Many people are skeptical of New Year’s Resolutions because most people are more than willing to make them but rarely ever keep them. An example is that swaths of people make promises to lose weight or get in shape at the beginning of the year and gym memberships soar, with the subsequent effect of gyms across America becoming more crowded. Yet, come early February, the number of people at the gym dwindle down to the size it was in December, before the New Year started.

Skeptics of New Year’s Resolutions also argue that a “new year” is meaningless in that one should always be setting goals to better himself, and should not be using the new year as an excuse to get his life together. They further argue that if one is TRULY responsible for his life, they shouldn’t be waiting for the insignificant change on a calendar to start.

I agree with these skeptics but then I also disagree. I agree with their points that “time” as we see it is a man made measurement and as such, we shouldn’t need a New Year to get our act together, because nothing has REALLY changed per se.

However, I think that skeptics discount one thing that a “new year” brings: the power of MOMENTUM. For the simple fact that we perceive in our minds the year as something new, a fresh slate, a new beginning, it can really propel us to make some life transforming changes in our lives that we may not necessarily have in say March or April.

When we have a STRONG intent for something, it paves the way for us to go and acquire that thing, whatever it is. The stronger the intent the more likely it is to happen, and what isn’t a better time than the perception of a new year to use the resulting momentum to intend something new and better for our lives?

Things shouldn’t be this way, we shouldn’t need a New Year to do this, but in reality that’s just the way it is, and we don’t have success in life dwelling on the should’s, we have success AFTER we first accept things the way they are and move forward from that point.

I personally love the New Year simply because I look at it as a marker to measure your progress in your life as to whether you’re accomplishing your goals and objectives in different areas of your life. I look at it in a way similar to how the leader of a country sets his goals as to what direction he wants to take his country in, where he wants to direct its resources and money, how he wants it to develop.

It was the momentum of the New Year back in 1999 that I made a resolution to join a gym and hit it regularly. Four months later I gained almost twenty pounds of muscle, completely transforming my body (for you smart asses thinking I used ‘roids, my success was due to a combination of genetics, consistency in going to the gym four days a week, protein shakes and the rave of the day, Creatine, so…..HA!), and creating a habit that I’ve stuck to till this day, twelve years later.

I can also see why many people are skeptical about making “New Year’s Resolutions” because when people in The Illusion talk about it, it completely reeks of insincerity. When you hear people talk about it you can hear that they know in their minds that they’re made to be broken and they don’t even believe they can stick with them.

Case in point, I remember watching the NY1 channel the day before New Year’s Eve and a reporter asked a pedestrian if he planned on making any New Year’s Resolutions and if so what they were. The man answered, “Eh, I plan on watching what I say more.”

When I listened to this, I could tell that the man clearly had no intention of keeping this resolution, and that it was, like for so many other people, a form of mental masturbation. I in fact personally wanted climb into the television and punch the dude in the face, not because I’m a man with violent tendencies who needs to be on meds, but simply because his insincerity spoke about many bigger issues that people deal with a whole that totally triggered a sizeable amount of frustration in me.

First off, he, like so many other people, was squandering the wonderful opportunity that a new year could provide in making some serious changes that probably he and many other people NEED to make in their lives simply by not taking advantage of the momentum the new year provides.

Second, it brought to mind how people are such sheep, following The Illusion, where they repeat the same cycle over and over again like a broken record, year after year after year, engaging in the same old destructive behaviour patterns, continuously settling for less, refusing to take responsibility for their lives, choosing to lie to themselves rather than confronting the truth, accepting mediocrity and overall just accepting lives of quiet, miserable desperation.

It was a painful reminder of how most people never improve or change because they don’t think it’s possible and think that their utter misery is just the way things are. It reminded me that most people never change, they simply remain stagnant year after or year, or get worse, which, technically is one in the same.

I’m an ARDENT believer of never, ever settling and living the life you truly desire to live, so it pains me to no end when I see others living, mediocre, miserable, uninspired lives, so excuse me for wanting to punch the dude I mentioned on TV in the face….repeatedly.

That being said, I really think that there are people who want to make some serious changes in their lives, but because they’ve tried repeatedly and failed, they’ve given up and don’t believe true change is possible.

I believe that the reason that many people have failed in making lasting change in their lives is that they don’t know how to get out of their own way and thus, whenever they try to go forward, they keep bumping up against themselves, stopping them dead in their tracks. You know the saying, “he that fails to conquer himself can expect to conquer little else.”

Well, for those truly wanting to make changes in their lives, here are several ways that I’ve used to get past my blocks and allow me to make some lasting changes in my life. I haven’t reached the “promised land” yet, but hopefully these ways that helped me can ultimately help you in transforming your life:

1. Be where you’re at…
   We all have habits that prevent us from completing a goal and enabling us to be successful, whether it be procrastination, lack of patience, losing focus easily, allowing ourselves to get overwhelmed and stressed out easily, etc. What winds up happening is we blame one or more of these things as reasons why we can’t stick to our goals and are not successful, and use them as an excuse for why we can’t go forward.

   Often we think to ourselves, “When I can fix this ‘thing,’ then I can start going after what I want.”

   I was a prime example. Knowing that I had all these habits that blocked me from consistently sticking to a goal, I would read 3,000 self improvement books in order to find a fix to my “problem,” thinking I had to fix my problem FIRST before I went forward.

   It’s no wonder I went NOWHERE.

   Now I say, screw all that, and just be where you’re at. Accept whatever “issue” you have for what it is and move forward anyway.

   Instead of trying to fight it, or let it continue to get in your way, learn to use the energy of that issue against it, like they teach you in Aikido or Brazilian Jiu-jitsu.

   Huh?

   Well, to use myself as an example. A couple of years ago, I decided to get into affiliate marketing online and where I promoted someone’s product and got paid a commission if someone bought the product through my own affiliate link.

   Now, I tend to unfairly too hard on myself and beat myself up over the slightest thing. Moreover, I tend to get very impatient. These are obviously things that I need to work on, no doubt, but rather than letting them stop me by stopping to “fix” them or by having them sabotage my progress once more, I decided to work with them.

   I made the decision that I was only going to check my affiliate account into which any commission I earned got paid into twice a month, on the first of the month and on the fifteenth. By doing this, I didn’t have to deal with the stress of checking my account everyday and wondering why, as in any skill you learn initially, I wasn’t getting results, which would lead to me getting discouraged and beating myself up which in turn would affect my progress.

   BUT, checking twice a month gave me some reasonable leeway to monitor my progress and see what changes I needed to make to get the results I was looking for.

   Soon enough, after about a month of starting, I had checked my account one June 1st and realized I made my first commission, and after several months, I was able to check my account more frequently than twice a month without getting frustrated when I didn’t make anything and without beating myself up.

   By accepting my faults and working with them instead of against them (or them against me), I decided to accept them and use them to my advantage.

   It’s the same thing with me cultivating the habit of drinking 8 glasses of water a day, which is the equivalent of 2 liters. Before this, not only did I not like drinking water, but I drank sparsely, probably the equivalent of two glasses a day of fluids. To force myself around this habit, I bought a 1 liter water bottle and carried it with me wherever I went in my bag so I wouldn’t forget to drink, and made sure that I drank two full bottles everyday.

   I’ve been drinking 8 glasses of water daily for almost four years now, and the visible results have been better skin, healthier looking fingernails and healthy looking eyes.

   So if you’re trying to lose weight and get into shape and up until now you haven’t been able to get over those food cravings, have a cheat day where for one day of the week, you eat whatever you want while staying committed to your new lifestyle every other day of the week. That would help shut your mind up by giving it a day to look forward to. I know many people who do this and tell me it works.

   In the same token, if you have a craving for fast food and always wind up succumbing to the temptation of going into a McDonald’s when you’re hungry and happen to pass by one, make sure you always carry a snack to nibble on frequently so you don’t get those bouts of hunger that make you go beserk and make you run and take refuge in a Wendy’s or a Burger King.

   Think creatively of ways you can learn to work with your personal challenges instead of against them. There are as many ways that exist as there are people walking this planet and then some. You may come up with your own way that’s totally different from the next person because you’re you.

   It’s great to want to work on your shortcomings, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but in rather than let them get in your way, just be where you’re at, accept yourself at the point where you’re at in your journey, and learn to work with them.

   Be where you’re at, you’ll be better for it.







2. Learn the “Magic of thinking small.”
   When you think to yourself that you have to lose 200 lbs or you’re trying to give a two pack-a-day cigarette smoking habit, it’s quite easy to look at those numbers and get so intimidated that you give up before you even start.

   Your mind gets so overwhelmed by such numbers that it begins to trigger anxiety and stress every time you think about one of these goals that are sure to improve your life that it’s no wonder you can’t make any headway.

   They key to overcoming this tendency is learning how to get our minds to shut the @#$%/ up by thinking “small.”

   I first heard the concept of “the magic of thinking small” from Mike Littman, author of “Interviews with Millionaires” and internet marketer.

   When I say “small,” I don’t mean setting your sights on a the all so lofty goal of making thirteen cents an hour, or setting other pathetically low standards for yourself when you can clearly do better, rather I mean learn how to take a larger goal and learn how to “chunk it down” to smaller pieces.

   For instance, when you start college and look at the four years it takes to get a degree, it can seem daunting. However, when you take apart your four years by first focusing on finishing your freshman year, then after your sophomore year, your junior then your senior, it becomes much easier, especially when you hit your junior year, because the light at the end of the tunnel is now visible.

   My mind has this infuriating habit of making mountains out of molehills, so you can imagine how I deal with seemingly bigger goals: they tend to scare the crap out of me. My mind makes it into one HUGE, daunting undertaking that causes me to procrastinate or worse, not do anything at all.

   To counter this, I’ve learned to chunk things down.

   For instance, when I go to the gym, after I stretch I do roughly 400 pushups, which I break down into sets of three, with the first set being 200, the second 150, and the last 50.

   Now, when I start with my first set of 200, without fail this huge wave of anxiety hits me because 200 seems so much and also because I’m afraid that after doing it so many times, this time I may “fail” which would cause me to deem myself a loser.

   Ahhhhh……how I “love” my ego!

   To deal with this annoyance, I don’t let myself count to 200 which is way too intimidating for my mind when I’m first starting out. Instead, I break my count to 200 into sets of ten, knowing that I have to do 20 sets of 10 to reach 200. By counting to 10, and knowing I have to do 20 sets of 10, the numbers stay low in my mind.

   For example, I start to count, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8.9,10 then say to myself 1, to mark my first set of ten, then 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8.9,10 then say to myself 2, to mark the second set, instead of saying 11,12,13……… or 20,21,22,23…..

   By keeping the numbers low in my mind, my mind stays quiet (for the most part) and I can do my 200 pushups without my mind freaking out because it is way easier for my mind to think about doing ten pushups than it is to think of doing 200.

   Strange “trick,” but it works!

   So, in terms of losing weight, or making money (something that I’m working on now), we psyche ourselves out by worrying about losing 200 lbs before we can even lose one pound, or trying to make a million dollars a month before we can even make one dollar.

   If you’ve failed at losing weight up until now, why not start with learning how to lose and KEEP OFF ten pounds every month than focusing on the all so daunting number of 200 lbs or 150 lbs or whatever (if that is your issue)?

   If you feel overwhelmed easily, learn to make consistent small steps and not only will you be surprised how far you’ve come after several months, you’ll build momentum and have the confidence to take bigger steps. Also, because you’ll be more confident, your goal won’t scare you as much as it did in the beginning.

   I remember a conversation I had with a very good friend of mine a few weeks ago. He was depressed because he was still living at home and he felt his life was going no where.

   I was happy he mentioned this to me because my other friends and I had already realized this about him a LONG time ago, so him waking up to see how pathetic his life was was a good sign.

   The problem with him is that he’s so caught up in the hip hop culture and The Illusion of overnight success and having his life look like a rap video, that he absolutely has NO concept of delayed gratification or discipline. He would make an effort to improve his life for two days, and when he sees he’s not living like Diddy, he immediately thinks he failed and goes back to his same old destructive habits.

   So, I told him to stop being so hard on himself. If he wanted to move out of his mom’s house, to focus first on taking a small step and renting a room first, and celebrate that instead of beating himself up for not living in the Waldorf Astoria after one week and then feeling like a loser..

   I told him after he gets into a room, he can then focus on taking another incremental step and celebrate that when he reaches it, and move on to the next step, all the while gaining confidence with each step, until he gets to where he wants.

   If you want to eat an elephant, you have to break it up and eat it piece by piece. So if you want to eat healthier, start by changing one thing first, then after some time, move on to the next thing, step by step. If you want to start exercising, and you are just so damn lazy and undisciplined, start by simply standing on the treadmill every day for two minutes without even turning it on. After a week or two, you may feel like an idiot sufficiently enough to turn it on and start walking on it.

   All in all, with every goal, to make life easier for yourself if you have a problem of getting stressed out easily, take a step that you can handle, one that’s not too overwhelming but at the same time not so easy as to not challenge you, and do that consistently. Trust me, the rewards will be immense!



3. Lie to yourself

   Okay, before you jump to conclusions, when I say “lie to yourself,” I don’t mean finding another man in your girlfriend’s bed and telling yourself that it was only the exterminator making sure that the bed bugs don’t come back, or you got 17 DUI’s in two months and you convince yourself that your life is under control. People do some variation of that EVERY day, and I’m NOT talking about that.

   I’m talking about lying to yourself to shut that incessant negative chatter going in your mind up.

   For example, when I used to do cardio at the gym and run on the treadmill (something I will start doing again shortly because I have to lose ten pounds of muscle since I’m starting to look “top heavy” and look like a bodybuilder), every time I was on my way to the gym to workout, this wave of stress would hit me when I’d think about the “long” workout I’d have to do which included cardio at the very end, because frankly, I’ve always disliked cardio.

   This would cause me to procrastinate and not want to go to the gym at all.

   To counter this, I’d simply “lie” to myself and tell myself that I was skipping cardio that day. When I did this, all the stress that I had would vanish and I’d be able to start my workout in peace. At the end of my workout, having done everything except cardio, I’d say to myself, “Okay, time for cardio,” knowing that truly, if I skipped cardio, I’d feel utterly guilty and beat myself up for it.

   When I resolved myself to running on the treadmill, the stress of running for 20 minutes would hit me, so I’d lie to myself saying I’m only going to do five minutes that day, which would of course, shut my mind up, and then, as I start the treadmill, I’d set it for twenty minutes.

   I’ll say it again, I’ve always disliked doing cardio, so this is how I get myself to do it, by LYING to myself. And in the end, I of course felt THAT much better for accomplishing my goal that I disliked doing so much.

   What I described is a different type of lying to ourselves than what most we’re all used to which is lying to ourselves in order to avoid taking responsibility for our lives. Rather, it’s lying to yourself in order to get yourself out of your own way so you can do the things you need to do to create the life you want to live.

   Two totally different things.

   When we commit ourselves to a sequential routine in order to accomplish whatever goal it is we have, our minds are frequently known to freak out, thinking it’s all too much, it’s going to be boring, it’s going to take too long, etc, etc, and if we’re not careful, we wind up getting discouraged and being thrown off track towards our goals/objectives.

   Yet, any person who is at the top of his/her respective field or anyone who has achieved some type of remarkable transformation would tell you that success requires you taking those small steps CONSISTENTLY over a long period of time.

   That’s why if there’s a certain goal we have that requires stricter discipline than we’re used to over a long period of time, such as going to bed earlier so we can wake up early in the morning to do some type of athletic training for example, telling ourselves that we’re only going to do it for a month even though we know we have to do it for an indefinite period of time can be a BIG help.

   In a case like this, when the month is up, we of course continue our routine, lying to ourselves once more, until our new routine becomes a solidified habit.

   Lying to this incessant chatter by telling it what it wants to hear will shut it up and get it out of our way so we can continue doing what we need to do to accomplish our goals.

   So, if it’s 11 AM and you have an hour to lunch and you’ve committed to changing your eating habits but you’re finding that you have an “unbearable” craving for McDonald’s, tell yourself that you’re going to eat McDonald’s for lunch. Chances are the voice will die down simply because of the fact that it was initially going off because it felt you were depriving it. Then, when it’s time for lunch, simply just make your way to Cosi or whatever place that offers healthy food, and after you eat, you’ll be full enough so you won’t have to think about that disgusting McDonald’s food again.

   Lying to yourself, if done the “right” way, can surely help you achieve your dreams.

When we talk about learning how to stick to our goals, objectives or resolutions through self-mastery to transform our lives and step out of The Illusion, the two MAIN pillars of The Viable Alternative that are involved in this are self realization and self discovery.

With the pillar of self realization, you realize that you are a unique imprint in this world with your very own unique gifts you have to offer, and that you have your own unique idiosyncrasies and peculiarities that you have to learn to deal with in your own unique way to be able to offer your unique gifts FULLY.

Two people may have the same personal challenges, but have ENTIRELY different ways of dealing with them. How one person deals with a challenge is often totally different from the way another person deals with the SAME challenge. The similarity is however, that they are both using their challenges as stepping stones.

That’s the beauty of our uniqueness and individuality.

With the pillar of self-discovery, you go through the ACTUAL process of learning how to overcome these personal idiosyncrasies in order to be able to freely give these gifts to the world.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps.

I’m sorry, I was actually trying to produce at least one blog entry a month on this site, but with my trip to Miami over the summer and all the “fanfare” involved with preparing for my one month trip, including putting together a sponsorship event, I got sidetracked. Then, coming back, I’ve been in some sort of strange transition where my perception of the world around me is shifting, so I decided to hold off on writing anything until I had a grasp of what’s going on.

It’s been well over three months since I’ve gotten back from Miami, but it’s now starting to dawn on me the effect that this trip has had on me. I see that it’s starting to change me in many ways.

You see, it was about one year ago, I was sitting in Bryant Park with a mentor of mine, and he was going over with me my plans for the upcoming fall in terms of my modeling career.

During our meeting, it was discussed reasons why that I hadn’t achieved my goals to get an underwear contract and also see the fruit of the investments I made as a model over the years.

