witness consciousness is simply noticing that you are noticing what the mind is doing.

Low-Hanging Fruit

Thow things happen when you relax and release.

One, you stop fighting with the causes of your disturbed mind, and that gives them room to release.

Two, you are actually relaxing back into the seat of Self, and you will grow spiritually.

The Past

There is zero benefit to being bothered by something that is not even happening.

If you let experiences pass completely through you when they are actually happening, they will touch you to the core of your being and become part of your without leaving any scars.

When you have an experience, it can simply come in and touch consciousness directly. It doesn’t need the mind to judge it as desirable or undesirable and then store it accordingly.

To free yourself, the moment you notice disturbance, let go.

Embrace your past, hug it, kiss it - love it to death.

Meditation

This inner work on yourself is more important than everything else you do.

Whatever is going on in there is fine - as long as you can objectively observe it. This is called mindful meditation.

The reason you lose focus on your breath is that consciousness gets distracted by what your mind is saying.

Just start watching your breath again.

The entire purpose is to practice gaining control of your attention so that it becomes yours again.

What you pay attention to determines your experiences in life.

Handling the Bigger Stuff

You don’t let go of the situation - you let go of your reaction to the situation.

If you let go of the samskaras inside of you, they will no longer affect your life.

You can truly be free of your past.

This is what living untethered means.

Dealing with Blocked Energies

In essence, you are causing yourself to be unhappy, then you're going outside and demanding that the world somehow make you happy.

The world cannot make you happy while you’re inside making yourself unhappy.

Transmutation of the Energy

Instead of pushing it back down because you can’t handle the experience, or releasing it outside as a way of relief, you can relax and release at such as deep level that you allow that blockage to pass without resistance.

That is what transmutation of the energy means.

Once the blockages begin to clear, the energy will find its way into your heart, and that will comfort and sustain you.

Always remember, the energy wants to go up.

You are the conscious witness of all that passes before you. You dwell deep inside, and nothing in there is more powerful than you.

The Power of Intent

You are pure consciousness, and your will has complete dominion over mind and emotions.

These blockages are yours, and you can let go anytime you want.

Surrender is about letting go of weakness and being committed enough to carry out your intent.

Surrender is handling anything that needs to be released inside and letting it pass through.

What’s happening inside of me?

What blockage go hit that caused this shift in energy to take place?

The purpose of my day is letting go of my blockages and evolving spiritually.

Exploring the Higher States

Because you don’t have all that commotion inside, and you’re feeling more whole and complete, there’s nothing you need from the outside.

Psychological needs come from your blockages.

Once the energy is no longer blocked and is flowing freely, personal needs are no longer your motivation. Your actions are the expression of love and gratitude for life. Your whole life becomes an act of service.

In the World but Not of It

A spiritual life is not about adhering to a given set of rules - it’s about never action based on your personal energy.

Is there something I can be doing to serve the moment in front of me?

Not for me; I already let go of me. Now that I’m clear and nonreactive, is there something I can do to raise the moment as it passes by?

If something happens and you feel you want to defend yourself, don’t touch it. First let go of the part of you that wants to close down, then deal with the outside.

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This is an intriguing book that positions the concept that we each contain an “internal family” of distinct parts - and that treating these parts with curiosity, respect, and empathy vastly expands our capacity to heal. I found the ideas of this book enlightening and a guide to self-discovery and transformation. After reading the book, I sketched out my internal family visually, identifying parts that had assumed extreme roles as a form of protection - the managers and firefighters that protected the exiles.

Understanding your parts can bring a deeper understanding of who you are and compassion to the parts you may dislike or drive you to do things that conflict with your desired character. The primary goal is to become Self-led, where you emerge as the leader of your parts and leverage them to excel in your work, relationships, and life. The outcomes of Self-leadership are the qualities that guide you to live a purposeful life - calmness, clarity, curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness.

The YouTube video at the bottom of this post is a recent Rich Roll podcast that discusses the multiplicity of the mind with IFS creator Richard Schwartz.

My Notes

Thoughts and emotions live with us, and we have to relate to them one way or another.

What we call “thinking” is often our inner dialogues with different parts of us.

Emotions and parts emanate from inner personalities I call parts of you.

It is this understanding of our disturbing thoughts and emotions - that they are manifestations of inner personalities that have been forced into extreme roles by events in our lives - that leads us to relate to them differently.

As our parts feel more accepted and less threatened or attacked, they transform into their naturally valuable state.

The most wonderful discovery I have made is that as you do this work, you release, or liberate, what I call your Self or your True Self.

If you don’t have any idea of who you really are, you can’t become that person.

The last place many of us have looked for peace and joy is inside ourselves.

The more your notice - step back from - rather than become or identify with your thoughts and emotions, the more you relax into being the “you” who is not your thoughts and emotions.

When a person is Self-led, they don’t need to be forced by moral or legal rules to do the right thing.

We all have pools of pain and shame, and protective strategies that are reinforced by our culture. We all come to distrust our Self and put on a range of masks. Until those pools are fully drained and our protectors fully relax, Self-leadership will be fleeting at best.

Calmness: You ride on the roller coaster of life like everyone else. It’s just that the ride that used to produce a white-knuckled clinging more often becomes interesting and sometimes painful or joyful.

Clarity: I define clarity as the ability to perceive situations without distortion from extreme beliefs and emotions. “beginners mind”, a perspective in which many possibilities exist because of the absence of preconception and projection.

Curiosity: When we are able to become nonjudgmentally interested in even our most despised inner demons, we find those internal dialogues to be enlightening and transformative.

Compassion: When your feel compassion, you see a person suffering, you feel empathy for them, and you know that they have a Self that, once released, can relieve their own misery. If people relieve their own suffering, they learn to trust their own Self, and they learn whatever lesson the suffering has to teach them.

Confidence: As people heal their vulnerable parts, their critics relax and their defenses drop. They feel Self-confident in the sense that their Self has healed those parts and has shown its ability to protect them or to comfort them if they are hurt again.

Courage: When a person is Self-led, they not only have the courage to act but also the courage to be accountable for acting.

Creativity: To allow for real Self-expression requires the courage to release all the creative parts we have locked in inner containers.

Connectedness: As we increasingly embody Self, we will feel a growing sense of connectedness to all the Selves around us. People often find themselves spending more time with others in who they can sense the Self.

If you are watching yourself, that’s a signal that a part is present.

As your parts come to trust you more, you will find that your ability to quickly separate and enter the Self state dramatically improves such that you can live increasing amounts of life from that place.

The protective parts that run your life must come to trust that it’s safe to permit more Self-leadership.

As each part drops its extreme role, all the parts begin to change their relationships with one another, eventually becoming an integrated, harmonious group.

Many of your parts can’t change until the parts they protect or are embattled with have changed first. If you stay curious with a part, you will learn about the reasons if’s afraid to change and that sometimes those reasons are realistic.

Ideally, your Self is present for every activity and interaction, and the appropriate parts are close by, offering suggestions, blending their emotions or abilities with your Self, or sometimes even fully taking over your body.

When a part does take over, it’s with permission of the Self rather than being an automatic reaction to step in and protect.

The protected parts are called exiles because they are the vulnerable ones that we try to lock up in inner prisons or leave frozen in the past.

We’re exiling not only memories, sensations, and emotions but also the parts of us that were hurt most by those events. These are often our most sensitive, innocent, open and intimacy-seeking parts.

I call protection parts that are responsible for our day-to-day safety the managers.

Managers are the parts of you that want to control everything.

The best way to understand managers is to think of them as striving to preempt anything that might touch our exiles. They want to protect our exiles, but they also disdain them for being weak and needy.

When you get to know them, you find that most managers are exhausted by their roles and are much more than their roles.

We all have parts that go into action at the point to put out the first, so I call them firefighters.

Firefighters do whatever it takes to deliver us out of the red-alert condition.

Firefighters will use virtually any thought, activity, or substance if it works.

