Category: Life

  • I GIVE IN!!!

    It’s time I come clean, put my BS aside and take responsibility for my truest, most raw BEING.
    Why?
    To serve & honour myself…YES! And just as important, to lead by example.
    To inspire & facilitate your most extraordinary evolution through my deeds NOT JUST THROUGH MY WORDS.
    And to bestow on you, what you are worthy of….choice.
    See…
    For years I’ve been focused on bringing you things like grant writing and productivity because that’s what my ego thought you wanted.
    Did you ever notice that your ego creates many illusions? Mine certainly does.
    One of the illusions it created is this: “my story isn’t important.” I had a false sense of modesty, thinking that “I’m not interesting, let’s not talk about me…”
    And yet…
    Every time I’ve told my story of transformation (several of them!) and of ultimately “finding myself” I’ve had far more requests for help than at any other time. It has inspired people to grow and change, because my story shows that it’s possible despite great obstacles.
    So I finally had a “duh” moment the other day. People have been craving this for a reason:
    Our society is set up from day one to program us to NOT be ourselves, but to live for other people’s impressions of us.
    Our ego gets addicted to the positive feedback that others give us when we do things that are pleasing to THEM, and we un-learn how to just be ourselves.
    Yet being ourselves is THE platform for truly inspired creativity. Lots of people claim “I’m not creative” which is total BS. The lack of creativity is simply a lack of being tuned into “being oneself.” This goes on to impact all other areas of life, limiting career progress and satisfaction.
    Being disconnected from who you are, and living from ego gratification, presents challenges to deep, satisfying relationships. It presents challenges to being truly healthy. 
    Who you are is a wonderful, loving, beautiful, fun, unique being.
    Who you’ve been programmed to act as is quite likely competitive, skeptical, reserved… constantly having to “prove yourself” to others around you in order to feel worthy.
    This way of being leads to things like the “impostor syndrome.” If you’re not being you – but operating out of your ego’s notion of what you think others want from you – you’re going to feel like an impostor! Operating from this false platform will never lead to truly good things in life.
    People who’ve achieved so-called success in that way always end up self-sabotaging at some point. Like the guy I just heard about from a friend who was wealthy, until a particular self-sabotaging behavior (coming from Ego) sunk the whole ship, and now he’s destitute.
    Yep, that was me, for many years of my life. And it continued even after I had the sex change. One surgery didn’t suddenly resolve this disconnection I had from myself. (Oh I wish it were that easy!!) It took far more work than that.
    I had PLENTY of self-sabotage going on, despite my apparent successes that my ego has been able to brag about (like the track record of grant funding and business growth).
    So anyway….
    I give in! I give up on my own illusions that my story is unimportant and uninspiring. I give up on the notion that people need help with grants and productivity and creativity… when if I’d been listening, I would have heard the message loud and clear:
    “Morgan, help us learn how to powerfully express who we truly are in the world, with no illusions, games, or false fronts!”
    And in doing that, I strongly suspect that the “troubles” with grants, with sales, with relationships, with health, with employees, with feeling like an impostor… those things will start resolving themselves. (EVERY big breakthrough in these areas I’ve had has been directly correlated with work I’ve done on aligning with core.)
    Honestly, it’s a bit weird to do this. It seems too “easy” – but that’s only because I’ve spent years and some major ups and downs learning how to do just that. Learning how to finally be myself! So I’ll see how it goes….
    And, if you’re ready to go to work on this – to remove those layers of falsity that keep you from expressing who you are in the world – then reach out to me. I can help.
    Morgan

  • What Lies in Stone….

    When speaking of his historically famous Statue of David, Michelangelo said this, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” He made similar comments throughout his lifetime about his artistic abilities and how he did not carve stone to look like figures, he simply released the figures from the stone. What a genius perspective to have. Michelangelo recognized that there was beauty within a block of stone and it was only up to him to reveal it. The same can be said for us and our authentic selves. I love talking about creating and how much better it can make every aspect of our lives, but when it comes to our core, its not about creating at all. It’s about what’s revealing whats already there.

    Who we are at our core is who we we were always meant to be. As we grow and experience life that connection to inner self can become foggy, and then layer upon layer we cover up that magnificent being and become who we think society, our families, our spouses, or our bosses want us to be.

    It is time to chip away at the layers surrounding our core. It is time to let go and release false beliefs and false judgements about ourselves.

    Just like Michelangelo’s beloved David, your authentic self is there, waiting in the stone to be uncovered.Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 9.10.41 PM

  • Victimhood vs Vulnerability

    Being authentic in vulnerability vs. the hidden agenda of victimhood.

     

  • "Panic Culture" and Ebola

    Airborne

    I had the “pleasure” – if you can call it that – of traveling through one of America’s busiest airports today. On my way through, there were headlines and TV’s blaring: “EBOLA!!!” 

    Scare. Fear. Worry. Doubt.

    “It could strike you at any time, so be AWARE, be CAREFUL, be SAFE.”

    Now, look. I have done a lot of computer modeling using fancy-sounding things like “Agent-based modeling.” I’ve played with the simulations of disease spread. It used to strike fear in me.

