Destroy What You Know

in ,

We are held back from creating the life we want, from our highest purpose, from our greatest growth and learning … by what we know.

Destroy what you know.

Once we feel like we’re a little good at something, we cling to that. We cling to wanting others to think we know things and are good at things. We cling to the feeling of knowing what we’re doing.

This clinging gives us the gift of fear of changing the status quo, because that comes with the possibility of failure. The gift of wanting to look like we know something, of wanting to feel certainty. Of waiting until we feel we’re ready — which we never will.

If we want to take our learning and our lives to the next level, we have to let go of that clinging to what we know.

Let yourself dive into the fear of change. Be willing to change everything. Be willing to embrace not knowing, a new view, being a beginner.

Be willing to embrace failure as a part of the process of learning and growing. Redefine failure, not knowing, so that you can’t wait to step into the unknown.

Seek out exposure to uncertainty. Seek to do things where you don’t know what you’re doing. Be open and public about your messiness, your commitments and your failures.

Obliterate what you know, to make room for what you might learn.

-AG

FPO SU23 DROP // MAGIC DEPT. CAPSULE

in , ,

A detailed look into FPO SU23 DROP // MAGIC DEPT. CAPSULE

The Magic Dept. short-sleeve shirt has been executed with 6.5oz 100% Cotton Poly Ring-Spun Yarn, and a water-based screen print on the left chest and back.

The Magic Dept. Khaki long-sleeve shirt has been executed with 6.5oz 100% combed ring-spun cotton, mock neck, heavy knitting and a water-based screen print on the left chest and back.

OC Bunny 5 Panel High Crown Mesh Back Trucker Hat, Polyester Foam Front, 100% Polyester, Front Panel w/ Lining, with a duck camo print all over print, embellished a front flat embroidery and left flat embroidery. 

Fly High 5 Panel High Crown Mesh Back Trucker Hat, Polyester Foam Front, 100% Polyester, Front Panel w/ Lining, embellished a front flat embroidery and left flat embroidery. 

Available Friday, 5/19 exclusively at www.focalsonly.com/shop

The Illusion of Control

in ,

‘The Master allows things to happen.
She shapes events as they come.
She steps out of the way
and lets the Tao speak for itself.’
~Laozi

When you think you control something, you’re wrong.

It’s amazing how often we think we’re in control of something when really we aren’t.

Control is an illusion, as I’ve said many times before.

We constantly make plans that never actually turn out the way we envisioned. ‘If you want to make God laugh, make a plan,’ an old saying goes.

We have been trained to set goals, and then work on the actions that lead to those goals … and yet how often do those goals fail? How often are we trying to control a future that we cannot predict?

Did you know five years ago that the world would turn out as it has — that Obama would be president, that the stock markets would have crashed, that we’d be deep into a recession, that earthquakes and tsunamis would hit, that you’d be doing exactly what you’re doing today?

Of course not. We don’t know the future, much less control it. We like to think we do, but that never turns out to be true.

And yet we continue to believe in the illusion of control. We face a chaotic and complex world, and seek to control it however we can.

Our attempts to control the world can be seen through:

  • Trying to control how our children turn out, as if we can shape them like blocks of clay, as if humans aren’t more complex than we can possibly understand.

  • Tracking every little thing, from spending to exercise to what we eat to what tasks we do to how many visitors are on our site to how many steps we’ve taken today and how many miles we’ve run. As if our selective tracking can possibly include the many, complex factors that influence outcomes.

  • Trying to control employees — again, complex human beings with many motivations and whims and habits that we don’t understand.

  • Obsessively planning projects, trips, days, parties, as if the outcomes of events are things we can control with our powers of manipulation of the world.

If we can let go of this illusion, what are we left with? How can we live among this chaos?

Consider the fish. A fish swims in a chaotic sea that it cannot possibly control — much as we all do. The fish, unlike us, is under no illusion that it controls the sea, or other fish in the sea. The fish doesn’t even try to control where it ends up — it just swims, either going with the flow or dealing with the flow as it comes. It eats, and hides, and mates, but does not try to control a thing.

We are no better than that fish, yet our thinking creates the need for an illusion.

Let go of that thinking. Learn to be the fish.

When we are in the midst of chaos, let go of the need to control it. Be awash in it, experience it in that moment, try not to control the outcome but deal with the flow as it comes.

How do we live our lives like this? It’s a completely different way of living, once we let go of the illusion:

  • We stop setting goals, and instead do what excites us.

  • We stop planning, and just do.

  • We stop looking at the future, and live in the moment.

  • We stop trying to control others, and focus instead on being kind to them.

  • We learn that trusting our values is more important to taking action than desiring and striving for certain outcomes.

  • We take each step lightly, with balance, in the moment, guided by those values and what we’re passionate about … rather than trying to plan the next 1,000 steps and where we’ll end up.

  • We learn to accept the world as it is, rather than being annoyed with it, stressed by it, mad at it, despaired by it, or trying to change it into what we want it to be.

  • We are never disappointed with how things turn out, because we never expected anything — we just accept what comes.

This might seem like a passive way of living to some, and it’s against our aggressive, productive, goal-oriented cultural nature. If you can’t accept this way of living, that’s OK — many people live their lives with the illusion of control, and not realizing what it is that makes them unhappy or frustrated isn’t the worst thing ever.

But if you can learn to live this way … it’s the most freeing thing in the world.

-AG

Simplifying Our Mental View

in ,

I’ve found that nearly all of us make things harder and more complicated, by adding a mental layer of difficulty.

We make simple things complicated:

  • Overwhelm: Doing one task at a time is pretty simple, but we get overwhelmed by all the things. We think about an entire list of things that we haven’t done yet, and we feel stressed about it, and end up feeling like we can’t do any of it.

  • Beating ourselves up: If we didn’t do what we thought we should do, we feel like we did things wrong, and we chastise ourselves for not doing things right. This discourages us from just simply starting again.

  • Frustration with another person: If people don’t behave the way we want them to, we can get frustrated … and then it can derail us from our intentions.

  • Fear about what might happen: Let’s say you need to have a conversation with someone, but you’re afraid of how they might react … you might put off that conversation because of that fear, instead of simply talking to them.

There is nothing wrong with doing all of this — it’s human. This is how our minds work.

However … if we bring awareness to our added mental layer, we can simplify it by letting go of that extra layer. 

It’s about doing things as simply as possible.

For example:

  • Decluttering: Most people overcomplicate it, because they feel overwhelmed by how much there is to declutter in their house or office. What would it be like to let go of this layer of “there’s so much!” and just start with one small area? Pick up one thing at a time in that area. Ask yourself if you use/love it or want to get rid of it, and put it in one of two piles. Repeat.

  • Email & messages: Like clutter, the idea of “there’s so much!” can overwhelm us and stop us from simply acting. Instead, what if we let go of that mental layer, and just spent 20 minutes taking messages/emails one at a time? Deal with each message before moving on. Repeat.

  • Tasks: Same idea — we have so many things to do that it overwhelms us and stresses us out, makes acting on things more difficult. Letting go of the idea of “there’s too much,” we can simply pick the most important thing to work on right now, and focus only on that.

  • Habits like exercise or meditation: We have lots of ideas about how hard the exercise is or how we haven’t been meditating as much as we “should” have been … and it creates extra stress and obstacles to just doing the exercise or meditation. What if we let all of that go, and simply went out for a walk or did some pushups? What if we let all of that go and simply sat down to meditate for a few minutes? Habits can be that simple, without all the extra mental layers.

I know it’s not as simple as that, because letting go of the mental layers isn’t always easy. But the point is that it could be simple. It could be much easier, if we could let go of those layers.

So then the practice is to repeatedly let go of the layers. Do things as simply as possible, not worrying about all the usual thoughts about “shoulds” and “too much” and “it shouldn’t be this way.” Removing these extra mental layers, we can simplify our lives greatly.

-AG

A Guide to Beating the Fears That Are Holding You Back

in ,

Once lived, the past has very little value. And yet we carry its lifeless body into all future moments, allowing it to crush us with its weight, to identify us, and to speak for us. – Don Miguel Ruiz

We’ve all been in a place of fear of something or being hurt again… but what does all of these mean? I’m a firm believer that whatever has happened to you, either a breakup, lost your career/job, lost a loved one, YOU have this feeling of being hurt, devastation, and not wanting to be hurt again… However, I believe that this is what makes us human.

For example, animals might fear an immediate danger, that is happening right now, but only we fear something that might happen, that isn’t happening now, that isn’t even showing its ugly face at the moment.

This fear, some might say, is necessary … it stops us from doing something stupid. But I’ve found most of these fears to be unnecessary, to be baseless, to be holding us back from achieving something and basically blocking what could be potentially a blessing in your life or even from moving forward.

“What fear is holding you back?”

  • intimacy/breakups

  • being hurt again

  • abandonment/rejection

  • failure or too much success

  • being broke

  • not being good enough

I think the last one — not being good enough — is actually at the root of all the others. We fear we’ll fail because we’re not good enough or being hurt again. We fear we’ll lose our relationships, friendships, families that we’ll be abandoned, that we’ll be rejected … because we’re not good enough. We fear intimacy for the very same reason — we might get rejected because we’re not good enough. Even the fear of success is based on the worry that we’re not good enough.

Do you have this fear? That you’re not good enough? I have, from a little part of my life many years ago.

I was mentally and physically abused by someone that “should" be a person that’ll care about me. And ever since then I’ve had this “fear” of being bullied again and being taken advantage of… so I took action and worked on my personal growth and learned to NEVER let anyone bully me or abuse me mentally or physically.

But here’s the thing: having the fear or being hurt is natural. Letting it stop you from going after your dreams and towards someone that truly cares about you is a tragedy.

I did this, for well over a 4 years of my teenage life. I let the fear of not being good enough stop me from even trying, from even daring to dream. But it turned out that my fears were baseless.That I AM GOOD ENOUGH. I’m not perfect, but who is?

When I was able to overcome this fear of not being good enough, this fear of failure and rejection, and put myself out there in the world, I succeeded. I found out that I was good enough.

“Accept your past without regret, handle your present with confidence, and face your future without fear.” ~Unknown

How to Beat Your Fears

  1. First, acknowledge your fear. This is a huge first step. If you do just this today, you’ve done something great. Many of us have these fears, but they are at the back of our mind, unnoticed, unacknowledged, as we try to ignore them and pretend they’re not there. But they are there. And they affect us, every day, all our lives. So acknowledge the fear.

  2. Be in the moment. Fear of failure and fear of being hurt again (and other similar fears) are fears of the future. We get caught up in worrying about what might happen. Instead, banish all thoughts of the future. Banish even thoughts of past mistakes and failures. Now focus on right now. Do something right now to beat your fears, to pursue your dreams, and forget about what might happen. Just do it, now, in the moment. When you find yourself thinking about the past or future, bring yourself back in the moment and focus on what you’re doing right at this moment.

  3. Feel the fear. You’ve acknowledged it, but you’re still afraid of it. You’re reluctant to even have this fear, perhaps even embarrassed about it. Well, no more. Recognize that you’re not alone, that we ALL have these fears, that we all think we might not be good enough. Please try this experiment with me: Repeat after me… “there’s nothing wrong with having this fear.” Now allow yourself to feel it. Experience it fully. Bask in this fear. It isn’t as bad as you think. It’s a part of you, but it doesn’t control you. “Feel the fear & do it anyway.”

  4. Just do it. To repeat: feel the fear and do it anyway. To beat the fear, you have to just do it. See below for some tips on doing this, but what works for me is not thinking, just acting. Like when you want to jump off a waterfalls into the pool below: don’t think about it. Just jump! It’s an exhilarating feeling. I fear public speaking, but when I get up and just do it, I feel great.

  5. Small steps. Conquering fear and pursuing a life goal can be overwhelming, intimidating. So start small. Just take one little baby step. Something you know you can do. Something you’re sure to succeed at. Then feel good about that (see below) and take another small baby step. Keep doing this, and soon you’ll have conquered a mountain.

  6. Celebrate every success! Every single thing you do right, celebrate! Even the smallest little thing. And use this feeling of success, of victory, to propel yourself forward and take the next step.

Assuming responsibility for your unpleasant circumstances is a way to regain control of your life and to learn.

Ask yourself how your thoughts and behaviors might have contributed to what happened to you. The past won’t repeat itself if you learn from the difficulty and assume control of your thoughts about the situation.

And even if you feel that you didn’t play a role in the challenge you experienced, you can still take responsibility for your attitudes and feelings about what happened.

See, if we live in fear or being hurt again, YOU ARE BLOCKING what could be a blessing in your life. So, go live life every day with open arms, and accept and learn from everything that you will experience.

-AG

Everything is a Practice

in ,

One of the next most powerful things I have been creating for myself is the view that Everything is a Practice.

Man, what a ridiculously valuable way to frame our lives!

Every difficulty that comes up is simply something to practice with.

Every frustration with another person is a practice ground, and the other person becomes your teacher. Bow to them with gratitude! Or even with things and events.

Normally, we think of these difficulties and frustrations as something wrong with us, the other person, or the world. With this kind of view, every failure is another reason to feel bad about ourselves. Every frustration with someone else is a reason to shut down to them or lash out at them. Everything wrong with the world is another reason to feel discouraged.

But what if, instead, we just took it as something to practice with?

Some examples:

  • My work is overwhelming: OK great, let’s bring awareness to the feeling of overwhelm, be with it mindfully, and examine the view that has you creating this feeling of overwhelm. Can we practice shifting the view? Getting in touch with our inner peace? With this kind of practice, every time we feel overwhelmed is an opportunity to get in touch with our inner peace.