Firefighters are reactive - they frantically jump into action as soon as the exiles are upset and their fire starts. Their urgency makes them impulsively unconcerned about consequences.

When firefighters take over, they can make us feel as if we’re possessed by something out of our control, so they make easy targets for demonization.

These three types of parts (exiles, managers, and firefighters) exist because of all the pain and shame you accrued in your life and the ways you were taught to relate to that pain and shame.

Since you didn’t learn how to heal that pain and shame, you had to exile it, which led to the need for all of these protectors.

Your parts don’t disappear - they just transform into roles they prefer.

As you get to know these parts and learn why they are the way they are - that is, you witness their stories from the past about how they were forced into the roles they are in - they change.

It turns out that there aren’t any inherently bad parts, just good parts in bad roles - good parts carrying extreme beliefs or emotions from things that happened in the past.

As your parts separate from the “you” that is left, you will begin experiencing and exhibiting those valuable leadership qualities (curiosity, compassion, and so on) and other ones because that is who you really are.

All that parts need to unburden - that is, to unload the extreme beliefs and emotions that keep them locked in rigid roles - is to believe that you fully understand what happened in the past when they acquired their burdens.

Ask this part to show you what it wants you to know about the past.

Once a vulnerable part has released its burden in this way, the parts that were protecting it or keeping it locked up often relax and become more interested in being healed themselves.

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Positive Intelligence is a methodology to understand your mental saboteurs and how to develop self-command to achieve one’s true potential. There is a free assessment to identify your top saboteurs. I completed a 7-week course about these saboteurs and how they impact performance. The value is developing an awareness of mental forces that constrain you from operating at your full potential.

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Summary

"Mastering Leadership" by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams is a comprehensive guide to understanding and applying transformational leadership principles. The book revolves around the Universal Model of Leadership, which outlines the stages of leadership development and the competencies needed to achieve effective and sustainable leadership. Here are the key points:

1. The Leadership Circle: The Leadership Circle Model is a tool introduced by the authors to assess and develop leadership effectiveness. It measures two primary leadership domains: Creative Competencies (effectiveness in achieving results) and Reactive Tendencies (behaviors that limit effectiveness).

2. Universal Model of Leadership: The authors present a Universal Model of Leadership that shows a clear path from Reactive Tendencies to Creative Competencies. It explains the stages of leadership development, from Egocentric to Reactive to Creative to Integral leadership.

3. Creative Leadership: Creative leadership is marked by a leader's ability to cope with complexity, deal with change, and handle people-related issues. Creative leaders achieve results in a manner that is sustainable, enhances collective capability, and engenders genuine commitment.

4. Reactive Tendencies: The authors delve into reactive tendencies, which are the learned behaviors that leaders resort to under stress. These are often unconscious habits that, while providing short-term gains, limit long-term effectiveness.

5. Integral Leadership: This is the pinnacle of the model, where leaders can operate from any other leadership perspective as required by the situation. They can adjust their leadership style to match the needs of the moment and exhibit a high level of self-awareness and adaptability.

6. The Inner Game: Leadership is described as having two aspects, the "inner game" and the "outer game". The inner game is about a leader's thinking, feeling, and self-awareness, while the outer game is about their behaviors and competencies. The authors suggest that the inner game drives the outer game and that leadership development should focus on the inner game.

7. Leadership Culture: The book discusses the importance of a strong leadership culture, which they describe as the collective action and behavior of the leaders, and how it drives performance and success. A strong leadership culture can also foster Creative Competencies and reduce Reactive Tendencies across an organization.

8. Transformation: The authors provide actionable guidance on how to shift from a Reactive structure to a more Creative one, thus transforming the leader's approach, mindset, and overall culture of leadership within an organization.

"Mastering Leadership" emphasizes that effective leadership requires a shift in consciousness from Reactive to Creative and ultimately Integral leadership, advocating for continuous development and transformation in leadership practices.