My mentor, who has a tremendous amount of spiritual insight, felt that part of the reasons why I hadn’t achieved my goals was that I never really allowed myself to really build some momentum. My career had always been in fits and starts, where I’d start, then I’d face some hardship or rejection, then stop again, then resurface after several months. He said I needed to be consistent.

He also suggested that since I was getting the results I desired that maybe I should go to South Beach, Miami and try out that market. There he said, was more suited to my body type, but also, more importantly, he said that sometimes you need to step away from a certain scene that you’ve been a part of for so long, try something new to shake things up, and then come back with a whole new perspective.

Funny enough, a brother-in-law, who’s a preacher who also has a tremendous amount of spiritual insight, had mentioned something similar earlier on in the year, saying that sometimes it’s required that I leave my current environment and go to a different environment to receive my blessings that are due to me.

Since a trip was now mentioned a second time to me, I took it as a sign that I needed to go somewhere.

On top of this trip, my mentor asked me, “When are you going to do a show to promote yourself as a model? If no one is promoting you, you have to promote yourself.”

BAM!!

Needless to say, this meeting scared me half to death. First off, I always hated the idea of putting on events, because I had this fear since childhood of putting on an event and facing the utter embarrassment of no one showing up. Second, how in the world was I going to get to Miami not to mention having to spend a considerable amount of time there? I didn’t have the money, and I couldn’t just up and leave my job as I had rent and other bills to pay.

Well, scared as hell though I was, a few months later, I managed to put a show together called “The Ike Show,” with the collaboration of a number of other artists which was a resounding success.

I also, slowly but surely, started speaking as if I was going to Miami, though I had no idea how the hell I was going to get there. I started emailing photographers down there through a modeling networking web site, telling them my intentions of coming down there the following spring/summer, and how I would love to shoot with them when I was in town.

Soon enough, doors started to open on me getting the money to fund the trip, (the IRS was a big help. Thank you Uncle Sam!) In May of this year, I bought my plane ticket, got someone to sublet my room while I was gone, and threw a sponsorship event to fund my trip to Miami. The event, though intimate and cozy where the guests had a great time, didn’t exactly garner the amount of money I would’ve liked, went a LONG way helping me get over my fears of throwing events and promoting myself, helped create a buzz for myself in the industry, and lastly, got people to take me more seriously as a model, which was very important.

So, I left New York for South Beach July of this year, spent a month there, did my thing, and the rest they say is history.

So, as I sit here typing this, having been back from Miami for quite a while now, I’m starting to see the changes the whole “to do” about going there has caused in me.

It has helped give me what years of reading a bunch of self-help books couldn’t: it has given me a new level of self esteem.

Well, let me be fair. It wasn’t only the trip, but also the whole chain of events that stemmed from my meeting in Bryant Park: putting on events to promote myself, shooting with 18 different photographers, slowly building my “brand,” all finally culminating to my trip to Miami.

Self Esteem

For years I’ve tried to build self-esteem, knowing I had little of it. I thought I could get it from reading books and going to seminars but ultimately was unsuccessful.

Looking over the past year, comparing where I was sitting in Bryant Park to where I am right now, I see myself and the world in a different way. Beyond merely just paying it lip service, I am really starting to think that all things are truly possible if you believe.

Now, I’m not the epitome of someone with self esteem because I still have a very long way to go before I consider myself truly comfortable within my own skin and I still in the process of discovering the essence of who I really am at the core level. Yet, I’ve covered a lot ground in how I feel about myself and am starting little by little to recognize the ME that is emerging from all the dirt I laid on top of it all these years.

Low self-esteem is a very common ailment that pervades this society. Yet though people have all sorts of ways that they try to build self-esteem, they never wind up having success because they have no idea of whom or what the “self” is to begin with. Because of this, they mostly wind up building their egos rather than their self, which ultimately winds up making things worse.

Here are some of the points that I’ve learned that were helpful in me feeling better about myself. These steps go beyond just reading some damn books and claiming I’m “enlightened,” rather, they come from experiences that I’ve personally gone through and learned from.

1. Honour yourself
   
   When I say honour yourself, I don’t mean by going to the Apple Store and picking up the latest version of the iPhone (R.I.P. Steve Jobs) so you can show off to your friends or in order to keep up with everyone else. That is just simply gratifying your ego. Rather I mean to listen to your heart where your true self lies and honour what it’s telling you.

   Whatever desire that is speaking to you, take steps towards fulfilling it. It doesn’t even have to be something “big” like climbing Mount Everest, or swimming across the English Channel. It could be something smaller like taking a course at some school of some subject you’re interested in. It could be also taking small trip somewhere that you’ve wanted to go that isn’t thousands of miles away.

   For quite a few years I’ve been VERY embarrassed at not knowing how to swim. Yeah I took a course as a teenager, but I didn’t learn too much, and within the last few years this had been eating at me. At the beginning of every year over the past few years, I’d write down as one of my goals to learn to swim, and each year would pass without me taking any steps towards achieving my goal.

   This past spring, I decided enough was enough and despite the fact that I didn’t think I could afford to do it as I had bills to pay, I decided to go and do it anyway, and everything would work itself out.

   I just refused to continue to be a victim of my circumstances including not having enough money.

   Well, I took my swimming courses and everything else worked itself out.

   Now, I still don’t know how to swim as well as I’d like, and I still have more courses to take, but man, I felt so good about myself just taking charge of my own destiny and doing something I had wanted to do for a long time. It felt so powerful and exhilarating. It taught me the first hand experience of taking an active role in living the life you want to live by listening to your heart.

   The same thing can be said when I was stepping out of my comfort zone to put together events to promote myself as a model. As scared as I was, and with the little sleep I was getting at night due to all the work I had to do, there was a power I felt within me because I was taking steps towards achieving the desires of my heart. Instead of just sitting on the sidelines watching other people make things happen, I was being proactive in making the life I wanted to happen as well.

   I personally believe from my personal experience that when we honour what’s on our hearts, our self esteem rises bit by bit. Conversely, when we ignore what’s deep in our hearts where the core of who we are lies, we are in essence telling ourselves that we don’t matter. This could be displayed when we ignore a desire to pursue a passion because we’re scared or think that it’s “childish” or “foolish”. This could also be displayed when we settle for a relationship we’re unhappy in because we’re afraid to be alone.

   It’s one thing to be told that you don’t matter by other people, but how do you think your self-esteem is affected when you tell that to yourself over and over again?

   When we choose to act on those seemingly small desires of our hearts consistently, it builds a momentum that causes us to be more confident and have a steady rise in our self esteem that we start taking on those “bigger” desires until before we know it, our lives are transformed.

   Honouring ourselves can also be as simple as deciding to stop eating a not-so-healthy food, joining a gym to get in shape (and actually going regularly, not just going once every three months and feeling guilty or making excuses for not going the rest of the time), deciding that you’re going to drink eight glasses of water a day because it’s healthy, quitting smoking cigarettes, deciding not to no longer hang with certain people because they’re negative, etc.

   When we choose to do (or not to do) something because it promotes our overall well being, we demonstrate that we love and honour who we are and it helps raise our self esteem.

2. Take risks/step out of your comfort zone
   
   I’ve heard the saying that “All growth happens outside of your comfort zone,” and I can honestly say looking back at the past year that whoever came up with this is right.

   Naturally, it’s quite scary to step out of our comfort zones because we have to confront our fears that we hide from inside our comfort zones. Also, it often means that we take on a task that’s beyond what we recognize ourselves as being capable of.

   Coupled with all this is the uncertainty we face when we take the “risk” of stepping out of our comfort zones. Oftentimes, it means giving up a steady check, risking not being able to pay our rent, moving to a new city of even country where we don’t know the language or have any friends or family, leaving a “comfortable” but unfruitful relationship, etc.

   Yet, despite all these “risks”, my opinion is that the REAL risk is choosing to stay in your comfort zone.

   Why?

   Well, because you miss out on really getting to know who you really are and you’re made of. You also deny yourself the possibility of succeeding and subsequently unearthing a whole new level of yourself that you never thought existed.

   Truth be told, even if things don’t work out the way you like, there STILL is a very good chance that you’ll learn something about yourself that you didn’t know about before.

   So, whether you win or lose, you still win because you get to challenge and disprove all those false ideas you had of yourself – ideas that diminished your self esteem.

   However, when you choose the short term “benefit” of playing it “safe” and remaining “comfortable,” in the long term your self esteem suffers because it erodes your self respect and you deny yourself the privilege of taking your destiny into your own hands and answering the desires of your heart.

   I’ve learned that despite the fear, there is a certain “aliveness” that you feel when you’re living on the edge and stepping out of your comfort zone to pursue your goals and dreams. You’re scared, you’re not certain about how things will turn out, but you feel empowered just for the simple act of putting yourself out there.

   About a month and a half before I left for Miami, my mentor had challenged me to put together an event to collect sponsorship dollars for my trip, and also as a way to promote myself as a model that’s making things happen.

   Frankly, I was annoyed at his suggestion because 1) I pretty much already had the money I needed; 2) I thought it’d be a waste of time and 3) I didn’t want to risk losing any money putting together the event by not being able to collect enough sponsorship money.

   So, I flat out refused. I mean, how dare he? I had already faced my fears of putting together events by putting together a show called “The Ike Show” eight months earlier which was a resounding success, why did I have to go through all that again?

   In actuality, the only reason why I got so annoyed was because as a mentor should, he was challenging me to step out of my comfort zone and doing what scared the crap out of me. Topmost of my fears was what if nobody showed up. I also didn’t think anyone would care about what I was up to and was afraid of risking losing any money.

   I also knew how much work goes into putting on an event, and didn’t want to do it.

   Well, my mentor saw my explanation as to why I wouldn’t do the event for what it was: b.s. and he told me so in quite a brutally honest fashion.

   After he laid into me, I saw in hindsight how stupid I was being. I also knew that I would’ve lost a lot of respect for myself if I shirked from facing my fears and stepping out of my comfort zone to pursue my dreams, so I went ahead with the event.

   Indeed putting together the event was no picnic, and during those three weeks when I was putting together the event I slept very little, and often found myself dosing off at work. I also had this nagging fear that no one was going to show up at the event. Yet, despite all of this, during the whole process, I was filled with such an immense respect for myself for actually going out and making things happen.

   I explained earlier that the event was successful and the guests had a good time, but though the turnout was decent, I hoped more people would come, and I wound up losing money putting together the event because the sponsorship money I received didn’t cover what I initially spent.

   But who cares? I can’t put a dollar value on what I gained from stepping out of my comfort zone, taking a risk and putting on the event. The benefits FAR outweighed the “disappointments.”

   Also, I would’ve lost a LOT more had I chosen to listen to my fears and stay in my comfort zone.

   This event, coupled with the other instances throughout the past year where I stepped out of my comfort zone and took action towards actualizing my dreams was a major contributor to the momentum I had when I returned from Miami that helped catapult my self confidence and expand my awareness of what’s truly possible.

   I have this new restlessness to challenge myself to do things that in the past I thought were impossible. I look at the life I’m currently living and compare it to the life that I want to live, and see it as a challenge to see if I could really get there. I have this possession to be a better version of myself and see how it will manifest.

   Also, beyond it being just a fanciful idea, I look at those who express qualities that I admire that I am not currently expressing, I think to myself, “Why not me?” I also think, “There’s no excuse. If this person can express such qualities, why can’t you?” These admirable qualities that I see in others no longer seem like an impossibility but rather, more of a challenge.

   All in all, just from what I’ve been able to accomplish the last year, I’ve seen a whole new range of possibilities for myself – possibilities that I deserve, and that I’m worthy of.

   This all wouldn’t have been possible had I not chosen to step out of my comfort zone and take risks.

3. Become aware of your habitual thought patterns
   
   It was in 2001 when I discovered for the first time that the reason why I seemed to always have this underlying, nagging insecure feeling was because of that negative voice inside my head that would tell me that I wasn’t good enough, that I was a loser, would bring up all my past mistakes when I wanted to attempt something, etc, etc.

   Upon learning about this constant internal critic, I read a thousand and one books over the next few years so that I could learn how to change the voice or turn it off.

   Truth be told, I completely failed at doing that and almost went insane.

   It was last year when I heard this brilliant quote I finally began to have a breakthrough in this area:

   
   

   “We cannot control the parade of negative thoughts marching through our minds. But we can choose which ones we will give our attention to. Picture your thoughts as people passing by the front of your home. Just because they’re walking by doesn’t mean you have to invite them in.”
   - Gladys Edmunds

   It dawned on me that it’s not about shutting off that negative voice per se, but changing how I responded to it. You don’t have to listen to your egos when it tells us that you’re a loser, or that you’re going to fail, etc.

   That insight led to a series of realizations this year that made me realize that by HABIT we are not only accustomed to responding to that negative voice in our heads with more negative thought patterns, but by extension, we in general are accustomed to indulging in thought patterns that take us farther away, not closer to the type of life that we want to live.

   What’s worse than that is that we’re so used to doing it that we’re not even aware of it.

   I bet if you were to randomly take a snapshot of what was going on in your mind at any given time of day, it’s very likely that you would see your mind deeply engaged in thinking about how horrible you are, your past mistakes, how to adjust your life to the negative thought that just came up in your head that spoke negatively about you, etc.

   Think about the random thought that pops in your head about some kid calling you ugly when you were in the third grade. Without even knowing it, you readily agree with the thought and before you know it you’re thinking things like, “I can’t look this person in the eye because he’s going to see how ugly I am,” or, “I can’t wear this outfit because it’s too good for me,” or “Let me wear this outfit to hide my ugliness.” From there, you’re thoughts go to all these different tangents all based on the fact that you’re ugly.

   Now, if you have a goal to find that special someone in your life, how successful can you be in achieving that if you’re caught up with habitual thought patterns like this?

   My answer would be: not successful at all.

   Hey, I’m no different, it’s just that I started to wake up to those habitual ways of thinking that were sabotaging my life, my success, my happiness and my peace of mind. What makes doing this even more challenging is that it’s difficult to notice the ways which we sabotage ourselves with our thinking because we’ve been doing it for so long that it’s just a “normal” part of us.

   When a thought would come up in my ego that I was a loser, by habit I spent time agreeing with that thought and responded by arranging my life as if I were a loser. I would mentally cut back on my goals, shrink back from doing certain things I wanted to do, and think about ways about how to live my life as a loser.

   When I thought of a dream or desire and my mind would suddenly respond with every past mistake I made since I was two years old as to reasons why I was unworthy of and unprepared for what I desired, I would respond by switching my mind away from focusing on what I wanted in life.

   Like an obedient little soldier, I responded by getting in line with everything I was told, even if they didn’t serve me. Also, though I was consciously investing time thinking negative thoughts about myself, it wasn’t aware that I was even doing it because it was such a normal way of thinking for me.

   This all started to change when I came back from Miami. Having built up so much momentum towards my goals, I started to view things differently and was looking at how to take my life to the next level.

   Knowing that we’re called upon to have faith, that we’re told not to worry about the future, I sought to acclimate my mind to these principles, so I began to randomly catch myself at any given time of the day completely and totally wrapped up in negative thinking that was totally opposite of the thoughts I should have to achieve the things I wanted in life.

   Disgusted, I would ask myself why in the hell would I be wasting time and energy thinking about things that weren’t doing me any good whatsoever and would interrupt the pattern by thinking a different thought.

   This wasn’t at all easy because since the habit of thinking this way was so ingrained in my head, it just felt so right to think this way that I felt compelled to do it. Many times, it was so tempting that I would just give in to that way of thinking. It wasn’t until another one of my mentors who writes the blog, Conduit of Healing, told me to incorporate regular deep breathing that I started to make headway and win the “battle” against my mind and its habits.

   It’s similar to what you would do if you were trying to break the habit of biting your fingernails. You start to become more aware of when you start to put your finger to your mouth and when you see yourself doing it, you immediately stop yourself and do something else.

   At first you may find it challenging because it happens so quick, but over time, things start to slow down and you’ll become more adept at catching yourself early enough to prevent yourself from biting your fingernails or doing whatever habit it is you’re trying to break.

   Discovering how to finally take back control of my mind has been a true blessing. Before I was aware of this I would sometimes spend days to weeks on end engaged in destructive thought patterns without being aware of it. This is how I sabotaged my success, my happiness, and my peace of mind.

   I couldn’t ever take or see the path of the Viable Alternative before because I was unaware of the Illusion that I was trapped in.

   It’s now becoming a daily occurrence that I discover some “new” negative thought habit that I previously wasn’t aware of where I’ve been sabotaging myself and blocking my success.

   As I pick off these negative thought patterns that I was habitually used to thinking one by one by bringing light to them, I take back a piece of my self esteem, my confidence, my well being, my uniqueness, my creativity, my motivation and my inspiration. Being unaware of how I was thinking before robbed me of all these things.

   Most importantly I’ve started to discover my true self which was hidden under all the noise of the mind that I was caught up in.

   The problem with most of us is that we’re asleep to what we’re thinking in many areas of our lives and are not even aware of it. We’re like machines running on automatic thinking the same way over and over again without even realizing how we’re robbing ourselves of our self esteem through the way we think.

   By becoming aware of your patterns of thinking with the understanding that you can actually change them to something more constructive, you can begin the process of taking back your self esteem.

   If you don’t get this area of your life handled, you will have little success in your efforts of self growth and gaining self esteem. Our habitual and unchecked thought patterns are like the thief that came to steal, kill and destroy.

   They’re like a top executive of a promising company who causes his company to turn a loss every quarter instead of an expected large profit because he siphons funds from the company’s account while other execs and shareholders are scratching their heads as to what is going on.

   They could also be likened to corrupt government officials or guerrilla soldiers in a war torn and famine ravaged country that take money and food donations sent from around the world to alleviate the suffering of the victims and use them for their own selfish purposes.

   They’re the unseen enemy that turns back any progress that we make. They’re the reason why after all these years of doing affirmations, visualizations, etc that you may be seeing little growth or improvement in your life.

   This was certainly the case with me. There were a number of years that I was supposed to be on the path of self improvement but wasn’t improving a damn bit. Simply put, because my unseen habitual thought patterns sabotaged any possible success I could’ve had, causing me to take two steps back just about every time I took one step forward.

   So I say, WAKE UP, and stop letting your ego bully you!

