The Inner Excellence Way

Summary:

1. Inner Excellence is an in-depth system of training your heart, mind and body to be fully engaged, unattached to your goals and dreams, so you can perform at your highest level and live an extraordinary life.
2. We use the mind to train the heart, which is the source of our greatest fears and biggest dreams.
3. Your heart’s deepest need is love and acceptance, and thus the greatest fear in performance is losing that love and acceptance due to performing poorly.
4. The three greatest obstacles are your thoughts, revealed in three categories:
   1. Overanalysis
   2. Negative (judgmental) thinking
   3. Self-consciousness
5. Here’s the daily training:
   1. The primary goal is to learn and grow, seeking small improvements every day, to become the type of person who loves greatly and lives fully engaged, who walks by faith not by sight, who’s greatest dream is to share a selfless and therefore fearless love with the world.
   2. Self-mastery is mastery of the ego, and so each day we take the risk to make mistakes, potentially getting judged and looking foolish while we do it–then we own that foolishness as a step to mastering the ego. We need to do hard things, to fall down again and again in order to learn all there is to learn.
   3. Clarify the vision and stay connected to the vision every day; make space in your day (and protect that space) to dream and imagine greatness.
   4. Seek to grow in self-awareness, especially of your thoughts and feelings and how they translate into actions and results.
   5. Guard your energy, the positive vibes aligned with everything you’ve ever dreamed of. Every decision, every action throughout the day is considered for how it will affect your flow of resonance, your ability to walk in love not fear.

___________________________________________________

“He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.” – Thomas Merton

The way of excellence is not for everyone, so this may be your moment to bow out of this conversation, this community. You should realize that this journey, on the path to an extraordinary life, has one foot in joy and one foot in suffering.

The universe was created with certain laws, like gravity and the space-time continuum. One of those laws is that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it just changes form. It’s constantly changing form, looking for available places to place its power.

There’s an energy in the universe that grows the grass and spins the earth and it contains the seed of everything you ever dreamed of. If you want to connect with that energy, you totally can. It’s waiting for you every moment. But it’s gonna cost you.

Most people aren’t willing to pay the price. They may say, “What if I spend years developing myself, chasing a dream, and the dream doesn’t deliver?” This is why we develop the person first and foremost (your heart and soul), so when the obstacles and adversities and plan B’s come (and they always do), you’ll be able to adapt to any situation.
The path on the way to your goals and dreams are almost always diverted in ways you didn’t expect and perhaps didn’t want (the plan B diversions) but those are not roadblocks, but rather they’re building blocks to help you become the person you need to be to live your dreams.

Perhaps you’re not willing to pay the price, hey – no judgment. Best wishes. But if you’re up for at least considering the price, let’s talk a little more.

First let’s look at a few laws of the universe:

• positive energy attracts positive energy
• negative energy attracts negative energy
• in order to build muscle, we must break it down first so it can re-build with stronger and larger fibers.
• in order to gain wisdom, we need to experience trouble
• in order to gain mental toughness, we need to place ourselves in the painful path of likely failure
• in order to master the ego, we need to be willing to look like a fool in front of others

And a few things we need to do in order to learn and grow and master the ego:

1. Clarify the vision–your greatest dream–and the type of person who lives that life. The vision is more an energy and heart posture than results and circumstances, a way of life. Know the vision and protect it daily.
2. Develop self-awareness. Become an observer of your thoughts and how thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to actions, and actions lead to results.
3. Connect with the positive rhythm of the universe and stay aligned with that energy, protecting it moment to moment.
4. Put yourself in new and challenging circumstances regularly; schedule it. You need to fail to find out what you can do.

Let me know how it’s going for you.

Love Jim