My Notes

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My Notes

Some of us fear making a significant change in our lives and accept the status quo. Our self-limiting beliefs create barriers and artificial boundaries that hold us back from experiencing our true potential. As we break through these barriers, we create new energy and clarity to perform work activities that leverage our unique gifts and strengths. Our strategic vision to recognize the work we are uniquely called to do and the disciplined choice to overcome barriers enables us to take the Big Leap to success, fulfillment, and abundance. Operating in our Zone of Genius sets us free.

Upper Limit Problem

The Upper Limit Problem is our universal human tendency to sabotage ourselves when we have exceeded the artificial upper limit we have placed on ourselves.

The Upper Limit Problem is caused by a too-low thermostat setting on our ability to achieve and enjoy our ultimate success.

The thermostat gets set low early in our lives, at a time when we could not think for ourselves.

Later, as we dream about big goals and move up into realms of love, abundance, and creativity that are above our old thermostat setting, we bump up against the artificial lid that we have placed on our success through unconscious childhood decisions.

Unless we solve the ULP, we will keep finding ways to bring ourselves back down when we’ve blown past our old setting.

Those unconscious decisions become barriers we must overcome in order to express and enjoy our full measure of success.

Four Hidden Barriers

1. Feeling Fundamentally Flawed - if we carry this false belief within us, we sabotage our success because we think we’re essentially bad. If something good happens, we must mess up to offset it, because good things can’t happen to bad people.

2. Disloyalty and Abandonment - the false belief that by succeeding, we are being disloyal to and leaving behind people in our past.

3. Believing That More Success Brings a Bigger Burden - the false belief that we are a burden in the world. If we carry this feeling inside us, we sabotage our success so that we won’t be a bigger problem.

4. The Crime of Outshining - the false belief that we must dim the bright lights of our brilliance so that we won’t outshine someone in our past. If we hold this feeling inside of us, we tend to hold ourselves back from expressing the full potential of our innate genius.

Understanding why we’ve limited ourselves liberates a new energy in us, which we can draw on to propel us to new heights of abundance, love, and creativity.

As we spiral upward in our quest to express our unique genius, we will likely soar past ghosts and shadows of those old barriers.

For this reason, it’s best to think of our quest as a continuing journey of transcending upper limits.

The payoff for the work is a gift of enduring value: we get to live in the full rainbow of our potential, in our Zone of Genius.

Zones

• Zone of Incompetence - all the activities we’re not good at. Others can do them a lot better than we can. The best way to handle things in your Zone of Incompetence is to avoid doing them altogether.

• Zone of Competence - you’re competent at the activities in the Zone of Competence, but others can do them just as well. Successful people often discover that they expend far too much time and energy in this zone.

• Zone of Excellence - the activities you do extremely well. You make a good living in your Zone of Excellence. For successful people, this is a seductive and even dangerous trap. It’s where your own addiction to comfort wants you to stay. You’re reliable there, and you provide a steady supply of all things that family, friends and organizations thrive on.

• Zone of Genius - the set of activities you are uniquely suited to do. They draw upon your special gifts and strengths. Liberating and expressing your natural genius is your ultimate path to success and life satisfaction. Your Zone of Genius beckons you with increasingly strong calls as you go through life.

How to Transcend Our Upper Limit Problem

We transcend our Upper Limit Problem each time we make more room inside us to feel more love, abundance, and success.

It’s done moment by moment, and the moment goes like this:

We catch ourselves worrying or starting an argument.

Suddenly we realize we’re Upper-Limiting.

We let go of the train of worry-thoughts or the huffy point of view, taking a deep breath or two for relaxation.

A moment later, we break free of the Upper Limit and feel a flow of good feeling again.

In wink-of-an-eye moments such as these, we expand our capacity to enjoy more love, abundance, and success.

These moments are the springboards of our Big Leap.

Committing to Your Zone of Genius

I commit to living in my Zone of Genius, now and forever.

If it weren’t for ______________, I could be doing what I really want to do.

Longing is a persistent, lingering feeling of wanting something you can’t quite get or something you’ve judged unobtainable.

Most people have a carefully crafted, well-justified story about why they can’t take their Big Leap.

Just notice the voices and feel the fears.

All you need to do is acknowledge them, wave to them, let them know you’re aware of them.