If you’ve been struggling with low self esteem, you’ve just read firsthand what has helped me improve my self-esteem so far after searching for answers for years. Low self esteem is just a result of living in the Illusion where you’re accustomed to believing in outright lies about who you are.

These steps can help you shed light on who you really are by exposing the Illusion of who you thought you were When you do this, you will gradually start to recognize your true self and be empowered to leave your unique footprint on this earth that you were meant to leave.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps.

I’ve been wanting for a long time to blow the lid off a major misconception that people have, so here goes.

I find it funny that when we talk about low self esteem, we often talk about obvious examples such as:

• The morbidly obese woman who eats as an emotional escape.
• The person who has slit his wrists several times in attempt to end his life because he feels he has nothing to live for.
• The woman who continuously attracts abusive men because she feels she’s not worthy of a man who treats her right.
• The guy who has no friends and hides in his basement because he thinks nobody likes him.
• The guy who’s on depression meds because he feels there’s nothing good about his life.

Whenever we see a person that displays at least one of these behaviours, we are immediately able to see that this person has low self-esteem.

So why is this funny?

Well because if you just take the chance to look beyond The Illusion, you would clearly see that low self esteem is A LOT more widespread than these examples that I just described above.

Often we look at the strikingly beautiful woman that stops traffic when she walks down the street, is able to get all these “freebies” and favours because of her looks, and is surrounded by men who literally would give a pound of their flesh for the chance to be with her, and we automatically assume that because of her looks she automatically has a high self-esteem.

Or we look at the guy who’s surrounded by women all the time, who women can’t keep their hand off of, and we think that because he gets all these women, he MUST have high self-esteem.

Or we see famous actors, or famous rock and pop stars that adorn the cover of magazines, have millions of screaming fans, wear the nicest clothes, drive the most expensive cars, and live in the most luxurious mansions in the most exclusive neighborhoods, and we envy them because they seem to us as being the epitome of someone with high self-esteem.

I mean, shouldn’t they have high self-esteem because of all the people that like them, all the money they have and all the success they enjoy?

If I were to suggest that someone epitomizing any of these people I mentioned had low self esteem, a chorus of protests (and possibly insults) would be hurled in my direction saying,

“How could she have low self-esteem, she’s beautiful, and everybody sweats her.”

Or, “No way, look at all this money he has and that beautiful car he has, if I had all that I would feel good about myself.”

Now don’t get me wrong, it actually may be that these people I gave examples of may very well have high self esteem, but not for the reasons why most people would think.

It’s very sad that because of The Illusion that looms over the world at large, anything that is shallow and fake is completely held up and glorified, and anything dealing with the TRUTH is treated like some radioactive substance that would cause massive damage if “unleashed” to the population at large, and thus put in a box and kept FAR AWAY for “safe keeping.”

In a world like this, where everything taught on a large scale about who we are is FALSE, it’s no wonder why we have no understanding about what true self-esteem is or looks like, and in turn why we’re unable to look beyond a farce and see the low self-esteem in ourselves or others.

Let me tell you something, low self-esteem is one of the most widespread, prevalent, misunderstood and most importantly SUBTLE of all the mental diseases out there that most people don’t even know they even have it

Mental disease you ask?

Yes, mental disease.

Anytime when something is abused, in time it will begin not to function properly, and when something is not functioning properly it is at dis-ease.

When you’re wounded (and everybody walking the planet has some type of emotional wound or another in varying degrees…..yes, you too), whether it was inflicted through what someone said to us that we took to heart, or what horrible things we’ve told ourselves over the years, we think of ourselves as not good enough when measured up to a certain standard, (a standard which always winds up being b.s.), and we thus behave in ways that reflect the fact that we don’t believe that we’re good enough.

When we are habitually used to expressing anything less than the fearfully and wonderfully made beings that we really are, we’re at dis-ease which is exemplified s low self esteem.

Now rather than deal with the core of the issue, we instead are taught by The Illusion to build ourselves up by buying a nice flashy sports car, or getting plastic surgery to achieve a certain look, or trying to keep up a certain appearance, or by getting with as many girls as possible, or becoming filthy rich, etc.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these things in and of themselves, but when you come from a place where you’re using these things to build yourself up into some fanciful identity, then you have a problem.

Many people think that they have a high self-esteem because of all the “cool” things they possess, or because they think that they’re good looking, or because “everybody” likes them, or because they get a lot of girls or because of all the amazing things they’ve accomplished.

And, many of these very people would get VERY defensive if you were to suggest that they had a low self-esteem, and would spout off the very things I listed as to why their self-esteem is high.

Yet, to the astute eye, what they’re really doing is showing their a** as to how insecure they really are based on how they hide their inadequacies.

YES, they may be confident, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily have high self-esteem. If you disagree, just look at Kurt Cobain. The guy obviously was very confident in his musical abilities, but if he truly thought he was worth something, would he have offed himself the way he did?

To put it another way, Kurt Cobain was confident in his musical ability, but he didn’t have confidence in his own self worth. He didn’t have self-confidence.

You can’t have a high self-esteem if you’re basing your self off the wrong thing.

I remember several years back getting into an argument with someone and him telling me point blank that I was a very insecure person with low self-esteem.

When I heard this, I thought the person was crazy, because I felt that though I did at one time have low self esteem, I had now come along way to “build myself up.” I certainly was no longer putting myself down, I read all these history books to further my knowledge of the past, I saw myself as a goodlooking guy, I got my college degree, etc, and I indeed let the person who told me this know, that.

Yet, he wasn’t convinced because he was able to see through all the b.s. I was projecting.

Truth be told, what I was really telling him was that I hid behind my inadequacies by reading all these books to feel smarter, using my college degree to prove that I was worthy, and basing my whole identity off my looks.

In essence I was saying, “I’m not enough the way I am, so I will do a, b and c to make myself feel as if I’m enough.”

Little did I know that I had a dismally low self esteem because I learned how to skillfully hide it from myself and from others to the point that I wasn’t even aware of it. Yet, this mental disease was eating me up from the inside, and since I wasn’t aware of it, there was nothing I could really do about it.

You know the saying from G.I. Joe… “Knowing is half the battle.”

Well, I didn’t know isht. And I could say the same thing for the majority of the people walking the planet.

When I was able to finally realize and admit to myself several years later that I was an insecure bastard, I really thought that I was the only one who was messed up with issues.

On a quest for “true self-esteem”, I looked at those loud, cocky people who always had something witty to say, and wished I “had that.” I looked at those charismatic people who always had a charming, warm smile and a friendly thing to say and wished I had the confidence to be that way. I looked at those polished, put together people whose feathers never seemed to get ruffled and wished I had my act together the way they did.

However, all this started to change when I took the Landmark Forum (no, this is not a plug for that program. If you want to find my thoughts on it you can read it here). This is where I saw a bunch of people who I thought had it “together” because of their looks, their social status, their level of success, etc who were just as scared and insecure as I was, except for they found different ways to hide it.

What’s more, many of these people, although they appeared to have a reasonably high self-esteem to others, weren’t aware that people perceived them that way because they felt so woefully inadequate.

I remember being in shock after having conversations with several people I had gone to high school and college with who always seemed to have that confident swagger, were always thought of as attractive by the opposite sex, and were thus part of the popular crowd when they admitted to me that many times, it was all a front, and they projected a certain a persona to hide deeper issues.

Here I was, the shy, meek, pizza faced kid in high school dealing with the same issues as the cool guy and highly sweated girl, it’s just that we found different ways of projecting our insecurities. I shrunk from others while the other huffed and puffed his chest.

Yet, at the time, I had no idea that this was going on.

Wow, deep stuff.

Realizing this made me see that society as a whole doesn’t know didley squat about self-esteem and a good number, I’ll even say a majority of people, suffer from it in varying degrees.

Either we’re envying or worshiping someone else for having what we falsely think of as self-esteem due to the fact that this person possesses things that have absolutely nothing to do with self esteem, or we’re living in fantasy that we ourselves have self-esteem because we possess things that again have absolutely nothing to do with having a high self-esteem.

I remember having gone to college out of state, thinking I was so damn cool because I was born and bred in New York. Yet, during some somber moments of reflection I would think to myself, “Is this all I have that makes me cool? What if I was from Ohio, then what?”

I had no idea of my self worth beyond a “cool” location where I was from that everybody held in high regard.

It’s interesting the way the majority of men look at what society calls those “perfect 10” women. Yeah they’ll talk your ear off about how they’d like to have sex with one, but oh Heaven forbid you ever suggest they actually get off their arses and go approach one.

In many men’s heads, approaching a perfect 10 woman is the equivalent of crawling into a cave and trying to steal the cub of a 900 lb she-bear.

Just the thought has many men losing control of all bodily functions.

Without even having had one single conversation with the woman, they make all these imaginary assumptions about the woman that are based on absolutely nothing but her looks. Because she’s “beautiful”, they put her on this pedestal and assume that she’s “perfect”, while in the meantime giving away absolutely all of their power.

Not to say that she doesn’t have some great qualities, but thinking that her looks automatically give her these qualities is completely and utterly preposterous.

No where does it enter into the head of a man the possibility that a lot of these women tend to VERY insecure because of their looks.

First off, because many of these women are used to being told that they’re beautiful their entire lives, given all these breaks because of their looks, and being treated as if they’re “special,” they base their entire sense of self worth on their looks.

What does this mean?

This means that oftentimes, they didn’t take the time to develop other qualities like their intellect, personality, character, etc. They never thought they had to because they were looked upon as “beautiful” and got everything they wanted for it. Think about the person who just works out his left bicep religiously while he leaves the rest of his body alone.

They often have a false sense of entitlement where they expect everything to be handed to them without them having to work for it because frankly, that’s what they’ve gotten all their lives. Thus, they’ve been cut off from developing the sense of self that can come when you take responsibility for actualizing your desires.

They have to constantly be worried whether every hair is in place, and everything on them looks perfect because this is where they get their sense of value from. For the same reasons, they also worry about what will happen if or when their looks will fade.

And the ones with more substance worry about guys only being into them because of their looks.

I remember hearing a dating coach say that he knew personally some very beautiful women who have profiles on online dating sites who save all the emails they get from guys praising them for their beauty even though they never answer these emails, and when they need a boost of self-esteem, they rifle through these emails until they receive that boost.

Now, for those people looking to crucify me, I’m not in any way saying ALL beautiful women are like this, I’m not even saying a majority of beautiful women are like this, I’m simply saying that because of The Illusion, and the high premium it places on beauty, many are like this.

Go on Facebook, or on Myspace (if anyone is still left on that), and take a look at the profiles of some of the very attractive woman out there who put up all these provocative pics of themselves on their profile. I guarantee you’ll see dozens upon dozens of comments under these pics from guys who tell them how good or sexy they look. Sadly and pathetically, the woman, thinking that all she has is her looks, puts up these pics so she could get comments to validate her self worth.

She never has a problem getting the responses she wants because there are legions of idiot dudes who predictably oblige her.

Every time she needs another hit of the validation crack pipe, she’ll post more of these pics of her in lying out on the beach in her bikini during her vacation in Miami, or her in her tight green dress, or her in her naughty nurse outfit, or whatever.

What’s amusing though, is that oftentimes, you’ll notice that she doesn’t even respond to these comments, though she has no problem soaking them up.

So let me ask you, would a person with TRUE self esteem need to have armies of horny dudes commenting on scantily clad pics of herself in order to feel good about herself?

Let me teach you a new math equation that they never taught you in school:

Great Looks DO NOT EQUAL High Self Esteem.

Neither does fame nor fortune.

I remember reading in R&B artist/actor Tyrese Gibson’s recent book, How to Get Out of Your Own Way where he recalls how he went to a club with a mult-platinum rapper where the women were of course all over them. The rapper leans over to Tyrese and says to him, “Wow, all these girls are sweatin’ me and I don’t even have any of my jewelry on.”

Yes the women were obviously into the guy because he’s a successful rapper, and yes it would’ve been bad if the guy tied his self worth to his fame which is often fleeting, but with this guy, even in the midst of his fame and success, this guy still needed his jewelry to feel attractive, not realizing that there was someone behind the façade of fame, fortune and jewelry that was already attractive.

Then of course, I welcome you to file through the newspapers, magazines and search engines to search for the inexhaustible examples of people whose celebrity did nothing to help their self-esteem.

Yep, in terms of self esteem, the many folks out there with the looks, the cocky swagger, the money, the fame, the celebrity, the social status, the expensive car(s), etc. are no different from those I mentioned in the beginning of this blog who hide from the world by sitting on a computer in their basement playing World of Warcraft and only coming out for sunshine once every six months because they’re afraid of people.

It’s just that the more “obvious” cases have a different way of dealing with their self-esteem issues than the ones who are less obvious.

To the “untrained eye”, the first group has the more obvious self-esteem because they don’t have all this “bling” around themselves to conceal it, while the latter group, harbouring similar if not identical feelings of worthlessness as the former, hides behind a façade of self esteem made up of things I mentioned earlier, in hopes of eliminating these feelings of inadequacy.

In fact, many in this group have so fooled themselves in believing this façade is real that they look down on others in the first group with pity or contempt thinking, “What a loser,” or, “This guy really needs to feel better about himself.” (Hey, I’ve done it before.)

However, when the façade of these people begins to crumble due to circumstances out of their control, or the lie that they’re trying to suppress can no longer be contained, many of these people “degenerate” to those in the first group I mentioned, where they become the ones on depression meds, or on drugs, or hiding in their basement, because now their wall has collapsed, they feel completely “naked” and are afraid to face the world (similar to what I felt when I cut my dreads).

Basically, neither group has any idea about how to eliminate low self esteem, and society is no help because it simply perpetuates The Illusion whose only solution is to cover it up rather than teach us how to heal.

And the problem is, most people walking the planet fall into one of these two categories.

Until society starts to really encourage us to embrace who we really are instead of embracing a shallow, cooked up version of ourselves, we’re going to remain a society made up of people walking around with varying degrees of low self esteem, totally incapable of properly dealing with it.

Once we start to look deeper beyond the false, shallow definitions of “self” that The Illusion creates, and seek the truth about who we REALLY are, we will no longer idolize the same people we once did because our standards for what we admire in people will change.

Our former “idols” will shrink back down to “size” because what we once saw as confidence in these people we’ll now see as various facades they put up to hide their deep feelings of inadequacy.

In addition, we will also be able to see the low self-esteem in ourselves, so that it will cease to be that undiagnosed disease we’re totally unaware of that’s wreaking havoc in our lives. A havoc that is something we see and feel, but have no idea where its source is from. A havoc I may add, that usually takes the form of alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, overeating, getting into bad relationships, anxiety, and many other destructive forms of behaviour.

We will now be able to see what we’re reacting to, and subsequently put out the fire so we can start being proactive in our lives instead of reactive.

This is The Viable Alternative.

So, if you feel insecure around someone because of one’s looks, bank account, poseessions, celebrity, popularity, etc, or envy them because they have one or more of these things, realize that these things in no way give a person high self-esteem, and that despite these things a person has, he may be just as, if not more insecure than you.

Take a chill pill and stop being so hard on yourself. You’re not the only one with insecurities.

And lastly, if you can only come up with a list of the things that you own, the amount of friends you have, how much money you make, how good you look, and any other external reason as to what makes you worthy as a human being, it is most likely you have low self-esteem and are completely clueless about the fact you have one.

The fact that you base your self-worth on something that pales in comparison to who you really are shows that you’re compensating for some feeling of inadequacy because you don’t think you’re enough on your own. No matter how much you argue and protest that you really feel good about yourself, I beg to differ, your actions speak so loudly, what you’re saying can’t be heard.

ANYONE using a finite object to define his self worth indeed has a low self-esteem because that “self-definition” he chooses to hide behind is a very poor subsitute of who he REALLY is.

Hope this helps.

Ike Love

Now, I’m not in any way purporting myself to be some enlightened guru walking to and fro the earth wearing only a tunic, sandals and carrying a old school satchel, on a quest to enlighten the poor ignorant masses, but I do believe some light needs to be shed on this because there are a great many people who are SUFFERING unnecessarily because they don’t get this concept, so I decided to throw my hat into the ring.

Oftentimes, if you say you put yourself first, you’re thought to be a greedy, self-centered, selfish, heartless, unfeeling bastard who is destined to die alone with no friends.

I’ll be the first one to raise my hand and confess that for many years I too was one of the very ignorant and VERY confused people out there who thought it was horrifically wrong to put oneself first. Riddled with guilt about what a horrible person I was, I thought it was “righteous” to sacrifice myself and put others well-being before mine.

Since I’m talking about myself, I am freely allowed to say that I was a complete idiot.

You know, I’ve often recanted my years of “self-improvement” as a complete waste where most of the insights I received did VERY little to improve the quality of my life, but there is one brilliant insight I recall that relates to this subject that was introduced by a man by the name of Nathaniel Brandon, who is often quoted in psychotherapist circles as “the father of self-esteem.”

He disagreed with the whole concept bludgeoned into our heads by The Illusion that, “It’s easy to be selfish and it’s hard to self sacrifice.”

He went on to say that actually, “It’s hard to be selfish and it’s easy to self-sacrifice.”

Before I go on, let me stop and say that when I speak about The Illusion, I mean basically the collection of false beliefs, old wives’ tales, superstitions, judgments and criteria perpetuated by society at large that crystallizes in people’s minds and is purported to be the TRUTH but in all honesty leads people down a road where they’re following everything BUT the truth.

In other words The Illusion is the collective ego of society, which people plug into at the expense of who they really are.

Either way, you know what?

The man was right.

People often think it’s hard to self sacrifice and easy to be selfish and think putting themselves first is such a bad thing because they’re very misguided about what the “self” even is.

The self is NOT how much money you have in the bank, or how many fly clothes you have in your closet, or how many chicks you’ve banged, or how many people tell you that you look good (I sadly and pathetically based my “self” on this for years), or how many records you’ve sold, or how popular you are or any other external object or tangible concept.

When you base your identity on these things, you’re identifying with the ego or false self which has absolutely nothing to do with who you TRULY are.

Whenever you come from your ego, you see life as a zero-sum game where for you to win, somebody else has to lose and vice-versa. Thus, putting yourself first means that someone else out there has to get the short end of the stick while you “get over”.

