Category Archives: Your Best Self

Releasing Negativity

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Release Negativity

Any time you notice you are not in your best self — making mistakes, losing your temper, feeling lousy or scared, whatever it is — re-set your mind by erasing everything. “Clear the mechanism” as Kevin Costner’s character says to himself in the movie “Love of the Game” (a film that shows what Flow state feels like to a baseball pitcher, as good friend Bob DeSena points out).

Assume that any sense of dilemma is a lack of clarity, that if you were thinking straight you would be accepting what is and dealing with it effectively, without negative emotion. The one thing you want is to take whatever life hands you and deal with it as best you can, and anything short of that is rejected out of your mind and body instantly.

At first you will find yourself re-setting again and again as you slip back into the old time-worn ways of mental hand-wringing, but over time your mental muscles will get stronger. Just stick with it and your positivity will become indomitable.

Best to all,
Bill

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Here is the link to my latest post.

Practicing Forgiveness

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Original post December 1, 2015

There are a great many benefits when we stop blaming and instead open ourselves to forgiveness. Blame is an investment of mental and emotional energy that pays no return. The same energy can be redeployed to deliver a positive return.

I am faithful to what I see as the common core of all religions, not as religions but as scientific truth. My hypothesis and conviction is that there is only One of us. And if there is only One Spark of Being populating all of us, then anyone who has offended us has done so because his or her experiences have led that originally perfect tabula rasa into a condition in which giving offense is possible and perhaps inevitable. This awareness makes it much easier to forgive.

If, for example, my friend, whose mother belittled him because of her own childhood conditioning, has become carping, surely I can understand and forgive that. If I am him, living a different life with different experiences that have made me less carping than he is but imperfect in other ways, I can have an empathetic understanding.

[dropshadowbox align=”center” effect=”lifted-both” width=”83%” height=”” background_color=”#f9d798″ border_width=”1″ border_color=”#b3b3af” ] To forgive all, be all. — Bill Harvey from Mind Magic, page 233. [/dropshadowbox]

If we can forgive everyone including ourselves for all the influences that drive each of us to become what we perhaps only temporarily are, it may free us from having to continue to be exactly the same today as we have always been.

What has already happened could not have been otherwise, since all events are merely the resultant of their causes, which are themselves events dependent on a constellation of prior causes. Everything happens for a reason.

We can become a more potent cause for positive future events by being less critical of whatever happened that caused us to feel resentful, and instead reimagine the situation, decide what should have happened and then seek to do that in similar future situations. We can do nothing about the past. The goal is to simply set new policies to put into practice going forward.

Guiding others to adopt more useful new policies requires gentility; often it is best to simply ask the right questions to have the desired effect. Honesty and gentleness are essential tools in this endeavor.

To forgive a person, for a time in your imagination, be that person.*

If you are having difficulty forgiving someone, create space for an empathetic perspective: set some time aside and imagine living through that person’s role from the beginning to now, seeing if we could have played any parts better, and which blocks are likely to have prevented them from seeing or taking these options Then figure out how to help the person get past those blocks. This of course also works for self-forgiveness.

Communicating in some way what is in our heart, and then letting go and forgiving, will at a minimum stop tying up some of our energies deep in our psyche.

Instead of squandering our energy by blaming or being unforgiving, seeing situations with an open heart and an empathetic perspective can lead us to more positive outcomes where we can realize solutions that are a much better investment of our time and energy.

Thought you might also enjoy today’s latest short video commenting on advertisers taking charge of audience measurement.

Best to all,

Bill

*From Mind Magic, p. 233.

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village.

Imagine Living Your Dream from This Day Forward

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Originally posted October 13, 2015

Each of us is more interesting and exciting than any character in a movie because reality is actually happening. Movies are fiction, life is real. As exciting as fiction can be, real life is even more exciting.

Many of us have stepped behind the lens, watching instead of directing our lives. We may feel we have lost sight of the joy and excitement in life because of the challenges and complexities we face each day.

Imagine the rest of your life as a movie...

The first step to reconnect with the excitement of life is to connect with what we really want to do the most.

What is your ultimate dream or mission?

My life dream is to see really positive change take place in the world and to be part of making it happen. What’s yours?

”Follow your dreams” refers to your waking dream, your dream of what could be. And though our night dreams taken as a collection may seem full of disconnected seeming irrelevancies, we may find they sometimes contain clues about our mission.

Where are you now and how do you reconnect to your mission?

Are you focused on living your mission in your daily life and if not, what would be the way back onto that radio beam?