ZoG questions:

• What do I most love to do? (I love it so much I can do it for long stretches of time without getting tired or bored)

• What work do I do that doesn’t seem like work? (I can do it all day without ever feeling tired or bored.)

• In my work, what produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to amount of time spent? (Even if I do only ten seconds or a few minutes of it, an idea or a deeper connection may spring forth that leads to huge value.)

• What is my unique ability? (There’s a special skill I’m gifted with. This unique ability, fully realized and put to work, can provide enormous benefits to me and any organization I serve.)

I expand in abundance, success, and love every day, as I inspire those around me to do the same.

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My Reflections and Call to Action

• If you are experiencing success, assessing your activities in the Zone of Excellence is more critical than ever. It could be that these activities, and your value proposition, are now relegated to the Zone of Competence due to AI or your lack of advancing your skills in a competitive market. Conduct an audit of your skills and the demand for them in the market.

• What are the calls from your inner voice to pursue a higher purpose or dream but ignore or consciously push out due to urgent demands or fear? What is stopping you? Will you regret this on your deathbed?

• We are often so close to our work and how we operate that we don’t have the context of our unique skills and strengths. It’s easy to assume that others have them and are not necessarily unique. Now when someone shares feedback about something I am good at, I take that as a signal that identifies my Zone of Genius. Ask colleagues, customers, managers, friends, and family members to share feedback about what makes you unique and the activities you are specifically suited for. State that you are refining your career strategy to be more intentional about your path and would love their input.

  • What are the activities when I shine and exude energy?

  • What am I uniquely great at, compared to the interactions of other successful people?

  • What is the work that I do that others can do equally well or better?

• As we travel throughout our careers, we will likely experience multiple Zones of Genius as our needs change, and the market dynamics shape the jobs to be done. Identify your ZoG for the present and pursue that as your top priority. Open up your creativity to imagine other ZoG’s in your future. This consciousness will guide your self-development of skills and build a network over time to experience your potential ZoG at a time when you are well-positioned to take another Big Leap.

• Delegating work or finding others to do your work activities they are better at and at a lower cost is critical to operating at your true potential. Make a list of these activities and find a way to eliminate them from your calendar.

• Successful people can often be perfectionists and perform work for fear that others will not do it as well. Assess the opportunity cost and the hours in a typical week that could be freed up to work in your ZoG by delegating this work.

• Life is uncertain, and we are not promised tomorrow. Committing to and working in our ZoG is within our control and certain. This is where we create mutual value for ourselves and those we serve.

I commit to living in my Zone of Genius, now and forever.

I expand in abundance, success, and love every day, as I inspire those around me to do the same.

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In a busy world with talented people, our work and talents do not magically speak for us to land our dream job or provide access to resources that accelerate our careers. Power and influence are invisible strengths you will not find on a resume, but they separate high performers from others.

Stanford University professor Jeffrey Pfeffer provides a manual on how to use power skills to increase compensation, impact, job satisfaction, and happiness. Based on research and case studies, these skills can be learned and practiced to build the power muscle and change your life.

“Political skill is one of the most powerful predictors of success in the workplace”

The seven rules are:

1. Get out of your own way.

2. Break the rules.

3. Show up in a powerful fashion.

4. Create a powerful brand.

5. Network relentlessly.

6. Use your power.

7. Understand that once you have acquired power, what you did to get it will be forgiven, forgotten, or both.

You may have mixed emotions about power - it’s manipulative, inauthentic, and goes against my values or personality. We often see examples where power was abused for personal gain, but it’s also a tool that can be used to create value and change organizations, the lives of others, and the world. I take the view to embrace power as a resource to help fuel my purpose of coaching people to experience their true potential.

My Highlights

My hardcopy book is full of yellow highlights and pages that are tabbed. Here are three idea favorites from each rule.

1. Get out of your own way

“How people think of themselves invariably influences what they project to others and what behaviors they will enact. The lesson: use self-descriptive adjectives that convey power and eschew attitudes that, even if accurate, fairly or unfairly, diminish your status.