The truth of the matter is that self is not some tangible, finite “value” set forth by man, though man and The Illusion he created would like to think so.

The true self is that intangible, eternal essence of who you are. It can never be added to or taken away from. It just is.

It’s the part of you that shined forth as a little kid when you were playing by yourself or amongst your friends and you imagined yourself as a great warrior fighting against an army, or the king or queen of a vast kingdom, or a legendary sports star.

Because you were not fully tainted by The Illusion, all these expressions came forth naturally and effortlessly from the core of your being.

It’s the part of you that expresses the peace and satisfaction of making a positive contribution to mankind individually or collectively while doing what you know you were called to do, whether it’s being a street sweeper, a teacher, a doctor, a writer, an activist…whatever.

It’s the part of Michael Jordan that shined forth to enable him to hit those 42 inch verticals, and what propelled Usain Bolt to run 100 metres in 9.58 seconds.

The true self doesn’t get jealous, it doesn’t needlessly compare itself with others about what it does or doesn’t have, it doesn’t get insecure that others might be “better” than it, and it doesn’t fear loss.

Why?

Because your TRUE self knows it has everything it needs, and that it can not in any way shape or form be defined by some material object or subjective value because it’s far greater than these things. The self knows it has infinite potential and can’t be bothered with these petty labels that are supposed determine how worthy it’s supposed to be.

As corny as this may sound to some, because the true self has no room for fear it is an expression of love.

When you put your ego first, someone does indeed lose while your ego “gains” whatever that thing might be, but you are doing absolutely nothing wrong by putting your true self first, and by not putting yourself first, you’re sacrificing yourself to a false concept that is far inferior to whom you really are.

Yet, because of The Illusion, putting yourself first is not an easy thing to do, neither is it too popular.

You put yourself first when you ignore all the naysayers telling you to grow up, get a “real job” or get “serious”, and decide rather to pursue your dreams that come from the core of who you are, i.e. your true self, and live a life that speaks from your heart, saying, “Screw what everyone else says, I’m going to achieve the life I want or die trying.”

You put yourself first when you stick to your own views and opinions that you feel in your heart no matter how unpopular they may be. You put your ego first when you sacrifice your integrity and go along with what everyone else says because you don’t want people to dislike you or say negative things about you.

You put yourself first when you kick to the curb that useless friend or family member who does nothing but take from your life and inversely, you sacrifice who you truly are by keeping them around because the dead weight of their negativity hinders you from going forward.

I think many of you reading this would see a marked improvement in your well-being by putting yourselves first and banishing all the loser, deadbeats in your lives. I dare you to try!

Sadly, people make the wrong choices all the time because putting your true self first is not the easy, popular thing to do.

It is easier and more popular to sacrifice who you really are by jumping into the next dysfunctional relationship than it is to do the “selfish” thing and face your demons so you can learn who you really are and be able to evolve from being dependent on others to someone who is independent and whole enough to create a whole, interdependent, healthy relationship with someone.

On an aside, while on this subject, I am going to beat up the next guy who complains bitterly to me about how unhappy he is in his relationship and then when I suggest, “If you’re unhappy, why don’t you leave and move on?” they turn around and say, “I can’t because, she needs me.”

People like this have lied to themselves by thinking that they’re doing an altruistic thing by sacrificing themselves and putting someone else first, but really they’re making matters worse for ALL parties involved.

First off, though they’re not putting their core selves first, they’re definitely putting their egos first by using their “selfless concern” for their partners as a cover for their own desperate need to be needed and as a diversion for them to face their own demons.

Second, for all the “concern” about putting the other person first, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by the other person who you’re trying to “save” by sticking in a relationship where you’re unhappy.

There is also nothing to be gained by lying to the other person when you remain in the relationship not because of love, or because you’re happy, but just out of guilt and a self-righteous need to feel like some martyr…..gimme a break.

In addition, you insult another person’s intelligence when you say that this person “needs” you. She needs air, she needs water, but she doesn’t need you.

Lastly, you’re robbing this person of the gift one receives when one takes responsibility over one’s own life and decides to solve one’s own problems.

NO one gains when you choose to sacrifice your true self and put your ego first, while EVERYONE gains when you put the core of who you are first.

Putting your ego first results in either a lose-lose or a win-lose situation, where even in a win-lose situation, the winner still loses because they’re settling for results that are far inferior to what they could have had in a win-win situation, where you win simply because the WHOLE of which you are a part is gets to be uplifted along with you.

Before people start to have fits and start asking me, “What the __________ are you talking about saying there’s nothing wrong with ‘putting yourself first?’ How about the mom that goes to the club every night and leaves her young children to fend for themselves? She’s putting herself first but it doesn’t benefit anyone but herself.”

To that I would say someone who shirks her responsibilities that they KNOW deep down inside that they should be taking care of is NOT putting herself first but rather her ego. She’s also taking actions that will ultimately wind up biting her in the rump down the line when her kids grow to be resentful for her not being around enough when they were younger or they wind up getting in trouble with the law as they get older because the mom wasn’t as attentive as she should’ve been.

All these will obviously serve as headaches for her down the line for what she did and didn’t do when she was younger.

When I talk about putting ourselves first, I talk about taking actions that nurture our spirit and feed our souls, as we’re spiritual beings having an earthly experience. Just as our mind and bodies need to be fed individually, so do our spirits. When we don’t put our true selves first, we starve our spirits.

Take a look around you and look at the different messes that go on in people’s lives and in the world at large everyday. They’re a direct result of people not putting their selves first.

Personally, I believe if we ALL took time to find out who we really are instead of settling for this ego we hide behind, we’ll see a lot less depressed people walking around, because they’ll be taking the time to find out how to truly nurture and feed their spirits, subsequently healing their pain, rather than being complete wusses by running away from who they are through food, shopping, drugs, alcohol, or being in flat out, IDIOTIC denial, etc.

We’ll also see divorce rates plummet (oh boy, here I go again), because people who have no business being with someone else because they’re such a mess, would spend time making themselves whole rather than spending time destroying someone else’s life. Couples which have no business being together would cease to exist because people would be getting together out of a love for one another rather than a need for one another.

There would subsequently be a lot less wounded children walking around, who grow into wounded adults – many times a direct consequence of these unions not working out.

If we put ourselves first, I also believe we’d see a lot less psychopaths walking around victimizing people because there is a feeling of personal empowerment that comes from taking time to address the inner reasons why you’re unhappy and learn to love yourself rather than take your frustrations out at the world at large because you feel like a helpless victim.

Remember the famous quote, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” The implication is that you have to be able to love yourself first, so you can have something to share with others.

Also remember on an airplane, when given instructions for using the oxygen masks, you’re instructed to put yours on first before you aid others in putting theirs on. After all, what the hell use are you in helping someone else put on his mask if you’re gasping for air?

When you’ve helped yourself to breathe properly, you now have the energy to help others do the same.

The greatest gift you can give to mankind is to identify your purpose, the very way in which you were meant to serve mankind, and center your entire life around that, from where you live, to who your friends are, to whom you choose to settle down with, and inversely whom you choose NOT to be friends with.

When you do this, you put your true self first, and EVERYONE gains from it.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps.

Ike Love

I’m not only getting it from my parents, but also from friends, friends of family, relatives, friends’ parents, friends’ relatives, ministers, acquaintances, etc, the list goes on.

They all want to know why I’m not married yet.

My answer to them is that I really don’t care whether I get married or not. If I do, I do, if I don’t, I don’t. I’m not in any particular rush.

“But you’re not getting any younger”

“You’re getting old it’s time for you to settle down and get serious.”

These are some of the protests I hear when I give to people the answers to their questions.

Their answers to my explanation speaks to a bigger issue as to why I’m not married yet beyond what I’ve explained above.

To me, I believe that as a society we’ve been sold a big, fat lie about marriage. In this Western society (as I’m sure in others as well), we’re sold from the time when we were small that when we reach a certain age, we’re to meet someone, date for a bit, get married and then have kids.

This is the script we’re given or rather, sold, and most people follow it to the tee.

And herein lies the problem, people follow a script, or the Illusion set forth by society, but they don’t follow their hearts.

WAIT! Before I go any further, when I say “heart”, I don’t mean by that those feelings of love you feel for someone you’ve been with that makes you want to run to the altar faster than a crackhead runs after his supplier. (By the way, I think the analogy I made to a crackhead is quite adequate, being that sadly, a good number of people who run off to the altar are using reasoning skills that are no better than that of a crackhead.)

When people follow JUST their feelings they tend to make very BIG mistakes that cost them dearly down the line, one of them namely being so blinded by love that they wind up overlooking warning signs or red flags from the other person that spell doom for the marriage down the line.

For instance, a person’s significant other had a drinking problem, but since that person is in “love,” they think that marriage will make that drinking problem magically disappear, so they follow their feelings of love to the altar, only for the marriage to turn into a debacle a few years later over…..yep, that “little drinking problem” he/she had when they first met.

Or a person may follow his feelings of love to the altar, incorrectly assuming that despite the fact he can’t keep a job, that love would conquer all including his bills, only to wake up to the stark reality that finances, or lack thereof is the main reason why he and his wife fight all the time and why their marriage is crumbling.

When I speak about “following your heart,” I’m talking about doing what’s best for you from the core of who you are and taking actions that help nurture who you are at the core of your being.

Sadly, most people don’t know what that is because if they did, they’ll be making a whole different set of decisions than they are now.

Getting married because it’s “the right thing to do” is not a legitimate reason to be getting married. Getting married because your parents, friends and relatives are pressuring is also not the right reason to get married. Neither is getting married because everybody else is, or because you’re “supposed to,” or because you’re not getting any younger.

Please, go sell “crazy” somewhere else.

These are all reasons that have been sold to me by society and frankly, I no longer buy them. My happiness and my integrity as a human being are far too important for me to do that.

Now don’t get me wrong, though it may sound like it, I’m in no way against marriage. If I meet the right person I would be totally open to marrying her, raising a family with her, and sharing a life together. I’m just not hung up over it, or attached to that outcome.

It’s not marriage I’m against, what I’m against the way it’s sold to us. It’s a horrible thing to wake up one day to the realization that you’re utterly miserable because what society sold you about marriage brings you NO fulfillment as an individual but walking away isn’t as simple as going to Best Buy and getting a refund or putting an ad on Craig’s List. Instead, you have commitments like a couple of kids, and a mortgage on a house.

There’s not a mental illness known to man that would make me put myself through this just because I bought into what society says or what other people say.

It seems as if older generations, which include the Baby Boomer Generation and earlier, were more to marry out of reasons I’ve listed above such as it was the normal thing to do or because it was a contractual agreement between two families or some other reason that stemmed from the society at large rather than follow the urging of their soul.

However, younger generations such as Generations X and Y, are waking up to the fact that what many of their parents, grandparents, etc bought into is part of The Illusion because it doesn’t bring them fulfillment or happiness. Many are looking below the surface of what they’ve been told and thus you find people staying single a lot longer. We’re also seeing divorce rates skyrocket through the roof with statistics saying that 50-70% of marriages these days end in divorce….my goodness.

What I’m really grateful about is that I have good friends that I associate with who also have come to similar conclusions. We encourage one another to pursue our dreams, we share our realizations, our breakthroughs, and our triumphs, and we advise one another. We also make an earnest attempt, above what we’ve been told (or sold), to listen to our hearts and do what’s right for us, because we’ve realized that our happiness and fulfillment is tantamount above everything else.

We’ve decided that what really matters is leaving some type of legacy that will benefit mankind at large, and along the way, marriage may come along and fit into that labour of love…or it may not.

Wherever the chips may fall, fulfillment is guaranteed.

What’s funny is that we’ve had EQUAL experiences when we shared with people who aren’t on the same page our ambivalence and view about marriage I just explained above. They’re all in shock as to why we’re not freaking out about not being married yet and so nonchalant about it. Yet, they offer NO explanation as to why we need to get married beyond that it’s something that you’re supposed to do.

In fact many of these people who are pushing marriage on us aren’t even selling happiness to us when it comes to marriage. Dare I say is that because they believe that happiness only exists in fairy tales but in the real, “normal” world, happiness is “unrealistic”?

To many of these people, our explanations about our views marriage, with all this words such as “happiness” and “fulfillment” being thrown in, we’re speaking some sort of Australian aboriginal language. They think that there’s something wrong with us and some look like they want to ask us whether we’re gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, but in a mainly Judeo-Christian society, in many people’s eyes, there is something wrong with being gay, so if you’re not possessed about getting married, that’s the only other option.

I have two very good friends of mine who, several years back were HELL BENT on getting married. There was such urgency in their minds to do it and they even tried to spread this urgency to me, but I refused to partake and just simply didn’t care.

Interestingly enough, these two gentlemen wound up getting their wish to find wives but are separated now, with one telling me to never ever get married and the other telling me to take my time, there’s no rush.

Again, I’m not saying that you can’t find happiness in marriage and I know that though marriage isn’t easy, there are a great many married couples. What I’m saying is that these cats’ reasons for getting married probably blinded them not only to the women they wound up with, but also to what really was on their hearts.

As a matter of fact, despite their experiences, I actually believe that one day I will meet that special someone to raise a family with, but like I said, I’m in no rush.

I can listen to what society says about why and get married and possibly have a mediocre or a good marriage and also a mediocre or good life, but I’m not interested in simply mediocre or good, I want extraordinary on all levels. That is The Viable Alternative.

Before I go, I’m reminded of a time, a few years back when I was at work and there was an Asian guy who I worked with. When he first came to work at the company I was at, I remember him saying how he didn’t believe in interracial marriages, and that he was going to marry someone from his own culture. Fair enough.

But, he would constantly talk about this “hot” Spanish girl he had hooked up with in college.

Well, he was dating a woman of his own culture of the time who he eventually got engaged to and wound up marrying.

The day before his wedding, when he was walking around the office talking about his “big day,” someone asked him if he was marrying a Spanish girl, and without even a moment’s hesitation, his eyes lit up and he replied, “Don’t you think if I were marrying a Spanish girl there’d be this BIG smile on my face?”

To that I responded, “Bro, if it takes a Spanish girl to put a smile on your face, then why aren’t you marrying that? Why are you settling?”

To this he had no response.

I now began to wonder, if his whole spiel about marrying inside your culture was something just instilled in him by the “mini-society” he lived within, i.e. his family, whose views he just blindly parroted without listening to his own heart.

I’m sure this guy is “happy”, but how happy can one really be when the structure of your life, including who you marry is based on rules that, when seen through a magnifying glass, are completely full of holes.

When people stop following The Illusion, and start living by The Viable Alternative, where you allow your life to emanate from the core of who you are, you will see a lot more happy, fulfilled people who will be subsequently qualified to get into more lasting, SOLID, real relationships.

You’ll see whole people who are capable of getting into WHOLE relationships rather than people, who because they’ve denied the yearnings of their soul, walk around as broken, empty shells, which come together to form a broken structure that can’t stand the test of time and serves only to damage its individual components even more.

Hope this helps.

As I’ve decided that this year, 2011, being an incredible breakthrough year for me isn’t an option, I’ve come to realize in my path of self discovery that to make this declaration into a reality, I need to adopt an attitude of entitlement.

When I say “entitlement”, I don’t mean it in a negative way. There are two kinds of entitlement a person can have, one that comes from a reactive victim mentality and one that comes from a proactive victor mentality.

The first type exists when a person complains endlessly about how sucky his life is and how he got the short end of the stick because nobody has given him the opportunity to be successful. YET, while complaining, this same person engages in destructive behaviour that is inimical to his success i.e. drug abuse, alcoholism, or just plain making bad decisions, and every time an opportunity does come around, he’s either too blind to see it or too lazy to do anything about it.

When asked why he doesn’t go and create his own opportunity, he will come up with endless excuses about how all the odds are stacked against him, how hard it is for him, how futile it is for him to even make an attempt, and every which excuse out there that covers the fact that he’s too scared to put in a little elbow grease.

Basically, a person like this wants “success” to fall through his living room ceiling or be delivered to him personally by the mailman. He feels entitled to something that he refuses to work for.

Some people with this mentality take their “entitlement” to a level where they feel entitled to what another person has worked hard for and go and steal or take by force what doesn’t belong to them.

Then there’s the second type of entitlement, the one I’ve decided to adopt, which is the “Why not me?” mentality.

This type of entitlement is what triggers the third pillar of The Viable Alternative, Self Appointment. By first feeling yourself as worthy of attaining the thing or things you desire, you’ve begun the process of self-appointment, where you’ve now given yourself permission to go for what you want, telling yourself, “To hell with other people’s permission, I give myself the right to have this.”

A person with this attitude looks at others who have or are doing the things he desires in life and instead of being bitter or resentful about it, decides that he deserves the same things too simply because he’s worthy of it.

He feels that since he’s worthy of these things, he’s entitled to them. His sense of entitlement then leads him to go do whatever it takes to acquire these things.

If the people he encounters refuse to give him the opportunity, he insists on finding out someone he does, and if he doesn’t, then he decides to make his own opportunity.

If people refuse to clap for him and jeer and boo him, he starts to clap for himself, knowing that if he continues to clap for himself in confidence, someone will sooner or later take note, and endeavour to find out what all the “fuss” is about.

A person with the right type of entitlement will not take no for an answer when it comes to him living the life he feels he deserves.

When you feel entitled to something, you see no need at all to complain about or feel hindered by present obstacles, because you believe so much that you DESERVE to have what you desire that you refuse to accept these circumstances as permanent conditions. You know that NO obstacle is ever big enough to hinder you from what you see as your birthright.

I first found out about this mentality when I was 19 years old. After being bitter for a number of years about me not having the success in certain areas of my life, especially dating, I decided it was time for a change.

Rather than coming from a point of envy, I started hanging out with people who were successful dating women from a point of learning what they did. When I heard or witnessed their success stories, I would imagine the same scenarios with me in them. When I saw their unique qualities that made them successful, I noted to myself the unique qualities I had that would make me successful.

I similarly took this attitude to other areas of my social life and also my professional life when I was seeking real world experience as regards to what I was majoring in in college.