    If you believe like I did that something like Ebola can strike you down at any random time, then you are screwed. If not this virus, then the next, or the one after that. Or heart attack. Or cancer. Or meteor. Or war. Or murder. You’ll find a way.

    There are MANY ways to die, and a lot of people spend their entire lives, not LIVING, but AVOIDING DEATH. That’s so silly, because you can’t avoid the inevitable.

    No Regrets

    And yes, I’m going to die someday. Maybe soon, maybe later. Would I prefer the “later” scenario? Sure – but only because I feel like I have unfinished business, like raising kids and getting some more positive messages out into the world through the work that I do. I also want to explore some places I haven’t seen before. Yet, if it happens today, or tomorrow, I feel that I’ve lived life FULLY so far. I’ve done in one lifetime what few people do – experiencing life as a student, a teacher, a scientist, an entrepreneur, an explorer, an author, a man, a woman.

    And IF it happens soon, I don’t give any credence to the idea that it’s just “random.” If that happens, it means that I’ve accomplished what I came into this body and this life to accomplish, and it’s time to move on. There is nothing WRONG or SCARY about that.

    Led by Fear or Leading by CORE

    One of the principles of our universe – and our lives – is that you get what you focus on.

    So, if you’re constantly tuned into the news that is screaming EBOLA or disaster – you’re constantly tuned into fear. Since you get what you focus on, you’re going to get more FEAR in your life – i.e. an ever-accumulating pile of things in life to worry over, all adding up to the BIG ONE, the FINAL thing that you worried about but couldn’t ever fully prepare for (because you were so afraid to think that you might be snubbed out so handily by “circumstances” that you pretended you weren’t thinking about it – but you were).

    I’m not talking about sticking your head in the sand. You can be aware of your goals (such as “I’ve got more to do here”) and act in accordance with those goals (such as “I should wash my hands and avoid dangerous situations where possible.”) But it’s easy to go over the top with this, and lose connection with your CORE – your intuitive guidance system that can HELP you accomplish your goals. If your goal is to live longer, that guidance system is far more powerful than any screaming alert sirens or flashing headlines. It will help you line up with the people, places, and things that help you accomplish your goals.

    Auto-pilot vs Taking the Controls

    What screws most of us up in that is that we get lost in doubt, worry, and fear. Those things disconnect us from that very guidance system – much like an airliner that has just been flipped off of autopilot into manual flight mode. Manual flight is ok, but has a few challenges: it is tiring because it requires constant vigilance – and it requires VERY good instruments. Especially in our extremely complex world, operating on “manual” will tie you in logical knots about what is right, safe, and correct versus what is wrong and unsafe. Our “rational” minds cannot deal with a complex future, so we end up making these “rational” decisions with heuristics – i.e. shortcuts.  One of the most common heuristics is: “everyone is doing it, so that must be the way to do it.” Talk about a dangerous way to run your life. It’s like an airiner on manual pilot flying through fog. There are many illusions and without very good instruments, an “incident” is quite likely. Good instruments are like your CORE guidance system – yet most of us ignore those.

    An intuitive signal from the CORE is powerful. A heuristic is weak. They are NOT the same. Listening to heuristics leads to those random bad things (and some good things, too). Listening to the CORE helps you stay on track to what you want – as long as you’re clear about it and you don’t contradict it with the worry, doubt, and fear.

    Do not succumb to the fear mongers. Yes – be aware – but more important is to stay in tune with what you want out of life – your positive vision – and keep moving towards that.  And by God, if you’re not living life FULLY right here and now, start doing it. Ebola or not, one day you WILL be dead. It happens to the best of us 🙂

    Morgan

  • Accepting What You Deserve: YOU Deserve it ALL!!

    Dear One,

    Deservingness. You’ve been told a lie and you’ve told a lie.

    The lie that you don’t deserve it.

    It doesn’t matter what “it” is.

    But you find yourself always making excuses for why you have to do X, Y, and Z BEFORE you can deserve it.

    A better life. Improved health. More happiness. A better relationship. Better  work. Better clients. More money.

    We find all the excuses in the world for not allowing these into our lives…

    Because, we say, “I don’t deserve that!!”

    Or worse, guilt and shame. “I feel guilty because if I get that, I’m taking from someone else.”

    It’s a lie. Who knows where it started. That does not matter here. What matters here is only one simple thing. 

    Did you believe it? Do you believe it?

    Because at its core, most believe it to be true. At some level, good things only come from really hard work. They only come from suffering. They only come from lots of guilt.

    Yet that’s not EVER how good things come. No good thing has ever come via the pathway of shame or guilt. Not a single one. Those are negative attractors that only bring more of the same to themselves.

    You cannot believe that these things are the pathway to “success” in what’s important to you and ever achieve success in that thing.

    The avenue is different. The avenue is from something more fundamental, more basic.

    The avenue comes from eliminating the lie and getting to the truth!

    You didn’t come into the magnificent body to hold success and well being away from yourself – at least not for long.

    Yes, you want challenge. You want growth. But because we internalize this lie of non-deservingness, we go way beyond the healthy aspects of challenge and growth, into a perpetuation of states that hold us back. They keep us from embracing the growth that we could have had so simply – if we had only felt we deserved simplicity and ease.

