Life might look different eh?

What if we all put a stick of dynamite under the box most of us have agreed to live in?

What if you had the courage like my friend Alexis to give it all up?

What if rather than pretend everything is “fine” we got super honest and told the truth, admitted we were hungry for more, gave ourselves permission to cut the chord of comfort, complacency, and mediocrity to love deeper, bigger, and tell the whole truth of who we really are?

What if, like my friend Alex, you said “screw the conventional track” and just took a giant step into the unknown? What if, like my bro Dan, you quit a very stable job with good benefits to search and go after work that was much closer to your soul’s calling? What if, like my friend Patrice, you took a sabbatical from a growing entrepreneur business because you weren’t feeling it? And, what if you went the other way and took a high paying job in another country just for six months so you could afford to support your family like my other friend Dan did?

I have countless other examples of clients and friends taking bigger risks from leaving relationships that no longer serve, to starting businesses in the face of massive uncertainty.

What would YOUR life look like if you took bigger risks? What is at stake?

I’m here to help you get very honest about what you really want. Then, once you uncork that, I’m here to help you go for it.

If you are so inspired, here are 4 key ingredients to consider the change.

Truth

As Michael Jackson says, start with the man (or woman) in the mirror. Tell the full truth with yourself. Are you really satisfied with your life? If you know there’s more, what could you be doing about it? What else would you need to leap?

Community

If you make radical shifts in your life and you are alone, more power to you and good luck.

If on the other hand, you want to be “held” through the process and get serious support, no matter how bad it gets, the safest choice is in a supportive community.  We need the mirroring of honest brothers and sisters reminding us to stay true to ourselves and calling us out when we fall asleep or veer off on someone else’s track.

Mentors & Guides

Repeat: If you make radical shifts in your life and you are alone, more power to you and good luck.

Having mentors and guides help us see ourselves more clearly is another way. I feel lost, scared, and confused a lot lately and having a guide I can reach out to and talk openly with on a regular basis is crucial.

Context

Putting our life into a context that makes sense to us can make all the difference.

Sadly, somewhere along the way, most folks fell asleep in their lives and became discouraged from asking the big, meaningful questions. The context of most people’s lives is one they didn’t necessarily choose. The American Dream is the context many of us were raised into, and for most of us that dream is crumbling.

Fortunately a lot of us are getting smarter and realizing we can choose differently.

What if you created your own new, fresh context?

One idea? Knowing your life was shorter than you had planned.

Would that change your perspective?

Have you seen 127 hours yet? If so, you’ll get what I’m talking about here. As with any good nail-biting survival story, the hero faces death directly and as a result has a profound wake up call.

I was speaking to a deep elder in my local community Tom Daly the other day and he woke me up to death. Tom and his wife Jude, lead “One -year-to-live” groups. I have heard of this before and I love the idea.

Until recently, death is something I normally don’t relate to much.  In the United States, the more privilege you have, the less you have to pay attention. In this culture not many folks are very in touch with their mortality.

I live in the Boulder bubble. I could easily fall asleep. Yet, I’m a seeker, a person on a mission to wake up and relax into the truth of existence. That requires relating to death and impermanence on a regular basis and being very honest how and where I spend my time.

In the past, I would do my best to relate to death as much as possible although I didn’t know it at the time. That’s why I have liked extreme sports and serious adventure so much. Especially when I was feeling depressed and shut down in my 20′s. Being out in the wilderness, climbing with no ropes and hitchhiking across Alaska and Central America had me feeling more alive.

For a lot of men (and perhaps women), when they have an intimate relationship with death, they feel more alive. The closer to death you are, the more alive you can feel. Ask any combat soldier. Or any super extreme athlete, mountaineer, sailor, etc. Let’s face it, the way most Americans live is, well, boring.

So, since most of us are not risking our lives in what we do each day, perhaps we could play a game where we had to relate to death more frequently as a way of us feeling more alive and on target.

What if facing an imminent death was your context?

You ever notice how when some folks are diagnosed with cancer or another terrible illness that often their attitude on life changes?