Well, lo and behold, my life started to change, and the success I desired, though quite shallow I must say, started to show up in a way that was unique to me. It happened in such a way that when I looked back at the previous year I didn’t even recognize my life.

Then, sadly I lost this attitude a few years later and over the years experienced it in fits and starts but never could quite get consistent with it. In the meantime I was wandering in limbo, not being quite able to get it together and wondering what hit me….until now.

For the past several years, I’ve been experiencing an amazing transformation in my life where everything is starting to seem clear once more. The clouds have parted, the scales have been lifted from my eyes, and the shackles have been loosened, and I’m sensing nothing but opportunity – the opportunity to create whatever I uniquely want in MY life.

I am a divine being and I’m entitled to the best in life (as are you, but I can’t believe that for you, you have to believe that for yourself). No longer will I give away my power, peace of mind and happiness to forces that are seen and unseen. No longer will I put my destiny in someone else’s hands, no longer will I settle for less in life, and no longer will I shake in the boots of mediocrity, afraid of stepping out for fear of what might get me if I try.

The line is drawn in the sand and here is where I take my stand to achieve the amazing destiny that I was meant to realize. If I have to fight for it I will. By any means necessary.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe the problem in this world is that there is not enough of the right type of “entitlement” going around. When people just take a whiff of entitlement, they can do amazing things like topple governments just like we’re currently witnessing in the wave of revolutions that are taking place across the Middle East.

We saw it during the American Revolution when a weak army defeated the world superpower at the time, Britain, to become a young, independent nation. The world saw it in Haiti, where a rag tag army of ex slaves went on to execute the most successful slave revolt in history, playing the world powers of Britain, France and Spain against one another to finally throw out France and establish an independent nation.

The Illusion in life is that we’re helpless when it comes to taking a part in our own magnificent destiny that we desire deep down inside to fulfill. The Illusion in life is that the lives that we dream to live are for those other “lucky” people, but not us.

For years I was trapped in this Illusion, feeling enslaved and utterly helpless to really do anything about the life I truly wanted to live, which involved having a tremendous impact on this world.

I have decided that no longer will I sit and feel helpless to the obstacles that are blocking my way. I will instead use the power of my tongue, as words are truly spiritual and powerful, and follow the teachings of the Master, who said that we could speak to the mountains in our lives and command them to get out of our way and be cast into the sea.

I will no longer allow myself to be denied.

Why should I? As a man who is worthy of the best, why should I let anything get in my way. Why should YOU let anything get in YOUR way?

I’ve achieved great milestones in my self awareness, where I have become more and more aware of the thought habits that I adopted over the years to keep my growth, success, peace, happiness and power at bay. No longer am I in the dark as much as I used to be as to what was keeping me back.

Yet, mere self awareness isn’t enough for growth. You can wake up and realize the country you’re ruling or the company you own is a mess, but there comes a time you have to do something about it. I must now go in and change my habitual ways of thinking that had been limiting me and replace these habits with new more empowering habits.

Since it’s supposed to take 21 days to break a habit, I’ve written a 21 day goal (writing down goals seems to work for me) to break my habit of always associating my identity with my past failures. Basically, up until now, I had this habit of always looking to at my past mistakes to judge how worthy I’m allowed to feel as a person, how capable I’m allowed to feel about accomplishing something, and who I’m allowed to be in the present moment. .

It doesn’t take a genius to see how well this worked out for me.

This is no longer acceptable. As a person who’s entitled to the best, I must take responsibility and remove EVERY obstacle standing in my way of living the life I deserve to live.

And like so I intend to tackle all my other negative thought habits that have been blocking me from living how I want to live. One habit at a time, I will break the back of the “beast” and destroy The Illusion that I have been living under, taking back my destiny in the process.

This is the Viable Alternative, where by any means necessary, (as long as you’re not violating the rights of others), once you have a desire conceived in your heart, you accept it as YOURS for the taking, put on your battle gear, and go out and get it.

Hope this helps.

For part one of this blog, click here.

In Part 1 of this blog, I talked about my realization that anyone can appoint himself to greatness whenever he chooses, and thus take his destiny back from those he gave away his power to in the first place.

Very powerful stuff indeed.

Yet, like I said in my last blog, though this gave me some “semblance” of self-esteem, the foundation it was laid on was very shaky to say the least, and I was soon to find that out the HARD way, and subsequently undergo a very painful and LONG lesson.

Well, because I changed the way I looked at the world and myself, I soon was able to get into a relationship. Well, when the relationship ended for good a year later, due mostly to underlying issues on my part that I really didn’t address, I was devastated and totally came down VERY hard on myself.

You see, a few years earlier, when I had decided that I was no longer going to be a victim and dwell on my past, I had learned that hating people wasn’t the answer, so rather, I decided put a wall of indifference around me (more about this in another blog).

Since I knew that I was a sensitive person, and I learned hating people hurt the hater more than the hated, I also knew that allowing myself to be affected negatively by what someone might say or do was a recipe for disaster, so this wall was my solution, as it would keep any type of possibility of getting hurt or feeling vulnerable out.

This wall of indifference was to be my “shield” against everything and everyone is my life, even against significant others.

I’ll explain this in another blog, but being indifferent in life is actually a good thing, when you come from the right place of self esteem and self awareness. Though I thought I had both at the time, I really had neither, so this supposed “indifference” I had spelled the demise of my relationship.

Needless to say, when the relationship ended, I took a cold hard look at who I was and ALL the criticism I received over the years from others, concluded that I was a selfish, inconsiderate, horrible person, and throwing the baby out with the bath water, decided to throw aside EVERY insight that I learned when I had made my first transformation when I was 20/21 years old.

I felt that if this “person” who I created with all the insights I had a few years earlier that I assumed to be so wonderful, so confident, etc, couldn’t even maintain a relationship with someone who really loved him, then not only were those insights wrong, but I really couldn’t personally be trusted with coming up with a definition of who I really was.

One of the challenges I face is that I really only became aware of very recently is that when I piss someone off, I somehow become sensitive to EVERYBODY’S opinion of me and start feeling that I’m in danger of the whole world not liking me.

Thus, I tied in all the criticism I received from friends and family together with what my ex at the time said of me, and concluded that if I listened to what others had told me, I could’ve saved the relationship.

Lack of self awareness is a bitch huh?

I saw myself as a person “out of control,” and was completely, utterly desperate to change all my “evil” ways.

It was then, in a similar fashion to the way the government of a country cedes power to the military or some dictator when it feels it can’t handle the affairs of the country, I gave all my power over to my intellect.

I resolved that ANYTHING that I learned or acquired in life from here on had to be carefully picked apart and analyzed by my intellect first before it could be accepted.

I also decided that since this wall I decided to put around me kept me from seeing who I really was to the point that I couldn’t heed outside criticism, I resolved from now on to take my definition of myself from the outside world so I would no longer be oblivious to signs of me being an asshole or the horrible person that I was.

Now, I assumed I had the perfect mechanism in place to become this nice, pleasant, UN-selfish person who pleased everyone.

Truth be told, and I’m completely so utterly embarrassed to admit this and wasn’t even going to add this here, but my hope was that one day, my ex would one day run into me and see how much of a changed person I was that she would take me back (I know, I know…..go ahead and spell it out, L-O-S-E-R).

Gasp!

I’m shaking my head so much right now in such disbelief that I actually thought this way that I’m about to collapse from dizziness.

How ironic huh? Considering what I went through a few years earlier?

Yes, I was a complete EFFING idiot, and as a matter of fact, if you’re reading this blog at a time when people have learned how to use time travel, you have permission to travel back in time and slap me for what I subsequently went through for making these asinine decisions. As a matter of fact, please come back and get me as I sit here writing this because I would like to go back and slap myself too.

New Rules, New Life

So, under this new dispensation, several things changed.

• I now decided that I had to be overly sensitive to what people said because before me trying not to care what people thought of me led to me not heeding the complaints of my ex, which subsequently led to her leaving me. Now I felt that ANY negative criticism about me had to be considered and analyzed for the likelihood of it being true.
• Rather than just take the lessons of my past mistakes and move on as I learned to do a few years earlier, I decided that because I obviously couldn’t be trusted with learning anything, I had to now stay fixated on my past mistakes and constantly analyze them to prevent myself from making the same mistakes again.
• Because I had been told over the years how rude and brutally honest I was, I decided that to become a better person who didn’t offend anybody, I would now watch EVERYTHING in order to prevent the possibility of my “obnoxious” personality to come out.
• I decided to constantly focus on all my faults, believing that keeping them in the forefront of my mind would keep me aware of them so that I could work on them and not be oblivious to them like I was in the past. I also hoped that focusing on my faults would keep me humble and prevent me from being an arrogant person who felt as if there was nothing wrong with him.
• I resolved now to look to others for their opinions of me because not only could I not be trusted with formulating an accurate opinion of myself, but also people’s opinions would keep me aware of what was wrong with me. I felt that being confident was one in the same as arrogance because it cut you off from outside criticism.
• Right before I went through my breakup, I started feeling an emptiness within and a budding depression, which was bound to happen seeing that I based my identity on completely shallow things such as how successful I was with women, my style, social status, looks and money. Thus, it turned out that the things that I was able to achieve in those few years since my first “transformation”, and the person that I had come to define myself as was not nearly as fulfilling as I thought it would be. When I went through the depression of my breakup, I saw how all the things that I had thought would make me happy really meant nothing. In my “New World Order”, I threw aside any burning desire for personal ambition, thinking of it as “the Devil,” because, in the end it I saw it as only leading to me feeling empty, shallow and into being that horrible person who couldn’t keep a relationship (my goodness).

The Aftermath

These decisions of coursed changed the entire way I behaved and viewed the world.

• I was no longer able to behave spontaneously and freely because I didn’t trust myself to do so. I now became super stiff and stifled because I believed that every move and step I made had to be analyzed first to prevent me from making a mistake.
• I became stifled and inhibited around people who I deemed as “judges” as to whether I was “changing” or not, especially women. This made some conversations very difficult because I felt so self conscious that I wouldn’t even know what to say. I would just stumble around and second-guess everything I said or wanted to say in my head, terrified that I would say the wrong thing.

  I was afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing because disapproval from them would mean that I had to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.

• People’s disapproval of my behavior led to me retreating and beating myself up for days on end for failing at being a good, nice person. That followed more mental analysis of how to be a better person.
• Things that I was trying to learn became almost impossible to learn because I would focus on every mistake I made along the way thinking this was the best way to prevent myself from making the same mistake over again.

  I would be so stuck in my head focusing and trying to intellectualize the mistake it was hard for me to get better at anything.

• It also became difficult for me to believe in myself, since I equated confidence with arrogance. I felt that if I were to become confident and start believing in myself, I risked the danger of forgetting about my faults and thus being that horrible person I thought I was in the past that I was so desperately trying to get away from.
• Because my faults were constantly being broadcasted in my mind, I became even more terribly insecure and constantly second guessed myself. Since I only saw my faults, I doubted my ability to succeed in life.
• Whenever a negative thought popped into my head, I could no longer just let it go, because now I felt that it had to be analyzed through my intellectual system to make sure that it wasn’t true in the slightest way.

  I was afraid that letting go of it would make it more liable to happen but continuously focusing on it would help me to protect myself against it.

  This caused me to again be stuck in my head in analysis paralysis instead of living in the moment living my life.

• If someone said something to me that I didn’t like, since I concluded that being indifferent was what made me such a horrible person in the first place, I had no other recourse but to now let what they said affect me negatively, since I knew of no other way to deal with a negative remark.

  I would now go through sometimes days of pain and anguish for what was said to me. On top of that, I would constantly be in my head analyzing what they had said trying to prove how it wasn’t true and analyze a “solution” to the problem.

Though I did have a desire to make something out of my life, that burning passion that I had when I was 20 years old to change my life, along with the attitude of expectation and faith had left me. Because it had left me, the excitement for life had left me as well.

Whereas I once had an almost arrogant faith that everything worked out for me which led to me experiencing situations where I would always wind up on top no matter how difficult things looked, now, because I decided that almost everything about me from the past was so bad, I deemed my faith as “arrogant” and stopped using it.

Thus, just a few short years later, I would look in wonder and awe as to how I was able to have everything work out for me the way I did, not even knowing how I did it.

From once having this confident, inner knowing, however naïve I had been, that things were just going to work out, I now saw this world as this hostile place where I had to scramble and kill myself for every single crumb.

The idea of relaxing and letting go now became an anathema to me. I was now constantly on edge as I increasingly felt the whole world on my shoulders because I assumed I had to figure everything out bit by bit analytically.

Although I wanted to change from the person who I thought I was before, I would at times look back with longing wondering what happened to all the excitement for my life, though reminding myself of how much a bad person I was “back then” would snap me out of it.

With no excitement for life, there was really no motivation to go after what I thought I wanted. Life was just now a mundane humdrum that I just simply existed in, going through the motions.

Three years into this new way of thinking, I had no ambition, no goals, and no dream to do anything. Though I had felt I was doing the right thing, something did feel wrong.

So folks, this was the person I had become, and truth be told, in the coming years would literally almost lose my mind due to this way of thinking.

A Discovery

It was three years into this new way of being that I found myself standing in a bookstore suddenly inspired by a book by the name of “Think and Grow Rich “ by Napoleon Hill. I go into my experience in a past blog you can read about here.

The book rekindled in me a dormant and forgotten desire to be successful in life, something that I had thought that died in me.

It was soon after reading this book that I saw that to become successful one had to have high self-esteem, confidence, belief in oneself, etc.

After reading this book several times, I realized that I had none of these things.

Herein started my addiction to self-help that lasted for half a decade, where I now dedicated myself to acquiring all these things.

The unfortunate thing was, “self improvement” didn’t come as easy for me as it did when I was 19/20 years old where I had all sorts of revelations that changed my life (superficially in many parts, albeit).

For the next five or so years, I went to seminar after seminar, read book after book, listened to all these CDs and podcasts, tried all these affirmations, hypnosis, mental exercises, you name it, and got absolutely nowhere nearer to becoming a more confident person.

The only thing that happened was that I became overloaded with all this information, inspirational quotes, and success stories but had nothing to show for it in terms of real growth.

When I read “Think and Grow Rich” several times and decided that I too wanted to be great like those described in the book, I took note of all the obstacles standing in my way of becoming great: negative self-talk; low self esteem; insecurity; feeling inadequate; limiting beliefs, etc, and made it my duty to figure out how to overcome these things so I could become great.

Getting rid of my limiting beliefs and replacing them with empowering ones, learning how to believe the best in myself, feeling good about myself,, etc should have all been a done deal, but really it wasn’t.

Self improvement soon ironically became my biggest prison.

Running Around in Circles

From the time that I decided to change because of the guilt that I felt as a person because of a failed relationship, I slowly gave over my full power over to my intellect. It became the God of my life.

I put it in place for it to protect me from making any possible mistakes and to make me a better person, but like with the Skynet system in the movie, “The Terminator”, that became self aware and caused nuclear war, my intellect eventually soon got out of control.

My ego, believing my intellect was the only gift I had, became attached to it, subsequently causing me to experience hellish mental warfare almost all the time.

My ego also led me to believe that my intellect was the real ME and I soon became a one trick pony that tried to solve everything under the sun just using my intellect.

As the infinite beings we are, there are so many tools at our disposal for us to be the creators that we are, our intellect is only one tool. In my case, I associated the tool as ME, and thus became a “tool” in every sense of the word.

Imagine a drug czar that is appointed in the government of a particular country that deals drugs on the side. You wouldn’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize that the drug problem in this country would remain the same if not get worse.

This is what I had dealt with.

When I handed everything over to my ego, I started playing a game that said, “If it can’t be worked out or proved logically, then we can’t accept it as fact or believe it.”

Before I even go on, you must be asking, “What do I mean by the word ‘game’.?”

Well, I’m here to inform you that EVERYBODY on this planet has their own game that they’re playing that although we’re completely unaware we’re playing the game most of the time, we’re very successful at it.

The games that we play starts from a decision we’ve made in the past but have in most cases completely forgotten.

Sometimes it could be that we notice as children we feel unloved so we use crying as a way of getting attention. As adults this shows up as a person always getting into one mess after another so he could get the coddling he desperately needs.

Or a child could play the game of “I’m gonna get back at my parents for something that they did to me.” This shows up years later as the person engaging in self-destructive behaviour or repeatedly getting into trouble with the law, or underachieving just because it pisses his parents off.

The games we play run ad nauseum, but the common theme is that we’re all unaware that we’re doing it and the problems that we deal with in life reflect this game.

Though I was aware of the fact that I felt like an untrustworthy, selfish loser, I wasn’t aware of the actual game I was playing and the effect that it was having in my life.

On the surface I was going to all these seminars, reading all these books, trying to be positive, and trying to “improve” myself.

That was the Illusion.

But what was really going on was that my whole self improvement process was about seeking permission from my ego as to whether I was allowed to consider myself a good, positive, powerful person.

My ego, through this game I was playing, had this system where it ran EVERYTHING through to prove whether it was true or false, and because I identified with my ego, which in turn identified with my intellect, I was completely a SLAVE to this intellectual system.

A system that I had subjected myself to in order to ground me and keep me “sane” is actually what almost made me go insane.

It took my soul for ten years.

Through all my self improvement gesticulations, what I was really doing was seeking permission from this “system” to be great.

But again I say, I didn’t know I was doing all this. All I knew was that I was on this quest to improve myself and was going to try my damndest to reach that goal.

Because I really didn’t know that I was measuring everything up against a system, I would keep running into a wall over and over again.

I was able to perceive that the wall that I kept on running into were actually mental blocks. What I didn’t know that was that what was inside this nebulous “black box” of mental blocks was a huge, complicated intellectual system.

I remember reading Tony Robbins’ book, “Awaken the Giant Within,” where he had a specific chapter about getting rid of limiting beliefs. In the chapter he asks a series of questions that were geared towards you letting go of limiting beliefs that were holding you back from success, whether it be the belief that you’re a loser, or that you’re unworthy of success, etc. I knew I had a ton of limiting beliefs so I was sure the chapter was going to be helpful

Yet, no matter how many times I asked myself these questions that were to assure that I was going to let go of my limiting beliefs, I seemed to want to stubbornly hold on to them.

I would ask myself, “If these beliefs aren’t helping me, why do I insist on holding onto them? Wouldn’t it be a foregone conclusion that I let them go?”

The truth of the matter was, the system I was beholden to wouldn’t let them go, because letting them go would threaten its whole system of logic. Since long ago I made a decision to accept certain beliefs about myself due to what others said, my ego felt there was no reason to change them because even though they were limiting beliefs, it was “logical” for me to believe them.

My ego didn’t want to risk being WRONG because then my intellect would be in question as well as the whole logical system that was carefully figured out, so rather than being happy, it chose to be RIGHT.

What’s worse is because I had become to identify with my intellect, I though that this was the way things were, that there was no other possible way to live.

Hence the mental blocks in my journey that I repeatedly kept on experiencing that would keep me stagnant for years.

I was able to see that these mental blocks stymied any possible progress in my life, but I really didn’t know that these mental blocks consisted of an intellectual system.

Thus, what I consciously experienced as blockage, frustration and an inability to make any headway in personal growth was REALLY this huge, cumbersome intellectual system that I UNCONSCIOUSLY was controlled by that tied up any progress I was trying to make.

I remember talking to my bosses when I was in real estate, and going to seminars where I ran across some very successful people, and them being in awe as to why I wasn’t successful with all my intelligence.

They would constantly see how I would doubt and sabotage myself and would wonder why I couldn’t just get it together.

Well meaning mentors, coaches, advisors etc would tell me to just let go of my doubts and have confidence in myself, but all these excuses used to run through my mind as to why I couldn’t do that, some of which I expressed verbally.

Yet, what was so apparent to them was completely hidden from me.

I didn’t feel I had the right to be confident because my system had me believe that there were all these things that I had to accomplish first before I called myself confident.

According to my system I hadn’t earned the right to be confident yet.

Furthermore, I couldn’t drop my doubts because this system that I was following hadn’t disproved them yet.

It had all these rules and hoops I had to jump through in order for me to express confidence, charisma, and any other quality that was needed to be successful. It would tell me that I wasn’t allowed to be confident because I hadn’t accomplished a, b or c yet.

Success and the attributes and criteria required to get there were put on such a high altar that I literally perceived it as impossible although not for a lack of trying.

Since I wasn’t aware that I was using any system, what I consciously experienced was frustration at not being able to figure out how to be confident or earn what I thought was the right to be confident. I felt something was blocking me from being confident, however I really couldn’t explain what that something was, so either I couldn’t come up with an solid answer as to why I couldn’t feel confident, or if I did have an answer, it was riddled with excuses of things I had to do first.

Little did I know that these “things” I had to do first were directly given to me by this system and were constantly being added to according to its whims.

The only solution I knew was to continue my search by getting my hands on any piece of self improvement material available whether it was through books, audio, seminars, asking people questions, etc. in hopes that somewhere or somehow I could piece together the puzzle of confidence or find that one “magical” insight that would make my mind finally grasp confidence, self-esteem, etc.

I remember, after reading and hearing about how successful person after successful person had become confident by conquering his fears. I decided to step up to the plate and face my fears so I too could be confident, so after doing an inventory of what I was most afraid of, I decided to go on a crowded New York City subway train and speak about The Viable Alternative.

So, I did this two or three days in a row, and while it was a truly mind blowing experience in that I saw that I didn’t die of embarrassment, I can honestly say that it really didn’t do anything for my confidence or self esteem,

I was still the same, insecure person.

Think about those Third World countries that are ruled by a military dictator who had seized power in a coup d’etat, and promises that he’ll step out of power and relinquish power to a democratic government when certain conditions are met. Yet, when the conditions are met, the dictator reneges on his promise.

With every new endeavour I tried, book I read or seminar I attended, or goal I hit, there was this hope that this would be “it” in me finally being able to be allowed to be confident by what I perceived as my mind, but there was always something else that I had to do.

If there was any time that I felt confident, or charismatic or powerful and my ego couldn’t explain how I got to that state, it would make me immediately let go of the confident feeling and make me go back to doubting and being insecure, because it couldn’t take the fact that I was feeling confident without it being able to be explained through its system.

There would be this little voice that I would listen to that would say, “How did you get to feel this way? You didn’t earn this. You didn’t do this, this or that, so you don’t deserve to feel this way now.”

I would then drop the confident feeling.

Everything had to be able to be explained through the eyes of my ego or else it had to be discarded.

Moreover, if I received a specific insight from a book or some other source that helped broaden my reality, I’d feel on cloud nine and everything would just flow. YET, if I failed at accomplishing something or made a mistake doing something, my ego would take to mean that this new insight I learned failed at keeping everything perfect, so it would make stop using this new insight because it no longer “worked.”

It felt it had to rearrange things and see how things now fit together before I was “allowed” to use this insight again.

Every time I would try to reinstitute the insight into my reality my ego would immediately bring up the fact that it didn’t work and would block me from using it, causing me to automatically let go of the insight and eventually forget about it.

From time to time, I would often wonder what had happened to all the wonderful insights that had made things so clear and wonder why I hadn’t been using them.

It seemed as if I was always starting back at square one with every insight I gained wiped from memory because my ego felt they didn’t work.

This was why after a few years of “self improvement” I was befuddled as to why I had read all these books with all these wonderful insights but yet the quality of my life hadn’t improved.

I remember recalling gifts and abilities I had in my early 20s that I had literally forgotten about or would wonder what happened to because my ego had firmly locked them up and hidden them away from me. Since there was no logical reason why I had them, since it wasn’t proven that I was worthy of them, I wasn’t allowed to claim them.

My ego literally had taken every aspect of who I was and wanted EVERYTHING about me to be proven through this system.

Again, I was totally unaware that I was putting everything through a system, all I thought I was doing was “figuring things out.”

Hence, I was on this search through books, CDs, coaches, seminars and the like to find out how I could acquire these gifts and abilities that I didn’t know I already had. My hope was that somewhere I could find that one insight that would make everything click and make my ego finally give me the permission to be that powerful person I was so desperate to be.

During these miserable years, a preacher told me, “Son, all that you seek, you already have,” and a cousin visited my house for the first time saw all these books I was reading and asked, “Why are you seeking something that you already have?”

I didn’t get it.

I knew it couldn’t just be as simple as that.

In my mind, I thought everything had to be analyzed and figured out.

Also, my ego had built up such a “wonderful” system it couldn’t just let go of it just like that. To my ego, that would be tantamount to complete and utter failure and even, death because there would no longer be any use for it.

For one to be wealthy, my ego believed that I had to go through this long arduous process of suffering, heartache, health problems, and any which hell before I could be successful. Thus, whenever I came by an opportunity that I stood to benefit from or represented an open door that would bring me to the next level, my ego would deem that I didn’t earn it because I didn’t suffer enough for it, and would wind up sabotaging it.

One of the main reasons I never achieved any type of success was because I was afraid of attaining it and not having worked hard enough for it.

This made me afraid to even try at all because of this fear that I had to go through this difficult, tortuous struggle in order to succeed at anything. Moreover, whenever I did do anything, I always made it harder than what it was, such that I would strain to gain just the bare minimum. I would put the effort into making one dollar that one would put to making a thousand.

Hence, I was in a perpetual state of getting ready to get ready. I would read, study and study but never really do anything at all. From what you saw explained above, I couldn’t get the confidence to make an honest go at it, and I was convinced by my mind that didn’t have all the necessary resource to take action.

As a matter of fact, my ego made success look so hard, it had put so many conditions on being secure, confident and happy, and every time I “failed” at doing something “right”, it would pile on more conditions and list of things that had to be figured out first before I can even claim peace of mind that I would often think to myself that maybe it was just better to end it all.

How about my situation with women?

Well, I didn’t want to include this because I’m so embarrassed over what transpired over a period of almost ten years in this area of my life and was afraid that people would read this and think of me of some sort of weirdo.

On second thought, considering what I shared here so far, I think that’s already too late.

When I had first discovered the concept of self appointment and had finally given myself permission to be successful with women in my late teens, I started hanging out with guys who were good at meeting women with the perspective of learning how I could take what I learned from these guys and apply them according to my own unique traits.

After some time, I became “good” at meeting women in my own right,

However, after I got into a relationship and it ended, as I explained before, I threw everything I had learned away, because I thought I was “bad.”

After a couple of years, I was completely rusty and honest to goodness, couldn’t even carry a normal conversation with a woman that I was attracted to over the phone. Even something that I used to consider so simple such as approaching a girl I found attractive on the street and getting her number was now perceived as a hair’s breadth short of miracle.

In addition to being rusty, like I said before, my ego had taken all that I had to attract women that was unique to me and locked them away so I had no idea what was even attractive about me to the opposite sex.

Thus, I became once again terribly insecure and nervous around women I found attractive.

When, as a part of my self improvement process I decided to get this area of my life handled, (not realizing that I already had it handled but my ego hid the knowledge I had from me), things now were A LOT more difficult.

How?

Well, just like everything else in my friggin’ life, I now approached my “women problem” as a science project and began to read all these books, listen to CDs and the like that told me how to behave, what to do, what to say, how to act, etc.

Soon enough, EVERYTHING I did, EVERY step I made, and EVERY word I said in regards to women was now CONSTANTLY measured in my head against the material I learned to make sure I was doing things right.

Alas, my ego soon created another system of criteria with which it would use to measure how successful I was allowed to be with women.

The label of being “successful with women” became a prize that was to be bestowed to me by my ego only when I finally proved worthy. It was made as the Holy Grail of achievements and put on this huge, lofty pedestal that would, as time went on, prove literally impossible to reach.

Success with women was made into another hard, tortuous task by my ego.

As you can tell, things didn’t go too well for me.

First and most importantly, the real ME was taken out of the whole equation and replaced by an intellectual system. Thus, I was never in the moment and always in my head trying to figure things out for what to do or say, and how to act.

Since I had based who I was on my intellect and had absolutely no faith in the REAL me, my behaviour was now based on a bunch of theories and observations written by a bunch of self proclaimed “dating gurus.” All my natural abilities were completely hidden from me so that I was now a shadow of myself when interacting with women.

My interactions with women were soulless and robotic and women, the intuitive beings they are, could immediately sense that something was off about me.

I am completely embarrassed to say that I often came off as weird, insincere, and sometimes, downright creepy.

Having no connection to my core, I was at the complete, utter mercy of my ego as to how I was supposed to behave. Being completely off center and ungrounded and completely disconnected from the ebb and flow of things, I was constantly trying to “calculate” my next step.

Oftentimes, I was a complete nervous wreck, and because I was always trying to “calculate” the right thing to say, I was often stilted, nervous and tongue tied.

Then, the more I saw myself doing this, the more I material I would delve into to solve the problem, and the worse the problem would get.

I was basically trying to put out a fire by adding more fuel to keep the fire burning.

To make things worse, though I knew that I needed confidence to be successful with women, I never could quite get it because my ego had all these rules and stipulations on how it was to let me be confident.

My ego based confidence on factors such as how much information I had and how perfectly I was able to apply this information. Yet, most of the time, I could never apply the info I learned “perfectly” enough according to my ego’s standards so my ego would tell me that I didn’t have the right to be confident and I would remain insecure.

If I was interacting with a woman and I did something “wrong” or things didn’t go perfectly, my ego would then deem me a failure and tell me I had more studying to do in order for it o allow me to be confident.

When guys who were good with women told me all I needed to do was be confident, I couldn’t wrap my head around the whole matter. To me there was a whole complicated system behind it and I wasn’t allowed to be confident because I didn’t match the “specifications” that would make one confident.

I felt I wasn’t allowed to be confident, and when I was told to just be confident. I couldn’t bring myself to do it because I felt that “something” was blocking me.

That “something” was that intellectual system. Remember, though it was part and parcel of my life, I was totally blind to the fact that I was using it.

The concept of being confident was completely alien to me and thus, success with women was few and far between.

Since my ego made “success with women” this lofty, intellectual goal similar to man traveling to Mars, or time travel, I was led to believe that it was this hard, complicated process. Thus, from the time I was 26 to very recently, I mostly attracted women that I had to work hard for, chase and pursue, rather than women who genuinely like me for me right from the beginning.

If I did wind up attracting a woman who liked me from the beginning, my ego couldn’t fathom me having success with someone that it didn’t personally figure out, so I would wind up sabotaging the whole thing because it was deemed “too easy” and I didn’t work hard enough for it.

Hence is why a woman during this time could literally throw herself at me, and I’d STILL miraculously find some way to ruin it. Boy do I have stories that I will not share here.

Also, when I was able to behave “normal” enough for a woman to actually go out on a date with me, my “normalcy” didn’t last for too long, because my ego would be freaking out telling me I hadn’t earned the right for me to be successful with women yet, so my date couldn’t possibly go right, or it would have me in my head trying to figure out the right things to say at the right time fearing all along that if things didn’t work out its whole system of understanding women would have to be figured out all over again from scratch.

You can guess that 99% of my dates didn’t go well. There was so much at stake that I was a stilted, nervous debacle.

Think about how any women would react when out with a weirdo who had all this going on in his head.

Yup…it was a complete freak show starring yours truly being the “freak.”

Sad but true.

Ladies and gentlemen, I was a mess, a total and true mess, and I apologize for anyone who had met or known me during that time. I’m sorry you had to see me in a state like this. I was in a literal hell and didn’t know how to find my way out.

It’s funny that the tool that I was actually trying to use to lead me out of the hell that I was in was what was keeping me there.

On the Brink

The dangerous part of this whole time period was that many times, this intellectual system that I looked at my entire world through would start to make me question the very things about myself that one normally takes for granted.

At times, random thoughts would enter my head suggesting I do things that I normally wouldn’t think of doing that was beyond my character, or beyond anything I would ever consider doing under normal circumstances.

These weren’t inspirational thoughts that would encourage me to step beyond my comfort zone and go after my dreams or stand for some cause nor were they any thoughts containing ideas of some innovational product or concept that would change my life and change the world.

Oh no, I didn’t have it that easy.

Because my ego not only felt that everything I had needed to be proven, but also everything I didn’t “have” needed to be disproved, it threw everything and the kitchen sink at me in terms of things that I needed to analyze to prove or disprove.

For instance, I’d hear about some heinous crime or act done by someone, and all of a sudden, a thought would sometimes come to my head saying, “How do you know that you’re not capable of doing something like this? You shouldn’t have it this easy in life where you don’t have to overcome a problem like this. You don’t have the right to say you’re not capable of doing something like this because you haven’t worked for it. Since you haven’t struggled to be the way you are now so you don’t deserve to be free of this problem. The only way you’re worthy of anything you have in life is to struggle for it. You haven’t proven yet that you’re not like this.”

Since I thought that that little voice going off in my head was actually ME, I would immediately go into my head in order to analyze things and prove that I wasn’t capable of committing something like this because I DID NOT want to be associated with such a crime or act. I was afraid if I couldn’t disprove this, I had to accept it as true, and I DID NOT want that.

This went on for just about every area in life. My health was brought to question where I’d hear about someone suffering from some disease and the thought would rise up questioning my worthiness of being healthy and free of this disease because I didn’t have to struggle to overcome this particular disease to “earn” my health.

There would then be this nagging fear in my head that I just may get this disease. So of course, I would go into my head to try and prove to myself I was worthy of being healthy and not susceptible to the disease in question.

All these random, bizarre thoughts that conflicted with who I knew myself to be were thrown at me by my intellect because it wanted to be seen as the God of my being, where it wanted to take credit for everything about me.

Thus, everything was brought to question from my morals, my integrity, my values, and even my sexuality by throwing conflicting thought all so it could be disproved and I could consider myself “worthy” of what I had.

In addition to these kinds of thoughts, I would also get thoughts of the worst possible scenarios happening to me, all with the expectation that I was supposed to disprove them.

I would sometime literally spend hours if not days in my head worrying whether I could disprove this or that thought that conflicted with who I was for fear that it might be true.

Or I would spend hours upon hours trying to analyze the negative scenarios that were thrown at me hoping to disprove their possibility of happening.

Other times I would spend time worrying whether I did a good enough job disproving these thoughts.

Sometimes, I would be so tense trying to disprove all these thoughts that were coming at me to make sure that they weren’t true that I would get severe headaches and experience pain in other parts of my body.

Now, imagine me going out into the world, trying to effectively live life and be successful when something like this was going on in the back of my head.

Before I go on, I want to say there isn’t anything wrong with questioning every aspect of who you are, because in many cases, who we think we are has been dictated to us either by society, or our parents, or our peers, and without challenging them, we blindly accept them as true, though in reality, it may have absolutely nothing to do with are true, core selves.

A person has reached a pivotal point of growth in his life when he can sit down, look at every single aspect of his life and who he knows himself to be and CONSCIOUSLY make the choice as to what he’s willing to accept because it resonates with his core or reject because it really doesn’t suit him at all.

I read a story of a transformational coach who once literally sat naked and decided whether wearing clothes resonated with him or not. He went and did this for just about every aspect of his life in order to make sure his life was something he chose from the core of his being rather than something that was blindly accepted.

This is a very powerful thing to do IF you’re coming from the right place. In the example I just gave, the person was coming from the core of his being, and his actions were based on a love and respect for who he was. He had such a love and respect for himself that he wanted everything he surrounded himself with to reflect that.

I on the other hand was not coming from a place of love and respect for myself but rather a place of disdain for oneself. While this person was connected to his core, I had no idea who my core self was so depended on my intellect to save me from being a horrible person. Because of this, there was this belief that I constantly had to prove my self worth and how worthy I was as a person since I never felt I was good enough.

It’s no wonder I really didn’t achieve much during these years. I remember trying to do certain things but my mind would be somewhere else, trying to maintain the integrity of who I was.

It’s a true wonder that I didn’t have a nervous breakdown, and truth be told, I believe that if things changed, I would’ve suffered that fate and wound up in some mental institution.

I thank God that I was able to somehow hold onto my sanity and didn’t wind up snapping.

The Illusion

This was the whole Illusion in probably every aspect of my life. I had the front of a person who was on a path of self improvement, but in reality, all I was doing was gathering knowledge. This gathering of knowledge for the most part didn’t improve the quality of my life in any way.

Why?

Because really, my sole purpose for gathering this knowledge was because I was hoping that it would somehow convince my ego to allow me to be great. Yet, the more knowledge I acquired, the more tied down I would become, so I would search again, looking for the magic pill.

I was truly in a comatose state, year after year, repeating the same pattern over and over again but getting nowhere.

Imagine a scenario where you’re in a pitch black room where punches are thrown at you from everywhere, and since you can’t see where the punches are coming from, you don’t know how to defend yourself.

Observant people would tell me, “You think way too much,” or “You’re making this way more complicated than it really is,” but I really didn’t see it that way. To me, this was the only way to be. I was locked into a pattern but didn’t know I was.

It’s sad how we as human beings have this amazing ability to deceive ourselves.

I was like one of those people who was a member of a cult whose leader promised his followers that he would take them to the “promised land” of riches, wealth and power, and even after still being mired in misery and poverty after all these years still had a blind faith that he was still going to do it.

I often wore this mask of positivity because I felt, despite all overwhelming evidence that I wasn’t getting anywhere at all, I had faith that this system was going to eventually lead me to the Promised Land.

That was my life, false hope after false hope.

What’s worse, there were days here and there where for some reason or another, it seemed as if I had achieved everything I was looking for, because I’d feel so confident, validated, happy, at peace, centered, and whole. I’d be in this flow where I knew what to say or do from moment to moment without even thinking about it. The future just seemed so bright and my mind was effortlessly open to endless possibilities.

In these rare times, I would think to myself, “How could I have lived any other way?” I felt as if everything had been figured out and the hellish life that I was living before was finally behind me once and for all.

Freedom I felt, was finally mine.

Yet, something would happen in one way or another that my ego would interpret as a “failure” and I’d be right back in that endless loop trying to figure everything out and looking for the permission to be successful, confident, happy, etc.

Having had a taste of “freedom”, I would try desperately to get it back, but was only met with struggle, resistance and frustration. My ego, being back in control, saw this state as such a huge deal that it made it literally seem impossible for me to get back into this state. It now attached all these additional rules and regulations of how to get back into the state which left me “struggling” once more.

I truly felt like a slave who escaped and found freedom only to be captured and returned to bondage once more, or a slave who had a vivid dream that he was free only to wake up and find himself still in bondage.

It really felt like a cruel joke.

To me, it made no sense to live through life continually stifled, frustrated and living far below my potential when the prospect of things improving were made to seem totally impossible, especially when I KNEW that there was a better way to live. I sometimes felt that if the prospect of things improving were that abysmal then why not just end it all?

It truly was a lonely time, where I was so isolated from who I was, unable to fully express who I was or my will, and cut of from my very own God given internal resources and treasures that I never really felt that I was fully participating in the world at large. I continuously felt like a bystander, wanting to play but unable to join in the game. It really felt as if something else inhabited my body and the real me was out to lunch somewhere.

The Other Side of “Self Appointment”

Through this whole time, what I didn’t realize was that I was missing a very important part of the equation when it comes to self appointment to greatness.

Though I learned at the age of 20 years old that I can give myself the right to be great and live the life that I wanted to live rather than continue to pursue the futile task of seeking permission from others, I didn’t realize that I was STILL seeking permission from another “hidden” entity: my FALSE self, otherwise known as the ego.

The problem was that this false self that I was identifying with was thought of as the real me.

Here’s the sad truth that I didn’t realize and most people don’t really know: MOST people walking around the planet identify with a false self that’s built on as many factors as there are people walking around on this planet such as, how much money they make, how popular they are, how many records they’ve sold, how many girls they get, how many people they can beat up, etc, etc.

My false self that I was identifying with was my intellect and my ability to be “right” and figure things out.

Anything that proved my ego wrong but would’ve have improved my life IMMENSELY was seen as a threat to my ego and had to be discarded. Having its system proved wrong was tantamount to death for my ego since its very existence was predicated on my intellect, hence my running around in circles trying to find a “solution” to the life I wanted through the pursuit of knowledge that wasn’t a threat to my ego.

Most people do the same thing, buying all these material things, pursuing money, pleasing others, etc or whatever thing their egos base their images on in order that one day, their egos will be satisfied enough to give them that permanent feeling of greatness and self worth they desperately crave.

Take it from me, don’t bother wasting your time because it’ll never, ever, ever, ever work.

No matter how much you acquire based on what your ego tells you, it’ll never be permanently satisfied. As long as you’re identifying with your ego, you’re going to be running around like a slave seeking something from it that it can’t and will not EVER give you.

I had absolutely no idea that underneath all that constant running around and searching that there was my REAL, true core self that was mine for the taking. All I had to do was let go of my ego and allow it to be.

Me continuing to identify with my ego and seeking permission from it to be great was what kept me from connecting with my true self. Hence the complete wisdom of the preacher and my cousin who told me that what I was seeking I already had.

Greatness was already mine for the taking WITHOUT the permission of my ego.

At the core of our being, we were all created in God’s image. God used a part of Himself to create us, so we are thus part of the Divine, or the Infinite.

Therefore, we are great simply just because we exist. Our existence in and of itself is complete proof of our greatness.

It was a truly humbling fact that I didn’t need to write a dissertation, or read 35,000 books, or accomplish the twelve Herculean tasks or do any type of work that my ego said I had to do to earn my greatness, because I was already great without having to do these things.

How completely utterly silly is it to seek permission to be something that we already are?

We don’t even have to try to be great, it just comes naturally. Whenever you find yourself trying to be great know that for at least that moment you’re identifying with your ego which has no sense of your inherent greatness so it has to acquire external things to feel great.

Sometime early in our lives, we created a false self called our ego based on some failure we experienced and ever since that failure, our egos enslaved us and had us running around trying to compensate for that perceived failure.

When we’re identifying with our egos, there’s always this sense that’s something is missing and we have to go outside of ourselves to fill this void.

The whole lie of the ego is that it could equal the greatness of our infinite selves through the acquisition of finite things, whether it is praise from people, popularity, money, material possessions, etc.

The thing is the finite can never ever be used to create the infinite. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. They’re on two separate planes, kind of like the whole lesson we were taught in school that two parallel lines will NEVER intersect (oh boy, there I go being “intellectual” again.)

Hence the whole psychosis of me using my ego to try and get something that it could never give me.

When we’re connected to our true, core selves, there is that calm, centered, whole, powerful feeling of presence that we experience that can be had ALL the time when we decide to let go of our egos. This is The Viable Alternative.

I was on the right path at the age of 20 years old when I decided to stop seeking permission from others to be “great” and give myself the permission, but I still had a ways to go. Though I had escaped a room that I was locked in, I was still was trapped in the building.

For me to escape the whole building, I had to learn that I had to stop listening to my false self about how great I was and accept the fact I was already great just because.

New Heaven and a New Earth

It’s interesting because my whole self improvement journey has shifted. Now, rather than trying to become great, I am now through self awareness in the process of peeling off the layers of who I am NOT so that the greatness of who I really am can shine through.

I realize now that there is nothing can be added or taken away from me, because the Creator has already created me perfect and complete, lacking nothing. My job is just to get out of the way and allow my greatness to BE.

It was a LONG time getting to this place but I cannot tell you how peaceful it is to not feel that you’re carrying the whole world on your shoulders.

Admittedly, I do have a whole mess to clean up after years of substituting my core self for some fabrication that pales in comparison, but actually, it is a joy as I discover daily through self-awareness old, limiting ways of being that I followed by habit but truly doesn’t represent who I am. It’s so freeing to know that these limiting ways of being I was accustomed to is not who I really am.

Now that I am aware how great things really are, I REFUSE to settle for less.

I confess that when I used to spout about the importance of connecting to the core of our beings, I really had little idea of how to do this, because I was still trapped in my own debacle. I can confidently say now to anyone reading this that the best way to connect to your core is to stop identifying with your ego by accepting that you don’t need anything outside of you to be great because you already are without trying.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Parting Words

So, how did I finally arrive at this wonderful conclusion and insights that have made the difference between night and day in my life WITHOUT the aid of meds, shock therapy, a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist?

Well, there was actually a spiritual connotation underlying all that I had gone through that’s way beyond the scope of this whole site for me to explain, BUT there’s a trail of insights and paradigm shifts that I had that, bit by bit, brought me out of the muck I was trapped in.

Stay tuned for part 3 and I will share everything.

Held in bondage

You see, right from childhood, I always wanted to fit in, I always wanted to be accepted, and to achieve all these lofty goals, I felt I had to have other people’s approval in order for me to have ANYTHING worthwhile in life, including a positive self image.

During my elementary and middle schools years at private school, I was called a nerd and a loser, and was expected to dress and act a certain way. If I wore anything or did anything that seemed “cool”, or if I tried to assert myself in any way, I was immediately smacked down and told to stop trying to act “cool,” that it wasn’t working.

It kind of reminded me of the stories you read of what ethnic minorities went through during the pre-Civil Rights Era in America (and in many other countries).

In some areas, when they would try to rise above a certain level of society that was designated for them, their lives were threatened, laws were passed, or whatever they were using to help them uplift themselves was taken away or destroyed all in order to keep them in their “place”.

Truth be told, that’s how I felt, especially when I started hitting puberty.

Now I would look at all the “popular kids”, and noticed how they got invited to all the parties, they had all the friends, girls would have crushes on them, and they were looked upon as cool.

I thought to myself, if only I could be “accepted”, I could have those things as well. All I needed was their permission, and I could be cool as well!

So, I sought their acceptance the only way I knew how:
• By following them around whether they liked it or not (and no, they didn’t like it)
• By being overly supplicating and “nice.”
• By laughing at their jokes whether they were funny or not.
• By being seen but not heard.
• By putting up with their verbal abuse, afraid that if I tried to defend myself, they would get angry and never accept me into their circle. (My goodness).

Without the aid of any drugs like crack, I somehow convinced myself that this “master” plan would catapult me into the cool, popular circle, which in turn would grant me the permission I needed to receive what I thought were the finer things in life.

If you have even an ounce more insight than I did, you would see that this never worked. I only got more abuse, was called a loser more and more, and told to go away, that I was unwanted, and not welcome. I was told to hang out with the other losers where I belonged (lol).

Also, if I got one compliment, or someone “cool” was being nice to me, it would totally make my day, because it looked like I was finally getting their permission to be cool. Yet, if I got one insult, it would ruin the rest of my day, because my goal then looked more difficult to achieve.

It was truly a MISERABLE existence, and when I left private school, I came to develop a passionate HATE of private school and all the people that I had gone to school with, a hate that I carried with me into my late teens.

I felt that hating them and wishing death upon all of them was adequate revenge.

What I probably hated more than them was myself for allowing myself to be treated and abused in such a way. In my mid to late teens when I felt a bit more accepted, I frequently looked back in shame, anger and embarrassment at my previous servile condition which haunted me.

I felt like a former slave, looking back and despising his former condition of bondage, and wondering why he allowed himself to be in that condition in the first place.

The Curse of Puberty

To make matters worse, at the tender age of 12, I started to develop what would become by the time I was 15, severe cystic acne (not too far away from the person you see in the pic above). With that came the taunts from girls and guys alike of being called “ugly,” “pizza face” (hahahaha….pizza face) and the like.

Well, you can guess that at a time when guys my age became attracted to the opposite sex, starting right when I got into high school, I was also becoming attracted to the belief that I was ugly.

Girls who had any semblance of physical attractiveness seemed to give all the attention to the guys who were good-looking, and I didn’t see myself as one of them.

As such, it was fine for me to find a girl attractive and admire her from afar, but God forbid I would ever have the gall to think I had a chance with any of these girls. I felt I didn’t have the right to think that way. To me, the attractive girls were the reserve of the good-looking, cool guys, so I just stayed in my “place.”

It wasn’t only that I saw these girls as out of my league, but worse was that I felt that I didn’t have the permission of the “cooler”, more “beautiful” people to think I had a chance with these girls.

To me, to get the girls, to be cool and to be popular, you had to have the approval of the right people. What scared me half to death was the thought of being told that a girl that I wanted to try to talk to was out of my league and then subsequently being ridiculed and laughed at.

To avoid the potential embarrassment and subsequent depression, I didn’t bother even trying at all.

My absolutely fragile ego could only take so much abuse.

The thing was, it didn’t extend to only girls, it also extended to the clothes I wore. I liked dressing nice but I sometimes I feared wearing certain clothes because people might just tell me that I wasn’t cool enough to wear them.

What’s interesting is that even after my acne cleared (almost miraculously) by the time I was sixteen, and I started to lose the physical awkwardness that comes along with puberty, and have what could be considered “cooler” friends, the scars still remained.

I still was haunted by the labels that were placed on me that ate away at my self esteem and I still was driven by behaviours that I adopted to compensate for these labels.

There was a world of things that I wanted from tangible things like girls to the intangibles like self-confidence, the ability to hold my head up high, the ability to feel good about myself, the ability to express myself, etc, that I felt was closed off from me because I didn’t have the permission to attain them.

Once again, I felt it was in the hands of others to give me.

I even tried to openly put myself down and call myself horrible things like “ugly,” or a “loser” in front of others in hopes that they will correct me and tell me things that I wanted, or rather, needed to hear. Things that I wanted to believe in myself but wouldn’t, couldn’t, or didn’t.

Needless to say, for just about all my high school years, that boost I so desperately wanted from others never came.

Things Fall Apart

As I started to see that I wasn’t getting the approval that I felt that I needed to attain the things I wanted, at the very end of my high school years and into the first two years of college I began to grow very, very bitter, and in between (and sometimes during) my bitterness I began to go through a lot of depression.

I felt as if I were a victim of the world, a person who was on the outside looking into a world that he desired to enter but was kept back by the world at large.

I had a “me against the world” mentality, where based on evidence from my past, there were things I wanted but the world didn’t want me to have because it wanted to keep me down and for me to not get ahead.

I saw my life as one big injustice that was directed towards me, and I became a person who was full of hate, anger, bitterness and resentment (more on this all on another blog in the near future).

I began to start “predicting” things that would go wrong in my life and lo and behold, they would subsequently go wrong. This was clear proof that not only mankind wanted me to fail, but the “gods” wanted me to fail as well.

I soon just started to see myself as a person who just had“bad luck.”

The Great Depression

As things continued to go wrong, and the “conspiracy” against me continued to play out, towards the second half of my sophomore year in college, I began to slide into a deeper and deeper depression where I stopped caring about anything, or anyone, including myself. I began to sleep all day and stopped going to class.

Some days, when I would muster the strength to climb out of bed and walk to class, I would stop in the middle of the street and think to myself, “What’s the point?” and turn around and go back home and go to sleep.

I figured if the world and the invisible powers that be insisted on pissing on me, I was no longer going to allow myself to be their “fool,” so in response I was going to just lay there (literally) and do nothing.

As time passed, I continued to feel sorry for myself and spiral deeper into depression. I began to ask myself if it was just better to end my life, because I wasn’t going to get anything out of it anyways. I even thought about the method with which I was going to end my life (don’t worry, I’ll spare you the details).

Feeling so painfully miserable, I began to set dates of when I was going to do the “final deed” if things in my life didn’t improve. Truly, something had to give, because the pain I felt hurt so bad and I couldn’t live with it anymore.

This, I felt was going to be my big defiant act to the world to show it that I wasn’t going to fit into the “role” it had for me.

Well, fortunately, doomsday never came, and at the suggestion of my mother, I started to see a therapist on campus.

I went to the therapist thinking that there was something wrong with me, and that I was clinically depressed. I went hoping that he would subscribe to me something that would “make it all go away.”

The therapist, after hearing several sessions of my travails, woes and sorrows, laughed off my claims of clinical depression, saying that there was really nothing wrong with me. He said what I was experiencing was just the symptoms of adolescence.

He nonetheless went ahead and prescribed me some depression medication, but assured me really that there was nothing clinically wrong with me and was just experiencing “growing pains.”

“The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow”

Well, lo and behold, after I started taking the meds, I actually started to feel better.

It also helped that the school year was winding down, the weather was getting warmer, and though my grades were totally utterly pathetic, I was looking forward to going back to New York and seeing my friends and family.

I took the meds for about a month, discontinuing them for good shortly after I returned home, and when I realized that my depression wasn’t going to come back.

It was after this that something remarkable slowly started to happen.

I slowly started to change my attitude towards life for the better.

First off, I realized that I went through probably the worst depression of my entire life where I seriously contemplated ending my life, and…..I came out on the other side alive and unscathed.

I felt I was stronger and wiser for having been through something “major” and actually surviving it.

Because of this, I decided that I was no longer going to be a prisoner of my past. Rather, I resolved to learn from it and move on.

What’s more, I started to look at the people around me who had the things I wanted, from confidence, to a great sense of style, to money, to success with the ladies, which aren’t what you would exactly think of as “deep”, except maybe for confidence, and this time, rather than look at these things as the exclusive reserve of the privileged few, I started to wonder what these things would look like on me.

I noticed that there was something unique about everyone in the way they individually expressed the things I wanted, with each person having his own style.

I realized that me being a unique individual just like everyone else, my desires would appear differently than those that had what I wanted.

Rather than get depressed about my individuality, I actually started to get inspired. The fuel of the inspiration was that I was curious as to how my own “greatness” would manifest in contrast to the others I had admired.

The shrink that I had seen in school was right, there wasn’t really anything wrong with me. The meds seemed to be more like a placebo to help me see that really, I didn’t need anything outside of myself to be happy. All I needed was a change of attitude.

Appoint Thine Own Self

Originally uploaded by shaman.

My inspiration and desire reached a point that I no longer wanted to sit and wonder anymore what my greatness was going to look like. I also saw that no one was going to give me the “right” to go and attain these things.

I became so inspired that I decided screw everyone else, I was going to give myself the permission to attain the things I desired.

I didn’t realize it them, but this was the beginning of The Viable Alternative, where one steps out of The Illusion, and begins to erect the pillars which leads to one allowing his own individual greatness to be expressed through him on all levels.

Now granted, I truly, at the age of 20, had little idea of what self confidence was REALLY about, or any idea of really what one’s TRUE self was, and I wouldn’t find out for YEARS. At this time in my life, I thought that the “self” involved how one expressed himself “appearance wise”, from fashion, to style, to his physical looks.