    If you are overwhelmed, it is for one reason alone. It is because you do not believe at your CORE that you deserve your success to come to you easily and without struggle.

    Perpetual struggle is not a “natural” state for any being except modern humans. All other creatures may have brief struggles, but they quickly move on. They understand that struggle is not from love, not from flow.

    We do not. We have accepted the illusion that in struggle is glory – and so struggle we do. Always. We turn it from something that may happen once or twice into a state of being.

    That is a state of being which says: I do not deserve joy, I do not deserve flow, I do not deserve ease. It says: if I overcome one hurdle, I have to immediately find another one to embrace, or else I will not have value.

    Yet you DO have value. Intrinsically. Who you are is valuable. But if you have forgotten that, then you start associating your value with what you do, and with how people react to you.

    Do you see how fickle that is? Those people you are depending upon for your sense of worth, deservingness, and value may or may not give it to you. And so you stake your fate on external factors that you will NEVER control.

    Human babies do not do this. They feel their value. They feel worthy of the attention they receive. Of the love they receive. Then, as they grow up, they start learning that worth comes from pleasing others, and from “hard work” or accomplishment!

    Yet there is never enough hard work or accomplishment or pleasing of others to fill the void! Those are incredibly weak factors. They are transitory. The void never gets filled.

    You are deserving. That deserving does not come from outside, it comes from the inside. Inside of you is a loving, deserving being. But in your attention to these outside factors, you forgot to look inside for that which you seek. You’ve buried it, much like a treasure lost at the bottom of the ocean – and now it’s so far down beneath the water, that you can’t even see where it is.

    IT IS THERE! It may take some effort to find. But if you TRUST, and BELIEVE that it is there, and persist in your search, find it you will. You will find the greatest treasure that any human being could have: a sense of worthiness, well beingness, and deservingness. 

    Once you find those things, and truly FEEL them, LIVE them, you can have any external thing you want. Yet those external things will not matter so much to you, because they will pale in comparison to the treasure you have found INSIDE of you.

    Seek your treasure. Seek your own inner worth and value. Learn to feel deserving again. It is the most important adventure and challenge you could ever embark upon. So go in haste, my worthy, wonderful human being! Now is the time.

    -Morgan

  • Morgan's über-fantasy world (how about rewriting YOUR story?)

    Morgan's über-fantasy world (how about rewriting YOUR story?)

    This is a blog post about my fantasy world.  Before you click away into the nether lands of cyberspace, let me tell you why this might be important to you.

    We all live in a fantasy world.

    From the most brilliant scientists to the most fundamentalist religionists, our fantasies define who we are.

    In this second decade of the third millennium, we like to pretend that we’re “data driven” – that we are smart and savvy – supported by the latest info-overload purporting to tell us who we are and where we come from.

    It doesn’t matter whose data you use or where it came from. Data are neutral. Data have no meaning apart from the meaning we give them. In science, we tell stories about the data based on our hypotheses and theories. Some of those are some pretty darn smart sounding stories. So smart sounding that we often confuse them for the “TRUTH,” so help you God.

    In other areas of our corner of the vast Universe, people tell very different stories about their world. They look at different data, or they choose to tell a different story about the same data. Or both. This results in sometimes very different stories about who we are and how we came to be.

    You grew up telling yourself a story, and so did I. Everyone does. That story defines everything about how we show up in the world.

    There’s no problem with having a story. It’s how we make meaning out of the vast reams of data that we are exposed to in every moment. The problem occurs later on, after the story gets fixed – cemented like Krazy Glue – into our psyche. Not to be rooted out or changed, we cling to our story as if it were the TRUTH, never again allowing any information to come to us that doesn’t fit with that story.

    Then it often goes South. Many of these stories we glue into our minds impose upon us self-inflicted misery, disconnection, judgement of others, lack of self love, and worse. Despite those problems they cause, we cling to the stories as if they were some kind of “unchangeable TRUTH.” We cling to our stories, and we cling to our misery, lack of self love, judgement, and disconnection.

    I got sick of that and decided to change my story.

    It wasn’t a conscious decision. It would have been a much faster transformation if I had recognized my story for what it was, and intentionally rooted it out. Alas, I was not that lucky. (I was going to write “smart” there, but smart people are just as prone to telling themselves stories as the not-as-smart. Telling stories is an equal opportunity habit).

    So, my story began with growing up in a scientific household. My father was a famous chemist and my brother is a well known physicist. In our household, there was the truth as laid out by “science”, and there was all that “bogus crap that other people believe.”

    Little did I know that there were people all over the world looking at us scientists, and lumping our stories into the category of “bogus stuff that other people believe.” I suppose that it dawned on me at some point in mid-childhood that ours wasn’t the only story out there. But it didn’t matter, because our story was RIGHT and theirs were obviously WRONG.

    I was so wrapped up being RIGHT that I paid no attention to whether my story was bringing me any joy, love, fun, or peace. According to my story, emotional stuff like that was just a bunch of side effects of biochemistry that weren’t all that important.

    What was important was SCIENCE. What was important was Figuring It All Out (TM). What was important was being smarter than those ignoramuses who hadn’t yet Figured It All Out.

    My Ego was bloated with facts and figures to PROVE my case, a bit like one of those dead cows I’ve seen floating in the Colorado River. Yeah, it was that gross.

    And what did I figure out with my high-minded story?

    It’s a Random Universe and We Are Meaningless Players

    In that so-called scientific story I’d adopted, the universe started out for some unknown reason, and since then, everything that happened has been a product of randomness.

    My story about our random universe was based on ideas about what happened a very very long time ago. That was long before any humans were around to measure things with our fancy instruments. There were no weather vanes on Saturn to tell which way the wind was blowing… So to call it “scientific” is assuming that we know far more than we actually do about what was going on back then.

    Anyway… in that story, you and I and everyone else came from something a bit like green pond scum. Chance pond scum turned into chance human beings. By chance we were the fittest in a brutal, harsh, dog-eat-dog world. We out gunned and outsmarted the other species to ascend to the top.

    And the prize? A sort of clinging, tenuous survival on this planet, where at any moment we could be wiped out by war, meteorite, or other disaster… and then the cockroaches will ascend to replace us.

    Worse, because we wiped out so many other species (and later, races) on our clinging way to the top… guilt for our sins is mandatory. We are just selfish, brutish beings… not much more than a blight on the planet. It would all soon come to an end, a just dessert. When I was 13, I dreamed that my dog Bear and I were going to go live in a cabin in Alaska to wait it all out. Bear was the perfect companion for my plan, a stout St. Bernard – German Shepherd mix who could probably outlive me in that kind of scenario. He just needed a keg on his neck to carry our food and drink for the apocalypse.

    My daughter recently came to me and said: “I think it would be nice if we could just have a big reset and start it all over with far fewer humans.” WOW.  Now she’s carrying around a similar story, even though I didn’t consciously pass it on to her. That particular story of humans-as-blight is a prevalent one, especially in liberal/progressive circles**.

    (** I’m only picking on this story because it’s the one I’d adopted. There are plenty of other just-as-dysfunctional stories that people tell themselves, like the one that says we were all perfect until some rib-cum-woman came along, got hypnotized by a snake to bite into an apple, and that perfection was permanently ruined by this heinous act. Implicit in this particular story is the sin and temptation inherent in humans – especially women).

    That story led down a dark path for me. The more I reinforced it as I pursued my professor job as a bigwig scientist, the more it translated into dysfunction in my relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. “Things could collapse at any time” – I lived in constant fear due to this story. I perused the economic and environmental websites daily to reconfirm just how bad things were becoming. That focus on collapse became a personal reality for me. In 2010 UNC pulled the rug out from under a big project without notice, and that led to my angry resignation. According to my story – as just one more sign of how bad things were, they’d screwed me over for space for years, and things were just getting worse and worse.

    That story led to a lot of personal turmoil. It led to turmoil with my family. It led to bouts of depression. It was unfun and unhealthy, and I’m still recovering from it all.

    And it gets worse…

    My story also said I am unlovable. My story said that since I grew up with a peculiar birth defect, “I’m not going to be accepted.” It came from a childhood where my mom walked out the door…never to return. Whenever I saw something I didn’t like, I projected onto it a sense that “it is personal, against me…” instead of realizing that most people are just living each in their own world. My mom didn’t leave because of me, she left because of her own issues. Yet my story for all those years had been telling me that I somehow caused that.

    This story didn’t allow me to believe in LOVE. I mean, I believed in the concept of a biochemically-derived love, but it was just a function of neurotransmitters, and nothing more than that. Loving myself wasn’t on my radar, because it seems pretty odd to love oneself when love is just a bunch of chemicals in the first place. And….I was suicidal at times. It was bad.

    Why share so much? I do it to illustrate just how a story can paint you into a corner, like that story did for me.

    Then something happened and I got a new story

    Over the past six years, I adopted a completely new story. I took the same “facts” that I did before, and I chose to interpret them in a whole new way. I chose to tell a new story, one that has led to a profound change in my life.

    For a long time, I was afraid to share this with anyone. My new story very different than the previous “scientific” story I carried around. I felt like I would be laughed at for sharing it.

    But it is Just A Story

    Then one day it dawned on me. This is just a story. No more, no less. It is not a matter of who is right or who is wrong. That is a totally unimportant ego distraction that I had been caught up in  (as are many, many other people). I’d been so caught up in the Ego of my story, perhaps because I was a non-Mormon who grew up in Mormon Utah. I felt like I needed to defend my particular view against the very strong views of the nearly all-pervasive church influence around me.

    Yet it’s not just me. Nearly all of us adopt these stories, and then we go out into the world with a sort of missionary zeal for defending our story. We ttry to constantly prove to others that it is right, and we make judgements of those who’ve chosen a different story.

    All the while, we separate ourselves from what’s really important: finding and holding the best story that works for our joy, our peace, our prosperity, our love.

    So, I’m going to tell you my new story – a fantasy I created

    I make no claim about its “rightness.” I make no judgements about the very different stories that others hold. It may offend both some of the hardcore materialist scientists and many of the religious. That doesn’t matter.

    What matters is that you use my story transformation as an example, an illustration of how you can examine your story. You can figure out whether YOUR story is serving you, or whether it’s holding you back from a deeper sense of joy, love, and fun in your life.

    Since I spent my whole life around a scientific worldview, my new story is based on the best I can make of the evidence (not just the mainstream). You may not need as much evidence or data or “logic” for your story, and that’s ok. Those are things I need to justify my story due to my curious upbringing.

    It goes like this:

    In the beginning there was consciousness. It was aware of itself, and of possibility, but there was no medium in which to express itself. It was like a painter without a canvas. It was frustrated and forlorn, until it figured out a way to create a canvas out of itself.

    The canvas (our universe) is part of that awareness, and yet the universe, its canvas, has its own independent existence and progression. It is free to evolve by its own course – and yet all the while is supported through LOVE by that which created it.

    Within that canvas is a vast universe of universes, and there are also a vast series of “intelligences” – only a small fraction of which inhabit physical bodies like ours.

    Our own being came through a process that resembles the Evolution written about by Darwin, but with one difference*. It is not entirely random. Rather, it is driven by a creative process, expressing itself on the tableau of DNA as its canvas. It is driven by a process that has LOVE for its creations – all of its creations – at its core.

    It is not an old white guy with a beard planning out the “perfect scenario.” Far from it. No, it is an awareness that constantly grows and expands, and is joyous at each new development. It paints on the canvas through each evolutionary development. It paints on the canvas through each human idea. It paints on the canvas with each new star system that explodes into being. Sometimes those new developments don’t work, and can’t be sustained. Sometimes they work too well, and take over – squeezing out others.

    *note: remember, this is my own fantasy. If you want to get into a debate about evolution vs whatever (creationism, intelligent design, etc), I won’t join you. That is not the point here. It’s finding a story that makes us happy.

    With each new advancement, it opens up even more new opportunities for further developments. There is no “good” vs “evil” in all of this. The artist loves all of its creation. Evil is only a human creation, a product of people who’ve become disconnected from the love, the creativity, and the joy.

    The artist loves all

    The artist who created the canvas loves all of its creations, even though many of them have become so disconnected from it that they think they evolved randomly from pond slime. Even though they think that the artist doesn’t exist. Even though these creations have forgotten that they are love, and that they should start by loving themselves.

    A conscious being who does not love itself cannot give deep love to another. One cannot giveth of that whicheth one doth not have.

    We came here to explore and to create. We came here to build upon others’ creations. We came here as artists, much like the original artist, to see what great things we can do with the canvas of our life. It’s the canvas we’ve been given, yet many of us devalue it, minimize it, and feel unworthy of it.

    Sadly, like me with my former story, many of us have forgotten. We’ve become lost in a story that says we have to work really really hard to succeed, and if we don’t, we are not worthy and we’ll be left behind in the dust. We’ve become lost in a story that says we are insignificant, unexceptional, and unimportant in this vast (and cold) universe. Many of us get lost in a story that says we are here only to serve others, rather than to live our life to its creative fullest – while serving others through living our lives to their fullest.

    We have the free will to build upon creation with joy and love, or to unplug from it and destroy small parts of it with our hate and our fear. Though a lot of humans have chosen the course of hate and fear, our world is a resilient place. It will take a lot of hate to truly destroy it. Meanwhile, there are more and more of us who are waking up and embracing our true purpose here. We are gaining momentum to displace the hate and the fear. We are likely to triumph, as long as we embrace a better story.

    I like my new fantasy much better.

    It has begun healing my psyche and my relationships, without psychotherapy or pharmaceuticals. It has led me out of depressive episodes, and out of withdrawal from other human beings. I’m not 100% of the way there yet. The painting is by no means complete. We are never done. But I’m making great progress, because of the new story I’ve chosen to tell myself.

    So now it’s your turn. What story are you telling yourself? Is that story helping you be a happier, more connected human being? Or does it have you lost in despair, dysfunction, overwhelm?

    If it’s not serving you, perhaps it’s time to start rewriting that old story into something new. If you need help with that, reach out.

     

     

  • Trading batteries… until you kick the bucket

    Balanced rock

    Here I go, off on a tirade to offend some people again. I’m sure you’re used to that by now.

    I’m going to be particularly offensive to those people who tell you the only way to succeed is by working all the time, clawing and climbing your way up the ladder. It works well for those people who benefit from you doing that. However, it doesn’t work for the person doing the clawing and climbing and working (YOU)… nor does it work for your families, friends, and coworkers.

    Let me explain why this makes me shake my head. In the past two weeks I’ve had not one, not two, but FOUR conversations with people who have chosen to make a deadly tradeoff.

    They’ve chosen to “succeed” by working really really really hard. For years and decades. This means missed sleep, missing their kids growing up, and missing out on LIFE apart from work.

    All for some illusory goal like a promotion, more dollars in the account, or recognition. It’s BS.

    Because once you get to “there” there’s no real there there. I felt like that after getting tenure. (If you’re not an academic, tenure meant I was essentially guaranteed a job… for life… after a Hunger-Games like trial lasting seven years to “prove myself”). So what that I proved myself… ? It was hollow. I still had all the same challenges after as I’d had before.