  • Other people can be so frustrating! Absolutely … and also, can we practice being with this feeling of frustration (even expressing it fully as an emotion), noticing what view we have of others that creates our frustration, and maybe finding a more expansive view that lets us feel compassion for the other people? Maybe even seeing them with love and wonder? Then every frustration with others becomes a way to practice compassion and wonder and expansiveness.

  • This task is too hard, I don’t wanna do it: Yep, I have that too! So can we practice being with our resistance, noticing the view that has us think of it as a burden, and instead find a more open and joyful view of the task? Can it become a place of play and curiosity and adventure?

Every challenge, problem, frustration, failure becomes a place of beautiful practice.

Life becomes a playground and place of exploration.

What a magical place this world is!

-AG

Master Your Relationship to Time

in ,

The truth is, most of us have a pretty adversarial relationship to time.

There’s never enough. We’re always behind. It goes by too fast. We can’t do important things because we don’t have enough time.

None of it is helpful. Most of it is bullshit.

Let’s take the first one: there’s never enough time. This is powerful because there’s some truth to it: time is limited and precious. We will die, and while we don’t know how much time we have left in this life, we do know that it’s limited. It’s helpful to remember that we must make the most of our limited time!

But time is also abundant. Think of the past few years — it might seem like they passed really quickly, but actually we had so many hours we can’t count them. We had a huge abundance of hours. Maybe we didn’t spend them wisely (I know I misspent quite a few hours), but we had plenty of time. We still do, today and this month and this year.

The key is to see this abundance, and feel it in your body. It’s like the abundance of oxygen in the air all around us: it’s limited and precious, but we have plenty of it and can breathe freely and with joy. In some situations, oxygen is so limited that it can be life-threatening … but most of the time, we have more than enough for our needs.

That’s true of time. We have more than enough for our needs. We can do amazing things with the time we have — look at da Vinci and Gandhi and Rosa Parks and Tolstoy and Curie. It’s not about how much time we have, but how we use it, how we experience it.

With that said, I’d like to propose a handful of ways we can shift so that we can master our relationship with time.

  1. See the gift in the time that we have. Every day that we have is a huge gift. We get to have this time! We get to use it to make something, to love, to feel joy and laughter, to listen to music, to see nature, to move, to read, to feel. This is incredible! Instead of looking at how little time we have, we can appreciate the time we have as an incredible, powerful gift. Every hour is a tremendous gift. Every moment. Can we see the gift in the time that we have, and appreciate it fully? How would this shift how you feel about your day?

  2. Use the time intentionally & joyfully. If every hour is a gift, are we going to waste it? Or can we use it intentionally, for something that is important and meaningful to us? (Btw, rest is important. Self-care is meaningful.) Can we use this gift as best we can? And can we experience it with joy, with full appreciation? How might this shift how we use our time?

  3. Be honest about your priorities. A lot of time we use time as an excuse of why we’re not doing something, or as a reason to say no. We all do it: “Sorry, I don’t have the time.” This is a way to honor our boundaries, but it’s not fully honest. We all have the time — we just need to prioritize it, because the time isn’t unlimited. We choose to spend our time based on what is important to us. If we’re not out helping the homeless or saving orphans … it’s not because we don’t have the time. It’s because we’ve chosen to prioritize earning money, taking care of our family, taking care of ourselves, or doing something else meaningful. If we’re honest to ourselves about our priorities, then we don’t need to use time as an excuse. We can just say it’s not my priority right now, and then see the things we’ve chosen as priorities as the way we’d like to spend our time.

  4. Create space in your day. If you have some clear priorities, why not create the time to make them happen? We often feel that we want to prioritize something, but don’t have the time. Then we need to make the time. If we can’t, then we just have to admit that it’s not a priority right now. If it is a priority, let’s see if we can create the space.

  5. Don’t let things get familiar. Most of us have experienced the feeling that time is flying by faster and faster every year. This is likely because of a phenomenon where we don’t notice things when they get really familiar. It’s like driving past your neighborhood on the way home, without seeing any of it. It’s all familiar and you’re on autopilot. That’s how we experience much of our days — things get really familiar and we don’t notice it. What if we stop letting things get too familiar? What if we look at everything as if it were the first time we were seeing it? Time would all of a sudden become less blurry, and we’d be fully in the moment.