Because when the context changes, many inspired people begin to see things differently and start to make serious changes in how they approach life. They quit their lame job, they take bigger risks, they get clear on what they want and go after it, and they perhaps they even open their heart more.

I think if we all really knew we had six months or a year to live, most of us would make some serious course corrections to our lives.

So, what would be like for you to play a game where you imagine you had six months to live?

Play a New Game

Because when we change the game, we change. And, when we practice with other folks, we strengthen a muscle to do the real thing in the game of our life.

By playing this game, it might light a fire under your pants to do what you’ve always wanted to do. You might start to take a few more risks. You might be willing to put yourself out there and make some mistakes. You might express your love more. You might end that relationship. On and on.

If you want to experiment, go super deep, and have a blast doing it, come join Rick Snyder and I as we spend six months together living more truthfully, honestly, and courageously.

You’ll have the context, the framework, the community, the accountability, and massive support to go for it.

Here’s the link:

http://mensleadershiptraining.com

Six months. Sixteen other men. Serious transformation and a massive dose of laughter.

Me first! I commit to being true to myself, first and foremost. I commit to trusting my own experience above all else and getting to know my inner authority. No one holds the authority on me except me.

The moment you abandon your truth and yourself, is the moment you betray yourself.

I grew up in Utah so I have always been skeptical of dogma. On a regular basis I had Mormons trying to convert me to their faith. I was looked down upon, judged and patronized constantly. When someone else claims to have the truth where they are right and I am wrong, I contract.

Systems such as corporations and religions are very sophisticated about preying upon individuals who lack trust in themselves. These big systems know that people are looking for answers and will do anything to be reassured.

The system will then make false promises that are impossible to deliver upon (such as what happens when you die and the place you will go) in order to control people from finding the solutions themselves.

It is not surprising to me then, how many folks will place their full trust in another person, a priest, a church, dogma, a corporation a family member or whatever. The price tag? Confusion. Not knowing oneself. Pain. Betrayal.

God forbid we have a bunch of intelligent, free thinking, free acting people running around.

So, at 30 when I met a Buddhist teacher who said trust no one other than your own inner authority it was a breath of fresh air. But even Buddhism has blind faith, blind followers who just surrender their own wisdom to someone who holds more authority, seniority, or leadership over them.

It is human nature to look outside ourselves for the answers to life’s dilemmas. And, sometimes it is completely appropriate to seek council at various stages on the path. But to make this a habit as a way to avoid your own inner knowing is to cut yourself off from your life force and the tremendous wisdom that lies within you.

For example, a lot of men involved in men’s work will make statements like, “We’ll David Deida said….” My question to them is “Since when did David Deida become the authority on you?”

When we always surrender our trust to some other man who supposedly has more experience on us, we abandon our integrity and the truth of who we are.

A real mentor will help you cultivate your own knowing. A real teacher will help you find your own answers to life’s questions.

Young people today are tired of older people giving advice. It’s a bankrupt model and does little to empower a young person to be who he or she is supposed to be. Giving advice and thinking you know best, is to rob someone of trusting their own experience.

This is not to say we should not seek council or get feedback. Quite the contrary. Get feedback and then test it against your own experience.  On a regular basis, I open myself to feedback from trusted sources–then, I test it against my own experience.

Why are we so afraid to trust ourselves? When did trusting yourself get thrown out the window?

If you don’t know how, make it a practice to learn how. Trust in others is fine, but we have to trust ourselves first. Blind faith with no trust in oneself is a recipe for disaster.

But how do I develop my inner authority?

1. Trust your own experience. I learn through experience only. When we trust our own experience we develop our own inner knowing and intuition—a critical strength to have today. If we can give young people one lesson it is to trust their experience.

2. Learn from your teachers and then burn them. Milk a model until you are done with it and bury it. It is the only way you will develop your inner authority.

3. Spend a lot of time alone, in solitude, getting to know yourself.

** Important note for teenagers. It is appropriate to follow some external authority until you reach the right age of maturity. I know, a painful aspect of life. And remember to follow the wisdom of the external authority whom you trust and respect.