    It wasn’t like I was suddenly this mythical, tenured creature who now walked on clouds of velvet and no longer had to use the bathroom like the rest of the human race. Nope, I was exactly the same person, who’d had maybe three days of happiness and feeling of accomplishment, and then went back to facing exactly the same challenges as before (and maybe some new ones).

    Trading batteries

    Each of us has a set of batteries, one per major life area:

    • Career/Business success (and the money/security that comes from it)
    • Health
    • Mental/spiritual well being
    • Family

    At any point in our life different batteries have different charge levels, representing our overall energy level in that area.

    Our focus and attention is like a generator (or alternator) that charges a battery up – but the generator can only be attached to one battery at a time. And when it’s not attached, the batteries lose charge and run down. If you get a dead battery, that means that area of your life is going to have a major interruption. It will need a jump start.

    So, for those people who’ve chosen work success above all else, it’s like your generator is always hooked to that one battery of career/business. Occasionally, when the other batteries get critically low, you might attach some jumper cables for a quick top-off, but then it’s back to focusing on the career and business battery.

    Our batteries are much like real batteries in another way: when you let it deplete, next time you charge it up, it is permanently damaged and won’t hold a charge as readily. Pretty soon, after it gets drained one too many times, it can’t be charged anymore. That’s when you need a new battery.

    If you deplete your mental/spiritual battery, that’s when you have to end up on drugs (prescribed or otherwise), or in counseling… or worse. I knew several people who committed suicide at that stage.

    If you deplete your family battery, that’s when divorces and child custody battles happen. That’s when kids running away and even shooting up schools happens.

    If you deplete your health battery… well, that should be obvious, but maybe it’s not since so many people do it. That’s where cancer, heart disease, and so many of the other “Modern” ailments start plaguing you.

    My father depeleted his health battery

    I think we knew something bad was coming… my father was a well-recognized, successful professor who put almost all of his focus on the career battery. He got a lot of awards and recognition for that focus. That battery was very full. Sadly, his family and health batteries, not as much. He’d been on a stint of VERY hard work for a few years when he got the diagnosis of a terminal cancer. His health battery had been too damaged by that point, and there was no recharging it. He was dead after a challenging struggle…two years later.

    The irony of “disease care”

    I find it so funny that people think we’ll find cures for cancer, heart disease, and all those maladies, without fixing the real problem. The real problem is that with our health batteries mostly depleted, our bodies are incapable of healing themselves. We have a system focused on trying to stave off disease, rather than on creating health.

    We’re focused on the wrong thing. We have run amok with our own lives.

    If you are a person who’s like those I’ve had conversations with recently, i.e. you think that it’s okay to sacrifice all your other batteries in the name of career and business success, then I have an exercise for you.

    Write a letter to your future self, 20 years from now.

    In that letter, write something like this (with appropriate facts for your situation):

    I’m really sorry [your name]. I know I’ve let you down, by stealing away your life, health, and well being in trade for my need to prove myself in my career and chasing the notion of “security”. I am sorry about that collapse that landed you in the hospital. I’m sorry about that divorce and the custody battle that gave you a life of isolation and nearly bankrupted us. I’m sorry about the cancer that you’re struggling with and may not recover from now that it’s metastasized. I’m sorry that you never got to know your son, who became alienated and estranged because I didn’t have any time for him. I’m sorry about forcing you into ten years of counseling and anti depressives because I’ve treated your precious mind so poorly, with heavy drinking to cover up the malaise, and not nearly enough sleep.

    But I’ll tell you this, I think it’s all totally worth it because those accolades and security I’m generating are going to really really help you a lot as you struggle with this mess. At least you’ll finish life knowing that you got promoted, well paid (until we lost it in the divorce and cancer treatments), and lots of people congratulating us on our wins. I’m sure those congratulations will help you feel much better as you lie there in your (very expensive) hospital bed.

    I hope you will understand why I made the choices that I did, and forgive me.

    If writing that letter to yourself doesn’t give you a moment of thought, then I have nothing else to say that can help you.

    Dr. Morgan Giddings

     

     

     

    Morgan

    ps – in case you think that I am perfect about this, I am not. I made many battery-tradeoffs in getting to where I am. Some of them might have been worth it, but many were not. I would certainly do it differently with what I know now, and I do practice more and more of this balance that I’m talking about. And the irony is that as I do so, my work goes better than ever before.

  • The Mint-Bacon Cake

    This is an excerpt from my upcoming, nearly completed book Creating or Dying.

    You may wonder, “Am I really in charge of my beliefs?”

    Most people never even ask that question. They don’t even realize that they have a set of beliefs that are affecting their entire experience of reality, and that those beliefs can change.

    Instead, they let the news, their preachers, their parents, and their friends form their beliefs into some random mix.

    It’s like baking a cake blindfolded. You feel your way to the cupboard, randomly picking out oil, flour, oregano, salt, bacon, sugar, and mint flavoring. You end up with some horrible concoction that nobody wants to eat. And then you say, “Well, that’s what we got, I guess we just have to live with it.”