  6. Imagine you’re going to die in a year. This might sound gruesome to some, or too dark … but contemplating our death is a way to shift our relationship to life. To shift how we relate to time. So if you imagined, for example, that you were going to die soon … you might spend the time you have left more intentionally. And here’s something that’s fairly certain: if you know you only have a short time to live, that time suddenly slows down and becomes much more vivid. That’s what happens when we contemplate death — time becomes vivid, slower, real.

  7. Savor & be fully present to slow down time. If we think of time as a treat to be savored, we can become fully present with it. Think of the hours of your day as a delicious beverage, waiting to be sipped and fully tasted. How delicious! How wonderful it is to be alive. Time isn’t just sands slipping through our fingers, but pleasure being sipped into our mouths.

Try each of these, and practice them by fully inhabiting each practice. Give yourself fully to the practice, and see what shifts. Your relationship to time might never be the same.

-AG

When Your Task List is Overwhelmingly Long

in ,


I’ve talked with several people lately who have tasks lists from the floor to the ceiling, and it just overwhelms them. They’re not alone — I can relate, and lots of people have this problem.

If we’re fairly organized, our task list has everything we could possibly want to do on it, and it’ll get longer and longer.

That’s the good scenario — most people don’t have everything on the list, and the tasks are scattered across different systems and lists, in email inboxes and messaging apps, in browser tabs and pieces of paper, and in their heads.

Either way, it eventually gets so overwhelming that many people will give up whatever system they’re doing and start afresh, because the old system wasn’t working. In truth, they just didn’t have a way to deal with the overwhelm.

So what can we do?

It turns out, several key things.

Get Clear on Priorities

Let’s call this Step 0 — if you’re already clear on what matters to you, you’re ahead of the game.

But think about this: if you don’t know what matters, how can you focus on anything? Everything will seem urgent and important, and you’ll be scattered in lots of directions.

If you know what is most important, you can focus on that. The rest can wait. It’s like if you’re a doctor in a hospital, and one person needs a life-saving heart operation, and a hundred people have ankle sprains. You’ll focus on the heart operation, and let the ankle sprains wait for a few minutes.

Get clear on what matters to you. Make a list. Write out why. It’s worth spending 30 minutes on this.

Get clear on what’s important this week. And what you need to focus on today.

If you can get clarity on what matters & what to focus on, it will make you so much more effective than jumping around from task to task as if you were putting out a thousand small fires.

Change How You Relate to Your Tasks

Think about your list of tasks right now — does it feel stressful? This is a sign that you think of them as burdens, as something stressful, or as a potential way that you’re going to let people down or fail or look stupid. Or maybe all of the above.

How I’ve often related to my tasks is something like, “If I don’t do this task, I will be deficient and let people down.” If I have a list of tasks that’s full of these kinds of potential failures … of course it will be stressful!

How do you relate to your tasks?

Is there a more empowered relationship you can create?

Some examples:

  • I’m fully committed to this task because it’s incredibly important to me, so I’m going to create a sacred space of 30 minutes today to be fully present with it.

  • This task is an opportunity for me to serve someone I care deeply about, with love.

  • These tasks are training ground for me to practice presence, devotion, getting comfortable with uncertainty.

  • These tasks are an adventure! An exploration of new ground, a learning space, a way to grow and discover and create and be curious.

  • This task list is a huge playground, full of ways for me to play today!

These are some examples from my life, but they don’t have to be your relationship — what empowered way would you like to relate to your tasks?

Find that, and practice it daily.

A Short List

I find it helpful to have a long list of tasks, separated by area (work, personal, finances, etc.) and project, if applicable. But this long list can’t be done today.

So I create a short list, of just stuff I’m going to do today. I call it  “Today’s Joy List”. I try to keep it to 5-6 things, though often I give in to the temptation to add more joy opportunities than I actually have time for. :)

If I have meetings, those are on the list, and the more meetings I have, the fewer tasks I allow myself to put on the list.

What things have to be done today?

What things would be a really powerful use of your day?

Just focus on those. The rest can come later.

Full Focus

With a short list of high priority tasks, and an empowered relationship to those tasks … the world is yours!

The final thing I would say is to focus on one thing at a time. If you can practice this regularly, the overwhelm starts to lessen.

The opposite of this is constant switching between tasks. Doing quick emails, working on a task, but 30 seconds into that task you go check your favorite website or messages, etc.

Full focus is picking something important to work on, and then clearing everything else away. Make this the only thing in front of you. Notice the urge to go do something else, breathe, then bring focus back to the task.

Let it be your whole world. Be grateful to have this task in front of you, this opportunity to serve people you care about, this opportunity to play and be curious, this opportunity to learn and find joy and delight.

Now that I’ve shared these ideas of working with an overwhelming task list … how would you like to practice?

-AG