“There is evidence that not to make positive assertions about oneself or one’s work can be taken as a negative signal. So, if you do not project power and confidence, and your self-description is limited in its ambitions and claims, your social status and career will suffer.”

“To the extent people opt out of doing things their colleagues are willing to do - tactics that build power - they put themselves at a disadvantage. The fundamental point: everyone has choices, not only about how they think of themselves, but about what they are willing or unwilling to do in the contest for power.”

2. Break the rules

“it is easier and often more successful and productive to just do what you want and to ask forgiveness for something that you have done instead of asking for permission.”

“Another advantage to breaking with the rules is that, not surprisingly, rules and norms tend to favor those with the power to make them - who tend to be the entities in power. Why play by the rules others have made that may disadvantage you?”

“If people blend in too perfectly, they become unnoticeable, undifferentiated from those around them competing for promotions. People also want to excel, and to excel is to be, almost by definition, different.”

3. Show up in a powerful fashion

“the third rule of power is to appear powerful, because others will treat you and make decisions about you depending on how you show up, and those decisions often act in ways to make the initial impressions become true.”

“Appearance matters and predicts career outcomes and attributions of power.”

“One of a leader’s most important tasks is to project confidence. When someone projects confidence, others are more likely to follow and support them - and for that matter, to hire and promote them.”

4. Create a powerful brand

“A brand brings together aspects of someone’s personal and professional life in a way that makes it clear why they are uniquely qualified for some position or to found a company in a particular industry.”

“Your task: think of a short (two- or three-sentences) way of describing yourself and your accomplishments that brings together your expertise, your experience (what you have done), and a way of integrating that with some aspect of your personal story.”

“Part of brand building and creating a positive reputation is ensuring that you get credit for your work. That entails being willing to tell your story and eschewing any false sense of modesty or the belief that your work will speak for itself.”

5. Network relentlessly

“Who you know, and how many people you know, matters for your influence and for your career.”

“Centrality affects visibility. More people will know and know about people who are more central, and that visibility will often work to those people’s advantage for becoming the focal point for information and opportunities. When people evaluate jobs and roles, one dimension they should account for is the centrality that will accrue to them from occupying that job or position. Other things being equal, chose more central jobs.”

“If you want to get value from your connection to another, don’t make that other do the thinking for you. In other words, to the extent that you have a specific request for some specific help for a specific and sensible reason, others can quickly ascertain whether and how they will connect you to resources that might be helpful.”

6. Use your power

“the principal theme of this chapter, is the idea that power is not some scarce, limited resource that becomes depleted by being used. Instead, the more someone uses power to get things done - including structuring the world around them and changing who works with and for them in ways that support themselves and their objectives - the more power they will have.”

“Successfully using power to make changes increases the incumbent’s power, while waiting to use power or not using it at all leaves the status quo in place, thereby reducing power.”

“It is much safer to be feared than loved because … love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage, but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”

7. Understand that once you have acquired power, what you did to get it will be forgiven, forgotten, or both

“I ask people to become more comfortable with pushing the rules, and to lose the scripts and self-descriptions that hold them back.”

“The more powerful and successful someone is, the more likely it will be that talented people will want to work with them - and the ability to attract more and better talent increases the chances of subsequent success.”

“Success - money and power - takes care of many presumed sins, causing others to ignore, forget, or otherwise overlook or rationalize wrongdoing.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer Resources

Listening to real case studies provides an efficient method for learning Pfeffer’s power rules (Pfeffer on Power podcast).

Dr. Pfeffer shares the Stanford course outline with readings, and assignments focused on learning and applying the rules of power. Writing creative responses to the assignment prompts can accelerate your understanding of power concepts and apply them in your career.

Call to Action

Commit to one action this week to practice building and demonstrating power for your career. Examples include:

• Reach out to someone in your network with a specific, tangible request that can unblock your job search or accelerate getting something done.

• Draft your 2-3 paragraph brand statement described above in rule 4.

• Meditate on your self-description to identify how you may limit your ambitions and how others see you. Change one small thing on how you will show up differently within the next week.