    In the world of baking, nobody would put up with that. They’d throw the mint-bacon cake in the trash and start over.

    Yet in the world of our mental belief systems, which are just as important to our existence as those ingredients are to the existence of that cake, we rarely question them. We don’t go through the mix, throwing out the ones that aren’t working, and creating new ones that work better.

    So, we end up with a random selection of beliefs. They may conflict with each other, and cause conflict with other people in our lives. They may cause monetary or even spiritual poverty. They cause kids to be brought up with all the wrong priorities. They even cause wars and other large-scale disasters.

    Ultimately, the random selection of beliefs that most of us end up with, then never really question, lead to random results from our lives. Ask: what beliefs benefit me, and which ones harm me?

    By asking that question, you can take charge of creating a set of beliefs that’s more beneficial.

  • Being on time – is this how to lead?

    Being on time – is this how to lead?

    Does being on time, every time, assure success?

    According to a recent post by my friend Chuck Rylant, it does:

    When considering hiring someone for example, if they say they will call at 3:00 PM, when they call at 3:10 PM, I terminate the business relationship immediately.

    It is interesting that Chuck chooses to be so black and white about it. I mean, what if he was hiring Donald Trump to speak about investing… if Donald showed up 10 minutes late, would that be it, finito?

    This highlights an issue that drives me bonkers about our modern society. We expect it to run like a big clock.

    Live by the clock, die by the clock. Really.

    I don’t wear a watch anymore. I try as hard as I can to forget what time it is because I enjoy life more when I’m not focused on the clock.

    For all of the millions of years of human development, we’ve had accurate handheld clocks for about 20 of them. That’s a tiny, tiny little slice of history. And suddenly, these little devices are making the BIG decisions for us, like whether to have a business relationship with someone?

    When you’re hiring, it pays to be picky

    I get it. When someone shows up late for a job interview, that is a really bad sign. There better be a very good reason. And, it better be clear that the person making the excuse is not just an excuse-maker in general.

    However, just this one thing doesn’t say anything about whether that person is the best for the job.  I’ve employed many people throughout my life, and some were more punctual than others. This was not always a direct correlation with who was more productive.

    Clocks kill creativity (mostly)

    Creative thinking is nonlinear. That means it is not predictable exactly when or where it will happen. It means that, even if you’re working around the clock, you may not get that idea you need to move the project forward. You may only get that idea when you take a day off and go to the beach.

    When we try to box our creative thinking into little slices of time that are available during the working day, we limit it, we contain it, we corral it.

    Maybe that’s why so few people call themselves “creative!” It may be that they’re simply doing things – like living and dying by a clockwork model of our lives. If they loosened up a bit, maybe the creativity would start coming, naturally.

    Do what you say you’ll do, and do it with excellence

    If I’m faced with a choice of whether to delay a project and make it far better, versus being exactly on time but delivering something sub-par, the automatic answer is not to always be on time. If someone needs something by a deadline, then being on time is more important. But in most other cases, actually taking a bit of extra time (a few hours or days) to do something that’s higher quality is always better.

    The best of both worlds is, of course, to deliver on time and with excellence, every time. This is the gift of masters. There are very few of them who truly exist in our world – and they can charge insanely high prices because of it.

    But for the rest of us mere mortals, let’s not try to live our lives exactly by the precision of the clock. We do not live in a precise world, no matter how much we want to try to slice and dice it into one.

  • "I hate snow" vs Thanksgiving for snow!

    "I hate snow" vs Thanksgiving for snow!

    The other day I checked the weather forecast, and it was all bad news!

    Snow is coming. It’s going to cause all sorts of badness. Traffic stuff ups! School closures! Work delayed!

    “Winter Storm Boreas brought heavy snow to parts of the southern Rockies and Four Corners, and is poised to spread its wintry mess of snow, sleet and freezing rain into parts of the South and East through Wednesday. The storm already has affected much of the Western U.S., causing hundreds of rollover accidents and prompting officials to cancel events and close roads. So far, Boreas has caused at least nine deaths storm-related deaths from California to Texas.”

    Oh. My. God.

    Snow is evil! Snow is wrong! And it’s on its way!

    At least that’s the perspective that the weather people had about a winter storm that was sweeping across the country.

    It’s a sad reflection of the creeping cynical aesthetic of our society that something which produces childhood wonder and joy also produces adult angst and frustration.

    On this Thanksgiving day (which should be every day) – I want to chime in with my own little message of thanks… for the snow (and for everything else!)

    But it’s inconvenient – and it kills people!

    It’s so funny how far we’ve come – such that when a winter storm hits, we feel compelled to continue whatever it was we were already doing.. the shopping, the visits, the work. And then we get into car accidents and blame the storm when “deaths happen.”

    Um, no. If someone chooses to go drive in a winter storm, it’s totally their fault if they get into trouble doing that.

    Have we gotten a bit too hooked on “convenience” such that we can’t actually manage to slow down once in a while because of the rhythms of the natural world around us? Listening to the hysterics of the weather people, you’d think so.

    Stuck in a snow bank in Nebraska!