On paper or whatever device you prefer, make two columns. In the right-hand column, articulate and write down the big dream — what you always wanted to be when you grew up or what you realized you wanted to be along the way.

In the left-hand column, define where you are in the plot trajectory. What part of the challenge slope still lies ahead? What needs to happen in order to get from where you are now to THE dream? And how will the challenge slope itself change as you focus in the direction of THE dream?

If you need more clues as you articulate your dream and plot your trajectory, try this: see yourself as a character in a movie, playing the game of life, the LIFE MOVIE. Recognizing that challenge is the mainspring of plot, look back at the main moments of supreme challenge in your life. See the ones where you caved. See the ones where you rose to the challenge, when you were at your best. In movies, we identify with and immerse ourselves in the characters that are portrayed doing some noble act early in the movie. Recall your noble acts.

           You are not only the director of your Life, you are 
               also the scriptwriter as well as the protagonist.

You will enjoy the movie the most if you believe you are up for the challenge and then just do it, setting your sights on your mission without getting too attached to the outcome. In other words, be happy in the trajectory, even if it doesn’t take you to the exact pinnacle you aimed for. Let it come out however it comes out. Stay focused on the dream. Do it for the fun of it.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, In Terms of ROI at Media Village, Myers new site. Here is the link to my latest post, Program Environment Can Add +35% to +37% ROI Lift.

Ten Minutes in a Life

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Originally posted December 20, 2012
Volume 2, Issue 36

He looked up from the gas pump to where a moment before he had an intimation she would be, and high in the sky was the moon behind a pale shimmer of cloud, one day past full. Down and to the left was an American flag. Trees were all around. He suddenly realized the time was pretty good now. There was nothing to be concerned about that he could feel at the moment, no time pressure, everything was going fine. Then it came to him that he always assumed there was something wrong, some unrightness he would constantly have to steer against. He was thrilled at having uncovered a bad lens he could discard.

A minute later, starting up the car, the lyrics of a song on the radio triggered a vision.“The dearest thing in all the world is waiting somewhere for me” (“Waiting Somewhere For Me” by Rodgers and Hammerstein). He saw a scene of indescribable beauty, something between a fractal and a huge mural, a panorama of infinite detail and intense color, the parts in constant unfolding and rotational movement everywhere. He couldn’t hold it all — it was overwhelming, filled with light, luminous, numinous. The words “Oh my God” began in his mind but all wording was pressed out by the overwhelming emotional wave enveloping him in awe, love, victory, beauty. His feelings united with the scene so that he was the scene, the beauty, the happiness, the realization that not “he” — now “it” — was past the need for words forever, past the possibility of unhappiness forever.

He contemplated the vision as he drove to catch his train. Several minutes later on the cold train platform he watched himself hurriedly extract a mint, his body still assuming time pressure, always assuming the need to get done an important job that had to be done at top speed because suffering would be relieved for more people faster that way. He knew this assumption was also a bad lens to be removed. More good would be done without that lens, too. And besides, in his day job he was not relieving suffering directly, more like paying for the time spent in nonprofit work.

That was the ten minutes.

An hour and forty minutes later in Manhattan he wondered if the shock — that is, the heightened sensitivity — he was feeling would incapacitate him. Being in Manhattan with its concomitant information pressure could pull him into some ineffective state of consciousness if his skills were not all available. He did not worry yet as he was merely curious about it at this point. Next he automatically told the cab driver where to go before he could miss a beat. The rest of the morning unfolded that way, with actions being taken in natural confidence. Soon he stopped being concerned that he might be in a degraded effectiveness state.

What was it that he had seen? It couldn’t be the whole of what the consciousness of the universe sees, since that perspective would include what was going on inside each of the parts he had seen from the outside. He had been seeing some abstraction of the whole of what there is to be seen, but he had seen people striving, other life forms striving, the very cosmos striving, its movement the necessary means to some end. The dimensions of error/evil had been visible as wrong turns taken out of synch with the rest of the whole, there were great movements in history explained by the turnings of the wheels inside the driving bio-mental Platonic Forms gearbox whose meshing appeared to be a higher reality underlying the explicate order visible to human eyes.

Would science classify this as an hallucination? It was a vision, its complexity and the intelligence of its designs far beyond the negative connotations of the word “hallucination”. Also it was not seen with the external eyes, so if it were a hallucination, it would have to be classified as an interior one. Is that what science thinks a vision is? Or did I actually see something real?

Perhaps cutting-edge science would say that ideas long evolving in my head combined intuitively by themselves to present me with a visual representation. If so, this is a testament to the power of our subconscious minds, and to the function we call intuition, when for ten seconds we find ourselves in Flow state.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers .