DON’T YELL AT ME
Summary:
- The best possible life has amazing experiences, deep, enriching relationships, and is always learning and growing, one foot in joy, one foot in suffering.
- Amazing experiences are the by-product of five amazing and crucial relationships: with God, self, others, your work, and your environment.
- Amazing relationships are intimately connected by communication that’s clear, positive, and empowering.
- For most of of us, most of our communication has been none of the above, especially to ourselves (sometimes yelling ?).
- The solution is to update the lens through which you view the world, so that you’re “right-related,” able to see more of reality and capital “T” Truth, less obscured by your own unmet needs and desires.
“In performance, we have a greater purpose. The greater purpose is that we’re communing together, and we want this moment to be really special for all of us. Because otherwise, why bother to have come at all? It’s not about proving anything. It’s about sharing something.” – Yo-Yo Ma, world’s greatest cellist
The great problem in performance (and life) is that we see the world from the viewpoint with ourselves as the center. In this most common perspective, everything becomes about our own needs and desires. Thus, we miss a lot.
In the conclusion of Inner Excellence (for which the audiobook is due to be released in days! ?), Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” So often we don’t know what to do with it, because we’ve been caught up with what we want and don’t have or didn’t want but got anyway.
So we miss the goodness of that moment, of so many moments, because we didn’t know what to do with it.
This is because we haven’t learned perhaps the greatest of all skills, How to Communicate. So often we yell (usually at ourselves), because we haven’t learned to be good communicators. To communicate is to share a message. To communicate well is to share a helpful, empowering one.
The greatest communicators in the world learned that the most extraordinary people, lives that made a remarkable impact on the world, were extraordinary communicators. They were great messengers, and the message they shared was love.
There’s an energy you may have experienced as curious and creative, present without judgment, and as Yo Yo Ma says, “open to new questions, new connections, new explorations and unexpected answers.” Ma calls it Beginner’s Mind. I call it love.
To communicate love is to guard your heart (watch over it with care), to have a heightened awareness of your overall energy, and to make sure that your circumstances and results never supersede your purpose (the central meaning in your life).
To do this, we need to get our energy right, and it will never be quite right with self in the center of our world. All our relationships will be off, and thus so will all our communication. We’ll be frustrated, anxious and afraid.
When you take yourself out of the center, however, and put God/others/your purpose in the center, and have your work flow from that, then your communication will be powerful.
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In order to live an extraordinary life, we need to have the five key relationships appropriately ordered, so we can communicate wisely and powerfully.
For example, if your work is the #1 relationship in your life (which you’d recognize by what you think about most and worry about most), then every other relationship will be disempowered, because you’re putting unstable and temporary circumstances and results (work) ahead of eternal ones (God, self, others).
This easily becomes what psychologists call hurry sickness, which is a constant feeling of being behind and rushed, which causes anxiety. When life is out of order, there’s a constant yearning to move from disorder to order, and so we hurry.
As John Ortberg wisely pointed out, hurry sickness is not a disordered schedule, it’s a disordered heart.
A disordered heart is one that has self as the center of one’s life, a view so limiting it’s filled with fear. To get the relationships in their proper order, to be “right-related,” is to take self out of the center and replace it with the power of the universe.
This all starts with communication. The great communicators share empowering messages, and like St. Francis of Assisi, when necessary, they use words.
You might think of it this way: Great performance comes from great energy; great energy comes from great communication (mostly nonverbal); and great communication comes from a properly ordered heart.
With a properly ordered heart, you’ll become wholehearted, and with this type of center, you’ll be able to share your true self with the world, communing together with all that’s incredible and beautiful.
How to communicate for an extraordinary life (and performance):
- Realize that your overall energy determines everything about you–how you perform, who and what you attract into your life, and especially, whether or not you connect and align with the power that spins the earth, grows the grass, and holds the stars in place.
- Recognize that the primary limitations in your life–what has kept you from living your dreams–is self-centeredness, fueled by unhealed wounds and fears.
- Remember IX Principle #3: Selfless is Fearless. Get your limited self out of the way so your unlimited possibilities can flourish.
- Be still. And Know… Who you are… and Who God is. Nothing else matters until you get this sorted, because you’ll be advancing your relationships in the wrong direction, moving farther from what you really want.
- Put into daily practice key disciplines like starting every day with prayer and meditation, and having silent affirmations and reminders on your phone that you see every day.
- Arrange your days so that you’re experiencing deep contentment, joy and confidence in your daily life with God/the universe.
Love Jim
PS.
I just got back from an incredibly blessed 19 day trip to La Jolla, Ensenada (Mexico), Denver, Palm Bay and Atlantic Beach (FL). Super excited for you all to hear the audiobook with the added material and case study interviews. Narrated by the author. ? It’s due for submission this coming week.