    Once, when I was a foolish young senior in high school, myself and two friends did a cross country road trip in March. After driving from Utah to Philadelphia, only to get dumped by someone I was dating at the time, we drove up the East Coast from Philadelphia to Boston. After partying with some Harvard folks, we headed back west to Utah.

    On our way, Nebraska decided it was time for a big winter storm.  They decided that I-80 was in need of a closure.

    But at the time, they hadn’t yet stupidity-proofed their road closures with a gate. All they had was a big neon sign announcing the closure and telling us to “Exit Here.”

    Did we listen to the sign? Of course not. We’re from the mountains! We know how to drive in the snow! And we have a rear wheel drive Chevy Chevette with snow tires! And did I mention that we’re 18 years old?

    So we proceeded….

    Some parts of the road are clear.

    Other parts are covered in snow drifts anywhere from 6″ to 24″ deep.

    I am driving. I use the clear spots to get speed, so we can blast through the deep spots with momentum. It’s the safest kind of driving!

    Amazingly, we make it through 30-40 of the snow covered sections – about 200 miles into Nebraska.

    Gas is getting low, it’s now dark, but we don’t want to exit because we figure we won’t be able to get back on. The exits are snow-clogged.

    So we keep going. And eventually, it’s a long snow drift and a white out. Literally everything in view of the headlights is white. There is no other color to be seen anywhere!

    I decide to exhibit a rare moment of prudence and to slow down, just in case we might be driving off of a bridge abutment or something.

    And whoop…. there goes our speed. We’re now in a snow bank. Stuck. In Nebraska. At night. With an almost empty gas tank.

    So there we stayed, for the second-coldest night of my life (yes, I’ve experienced colder, once…) I had managed to think ahead and to bring a few sleeping bags, so we spread them over us, and when it got below freezing in the car,  I’d turn it on for a few minutes, then promptly turn it back off to save gas.

    The next morning, we woke up to a snow-covered landscape. I-80 was nowhere to be seen, covered in a thick blanket of puffy snow. There were a few semi-trucks off the road about 1/2 mile away.

    Not having cell phones as a crutch in the late 1980’s, we actually decided to talk to the other human beings in those trucks. They had CB’s, and told us that the snow clearing folks were on their way, but that we’d probably have to stay for a couple days before they pulled us out. Their only priority was getting the road clear – not pulling people out of snow banks.

    So there we sat, for hours, waiting.

    “Here comes a snow plow, straight towards us!” The guy gets a few feet away, stops the plow, gets out and asks us what we’re doing in the middle of the road – right where he’s trying to plow. Yes, we just spent the night right smack dab in the middle of I-80. How fortunate for us!

    We make some excuses, and then he goes and gets some chains, hooks us up, and pulls us out.

    He backs out of the way, tells us to head to the nearest exit and to “get off the road.”  We follow his instructions and the path he cleared back to the nearest town – Kearney, NB. There we find a motel who lets us hang out in the lobby, because the rooms are full. And there we waited, until late evening when the roads are finally opened.

    That isn’t the only time I’ve been stuck in Nebraska in a snow storm. It’s happened two other times! In each case, I’ve been delayed by a day or more on “important things”.

    If anyone has a reason to hate snow, it’s me.

    But in every single case where I have been “inconvenienced” by snow, it was my own hurried schedule that was the problem. Snow is snow. It is part of our natural world. It’s going to happen in the wintertime, especially if you’re named Morgan Giddings and you’re crossing Nebraska!

    I still love snow. I am thankful for snow!

    In the Western USA, snow is where we get most of our water supplies. It’s what we ski on. It’s great for snowshoeing. It supplies the rivers with water for rafting and kayaking in the summer.

    In response to the evil storm Boreas, a friend posted on Facebook:

    And so it seems that the question to ask is who is NOT going to Wolf Creek tomorrow? Get out the snorkels folks! Can’t wait to ski.

    and  later:

    Most people I’ve ever seen at Wolfie. But the conditions were amazing. 100″ of snow already!

    The kids love it!

    I love it!

    Who cares if some work gets put off for a day or two? The work will always be there tomorrow.

    The unfortunate rollovers don’t have to happen.  Just don’t drive when it’s snowing or icing (and if you do, take full responsibility)! It’s really that simple!

    The problem is our expectations – not the snow

    We seem to have gotten in a mode where we expect our lives to run like clockwork. Like some Big Robot in the Sky.

    But we aren’t inside of a clock. Our bodies… and the natural world around us have rhythms, but they’re not mechanical devices that can be controlled.

    The only reason snow is sometimes “bad” is because we expect to not have our clockwork schedules thrown off.

    What ever happened to flexibility, going with the flow, and being part of nature rather than against it?

    Be Thankful For Snow… And For Everything!

    One of the major transformations I’ve made in my life is learning to be more thankful for what I have.

    It’s amazing how a good “rampage of appreciation” can make you feel.  And we have a LOT to appreciate. Food on the table. A roof. Transportation. Freedom. Conveniences. The Internet. iDevices. The list goes on.

    On this day of Thanksgiving, let’s all appreciate what we have. Even things like snow that might, once in a while, present an inconvenience.