I had no idea there was a deeper dimension to this and me not knowing this would bite me in the a** later on, hence the reason for part 2 of this blog, to explain the consequences of that.

But hey, give me a break, re-read the preceding paragraphs and look at where the hell I came from. However flawed my “model”, this was my first attempt at looking to my own self to gain self-esteem and stop being a victim.

This was a step in the right direction where I realized that one could appoint his own self to greatness rather than wait for someone else to do it for him. I realized that everything I wanted in life was mine for the taking because I said so, regardless of anyone else’s opinion.

As a result, I was able to let go of the hate I had towards my former “captors,” (more on this on another blog). Since I no longer saw them as holding me back, I no longer saw myself as a victim, because I put the power of my destiny in my own hands.

As a matter of fact, .without all the hate and the anger (well, okay, there might have been some left), I saw this new self discovery as my true, big “Eff you” to those in my past who told me I was nothing and to the world at large (the Illusion) which tries to tell people who and what they could aspire to.

I decided that I was no longer going to consciously support that nonsense.

Rather, I took some words my mom told me in my toughest times and decided to live by them, that I was “the best and deserved the best.”

Since I now started to see myself as deserving the best, rather than expect the worst like I did in my “previous life,” where I ultimately got what I expected, I decided that I was going to do the exact opposite and expect the best as well.

What do you think happened when I did this?

Well, I started to get all these “lucky” breaks in my life. I’d get all sorts of discounts in stores without even asking for them. I would get in places for free that were charging, opportunities began to fall into my life, people would automatically like me upon meeting me, and my dating life transformed.

In fact, a year after my “great depression,” I looked back at what I had gone through couldn’t believe it was the same person.

Truly, to this day, I see that great depression that I had gone through as one of the best things that happened to me. It helped transform my life at the time. It also taught me how important a role attitude plays in the quality of one’s life.

It’s funny when I hear people talk about the Law of Attraction and how they first learned it in the movie, “The Secret,” because I discovered it years before it came out without even reading about it in a book or hearing about it on television.

I learned from the School of Hard Knocks, that you if you expect the best, you’ll expect the best.

The Spotlight is Now on YOU

Okay, ‘nuff about me, how about you?

I’m sure that there are people that you admire. You may admire them for the things that they have, the things that they have accomplished, or the things that they’re able to do. These people touch, move or inspire you in some way or another.

My question to you is, have you ever thought to yourself that there are great things you can do or accomplish that are unique to you?

Have you ever realized that the things that the people you admire have that you can have them too, but tailored to your own specific tastes?

You don’t have to sit in longing, jealousy, anger, or sadness wishing that you had what certain people have, or could do what certain people could do, or be what certain people could be, thinking that all these things are closed off to you.

I lived that way for years, and look how “happy” I was.

I was the perfect, miserable bastard for it.

The Illusion tells you that you have to fit a certain standard to acquire the things you want, and if not, you’re sh*t out of luck. It will then dictate to you the things that you’re “allowed” to aspire to or settle for.

I say b.s., get up now, tell The Illusion and those who perpetuate it to kiss your a**, and give yourself the permission to go and get these things for yourself.

Appoint yourself as having the COMPLETE and UNADULTERATED right to attain the exact things you want for your life.

Most people lives of quiet desperation because:
1. They’re waiting for someone else to give them the right to go and get what they want.
2. They’re not even aware of the fact that the power is within their own hands to appoint themselves the right to be successful.

I was waiting for YEARS for someone to give me the permission to acquire the life I wanted not only because I wasn’t aware that I had the power to do so myself, but also, I wasn’t aware of my own unique greatness. I was too busy envying the “greatness” of others and putting myself down for not being great like them.

The reason why you admire certain people is because what they’re able to do, be or have touches, moves and inspires you in some way. To this I pose to you this question: why not be touched moved and inspired by YOURSELF and your possibilities?

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with having some figure you admire, whether it is a public or a private figure IF this person inspires you to bring out your own unique greatness. However, I believe it becomes unhealthy when you put this person on a pedestal and live vicariously through this person, thinking that they’re better than you.

Next time you’re watching TV, the constant perpetuator of The Illusion, and you see some show that is glorifying the fabulous lifestyle of your favourite celebrity, rather than drool or turn as green as a Christmas tree with envy, see yourself as worthy of the same exact lifestyle. Ask yourself how you would cater such a lifestyle to your own specific tastes.

Then, decide which aspect of your unique greatness you’re going to give to go get it.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Next time you see a story on TV or read in a magazine about an inspiring success story, rather than get depressed and call yourself a loser, decide what type of success you want to create that would touch move and inspire you, and give yourself the permission to go get it!

Next time you see someone walking down the street with an attractive man or woman, don’t start hating on the person or yourself, tell yourself you’re going to attract the same thing that’s compatible with you because you have a, b and c.

Again, this is The Viable Alternative.

All the great movements in the history of humankind was started because a person or a group of people decided that they weren’t going to let their oppressors dictate to them how they were going to live, They instead, decided what they wanted and gave themselves the permission to go and get it.

You can see these examples in the American Revolution, to the most successful slave revolt in history that took place in Haiti, to the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.

What is it that you desire that you don’t consciously or unconsciously think you’re worthy of?

Whatever that is, the only person that needs to tell you that you’re worthy of it is YOU.

You may be thinking that you have to become this or that BEFORE you appoint yourself to success, but I say, “You’re as good as it gets.” This may depress you because you may think that you have to become more like this or that person, but actually, realizing that I was as good as it gets was one of the most freeing revelations.

Who you are, in all your individuality and uniqueness, is already worthy of greatness. You’re not going to physically transform into something new like the Incredible Hulk, so rather, accept the very fact that greatness is meant to be expressed and lived as you are right now within your own skin. You as yourself are worthy of it right now.

When I was able to do this, I was able to see myself acquiring better things in life and receive them.

The Illusion

What irritates me to no end is how people worship celebrities, public figures and other people they admire while being totally oblivious to the UNIQUE greatness that lies within them.

They live in this world, The Illusion, where they see this un-navigable chasm that stands between them and the “great ones” who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths.

If people are able to see their own unique greatness, they’ll get so inspired that they’ll throw aside the shackles of mediocrity and appoint themselves the right to navigate across that chasm that will bring them into the land of the “great ones.”

If they can’t navigate across the chasm, they’ll construct a bridge, and if they can’t construct a bridge, they’ll create greatness right where they stand.

Such is the way of The Viable Alternative where when one appoints himself to greatness, he won’t let anyone or anything stand in the way of the subsequent path he has to take.

Self-Appointment in a wider context

As I wrap this up, bear with me for just a few more minutes as I share with you some thoughts.

It interests me how I hear many ethnic minorities not only in America but around the world explain that their inferior statistics compared to the ruling majority is due to the fact of them being “kept down” all these years.

Now, historically, it may be argued that most of these groups may have a good point considering the violent injustices they’ve experienced for generations under their oppressors, (I’m sure you’re noticing how I’m conspicuously avoiding naming names because my intent is not to have a political or ethnic debate here), and also the policies that were carried out explicitly for that purpose.

It may even be argued that some of the policies in place now aren’t fair and don’t help their situation and that those in power may or may not be doing enough to help those who have been socially and economically disadvantaged for generations to “catch up” or get ahead.

However, I’ve often asked myself, what would happen if those who don’t like their position said “Screw the government, I’m going to find my own way ‘by hook or by crook.’”

What if more people said, “The government should be doing more but I’m not going to wait around for them, I appoint my own self to go and get what I want?”

I’m in no way pointing fingers, but I believe if more people accepted the fact that the government may not step in where they believe they should, right or wrong that may be, and said that they’ll find their own way, I believe the demographics of many groups around the world would change.

Hey, many slaves in the past knew their masters weren’t going to free them, so they took their freedom into their own hands and made a run for it.

I look at all the underdeveloped countries like Haiti and the ones in Africa where their governments greedily refuse to implement policies to develop their nations the way those did in Asia, Europe and America.

These governments refuse to provide steady electricity, they refuse to provide a solid infrastructure, they refuse to pass laws encouraging entrepreneurialism and investments and they just flat out refuse to make themselves useful in any way to foster growth in their countries.

As messed up as this is, what if the citizens of these countries decided to stop complaining, accepted that their governments are not only NOT helping matters, but that they may NEVER help, and banded together to provide these things for themselves on a macro level?

I don’t think a model for this has ever been used by developing nations on national level, but perhaps this may be THE Viable Alternative to the models of the Western World, Asia, and China?

Hey, just some thoughts…..

Parting Words

Thanks for reading.

However, I have a confession to make: this definitely is not where my journey of “self-appointment” ended. There were more PAINFUL lessons about self appointment that I was yet to learn as I would later find out.

Stay tuned for Part II of this blog where I share with you this very important and often overlooked lesson.

Photo Credit

It was the year 2008 and a good friend of mine invited me to come to a birthday party of one of his friends.

When I got to the birthday party, I met up with my friend who invited me and he introduced me to the “birthday girl.”

It turned out that the birthday girl and I had been a part of the same business organization some years back.  I began to tease her about not reaching a certain, “coveted” level in the organization, knowing full well in the forefront of my mind that I had not only not reached the said level of the organization, but I also had quit and was no longer a part of it.

My whole attempt at teasing her was an attempt at sarcasm and a way to make fun of my own self since I had not done any better than she did.  As a matter of fact, when she in turn asked me why I also didn’t reach this position, I confessed I was only joking with her as I did no better my self and wound up pathetically leaving the entire thing.

Well, there seemed to be no hard feelings about my busting her chops and I laughed it off and forgot about the whole thing.

Okay, so I thought there were no hard feelings, but I was about to find out otherwise……

A couple of days later I’m talking on the phone to my friend who had brought me to the party.  In the course of the conversation we talked about the party we went to and the girl who had invited him came up.  He then shares with me how she felt I rubbed her the wrong way with what I had been saying to her.  She felt I had no right to bust her chops the way I did because she didn’t know me like that to do so.  She even went on to say that she would’ve preferred that he didn’t bring me.

Needless to say, I was shocked and kind of hurt.  First off, I really didn’t mean any harm.  Like I said, my busting on her really was a self-deprecating attempt to make fun of myself, since I never was really successful myself in the business in which I was teasing her about not reaching a certain level.

Second off, with alcohol usually being the culprit of someone spewing random ridiculousness, I couldn’t have imagined myself of having been obnoxious, because I was stone cold sober and had absolutely nothing to drink.  At the time I was doing a 30 day health regimen which required that I didn’t drink any alcohol for its duration.

Third, I thought to myself, “Why would I go out of m way to purposely piss off the birthday girl whose party I was at?”

Lastly, knowing my “sordid” past of running off at the mouth and offending many a person, which earned me a reputation of being tactless and utterly rude (a label I truly hated having), I really thought that I had overcome that.  It hurt that with all the work that I felt I had done on myself to be a “nice guy”, that I was still hearing this from people

After I got off the phone with my friend, I got down on my knees and prayed to God.  I came to Him in a desperate, frustrated almost angry manner saying, “After all this time why have you STILL not changed me?  Why can’t you just help me change and overcome my faults?  Look at this, I’m still offending people!  When is this going to stop and when am I going to be allowed to grow past this?”

When I finished the prayer a few minutes later as I was trying to go about my business, I sensed the Lord trying speaking to me.  No, it wasn’t in one of those manners where thunder sounded from the heavens, the clouds parted, then a bright light from heaven shined directly on me with my hair blowing in the wind, with a deep baritone voice sounding from the sky saying, “IKE MY SON.  I’VE HEARD YOUR PRAYER……”

Photo Credit

Com’on now, you’ve been watching “The Ten Commandments” one too many times.

In truth, it was that still small voice speaking to my heart with wisdom that I couldn’t have possibly known myself.  It was very clear, and He said, “The only reason why you’re upset is because someone is disapproving of you.  Relax, let me be in charge and let me do My work.”

Wow, really profound…

This insight was further cemented by a book I read a few months later called “Walking with God,” by John Eldredge.  In the book, the author describes a prayer he prayed to God that went like this, “God, show me how I’m doing, how You think I’m doing, and how I’m really doing.”

In essence, what I was taught at this moment was that the things that I thought were wrong with me and was beating myself up over were not actually what God thought was wrong with me.  Moreover, the things that I thought that needed fixing in me were based on what I interpreted other people’s perceptions to be of me, and may not have necessarily been what I needed to work on.  God had an ENTIRELY different perspective what I actually needed to work on.

In life, people have placed many labels on us, but we have to ask ourselves, are they based on TRUTH or are they just based on the person’s own idiosyncrasies and erroneous perception of life?  A teacher in grade school may have called you an idiot, which you may have taken to heart right up to this very day, but most likely, the teacher was in a bad mood, frustrated, etc, and was lashing out to let off some steam.

Other times a person may have put a label on you because they see the same quality in themselves, and because they don’t like it, they judge you about it to make themselves feel better.

I mentioned in other blogs that I had a bad temper as a child and up to my teenage years.  My mother would point this out and would assert many times that I had to get my temper under control.  As I got older, I did just that and learned to control my temper with a desire to get my mother’s approval and guilt that my mom saw me as person out of control, which I had believed myself.  What actually shocked me more, was that though I saw myself deep down as an angry person, just about all my good friends saw me as this calm person and would tell me, despite my protests, that they could never imagine me losing my temper.

Yet, whenever I would get into a disagreement with my mom and I raised my voice just one octave, not even out of anger but just out of the spirit of the discussion, my mom would immediately jump on the fact that I was raising my voice and say that I needed to get this “anger of mine” under control or else I will give whatever woman I wind up with trouble.  I, of course would immediately go on the defensive and get all self conscious.

Moreover, if I ever had a situation where I had a legitimate reason to be annoyed with my mother or angry, and I expressed it in a legitimate way the way someone is supposed to when he or she is upset or angry, it was again thrown in my face my “issue” with anger and how I had to get it under control.  My even experiencing anger was judged and criticized, and I would wind up feeling guilty and getting defensive.

Well, one day, I was on the phone and my mom had asked me to wash my dishes in the sink and I told her I would get to them when I got off the phone.  Needless to say, she came back five minutes later while I was still on the phone and blew her top about the dishes not being done.

This was a very revealing moment for me.

I thought to myself, “Wow, if I had lost my temper in the same way that she did just now, I would’ve been given all these criticisms about my ‘bad temper’ and how out of control I was, along with all these grave predictions about my future.  Yet, she does it and it’s alright?  According to the way she judges anger, what does this situation say about her?”

My mind also when to those moments where I felt I had a right to be annoyed or angry because of a way I may have been wronged by my mother, but was judged, and I realized that my mom, in a similar situation, would’ve acted in anger herself.  So then, why was I being judged for this?

It was from this moment on that I realized all these labeling that she had put on me was a bunch of b.s. used to control and manipulate me.  I mean, her accusations were more coming from a place of judgment from someone who had no right to judge.  Her judgments were more about her than they were about me.

By the way, God bless my mom.  She truly is a loving, nurturing, caring, very giving woman.

It was at this point I gave up any remaining guilt about any anger I had.  I also let go of any fear of expressing anger, realizing that anger is a perfectly normal emotion to express as long as it’s expressed in a healthy way and not letting it control you to the point of going out and killing five hundred people.

Now, this is not to say whether I did or didn’t have anger issues.  The issue with my mom wasn’t my anger at all, it was rather more about judging and manipulating me to cover her own insecurities.

This goes to show that what we may think is wrong with us may not actually be what we need to work on because they may not be based on any actual truth.  They just all form a part of The Illusion of what we think we are but really aren’t.

Now, don’t get me wrong, we ALL have blindspots that other people can see on us but we can’t see on ourselves of things we actually do need to change.  If you hear people saying the same thing about you over and over and over again, then it may be an indicator that God is trying to tell you something and you need to look into it.

This is why it’s very important to associate with the right people whose opinions and advice you trust who may also be on their own path of self improvement and self discovery in one way or another.  People like this are quite crucial to your growth because they will notice things in you that you don’t notice in yourself and vice versa.  These people, if they’re really your true friends, will have your best interest at heart.

In regards to this point, there were definitely MANY, many times in my life where I had exhibited rudeness towards others that close, trusted friends had pointed out.  Situations that earned me the reputation of being a rude. bastard  I don’t doubt the legitimacy of many of these claims, however, the situation with the birthday girl wasn’t about who was right and who was wrong, it was a lesson that I had been going about dealing with my issues the wrong way.

I had depended on my own wisdom to work out my faults and not on the wisdom of the Creator, therefore I got frustrated when it appeared to me that I wasn’t overcoming my faults.  His lesson was that they will get dealt with in their own way, in their own time, in their own sequence.  My problem was that I felt that my “improvement” had to look a certain way, and be worked out in a certain manner.  God had other ideas.

Though we all have ideas about how we should be overcoming our faults, it doesn’t mean that we’re right.

Either way, I digress, back to the original point I was making.

The truth of the matter is that there is a bigger plan at work.  God created each of us for a specific purpose in mind for the unraveling of a bigger picture that only He knows and we’ve only received very minute glimpses of.

So, since that’s the case, wouldn’t God, an Infinite Being, have a MUCH better idea of what about ourselves we need to work on than some person who not only was created just like you and me, but also has his or her own insecurities that he is more interested in hiding by judging you to make himself feel better than he is interested in telling the truth?

Wouldn’t God know better about what’s wrong with you than someone who’s just trying to be hurtful and/or let off some steam?

If this person had been more interested in telling the truth, he would’ve FIRST removed the plank in his own eye BEFORE telling you to remove the speck in yours.  In fact, it is because of the plank in his own eye that he can’t clearly see the speck in yours.

Basically, there are three perceptions we have to contend with:

• What people say that is wrong with us
• What we think we need to work on
• What we really need to work on (God’s perception)

Like I said before, many of the labels people put on us our based on their own limited perceptions, yet, we take what they say as gospel.  Many of the things that we think that is wrong with us are based on guilt of not living up to someone else’s standards, the standards of society, etc, and may not actually be what needs fixing.

Also, many of the things that are actually wrong with us that we’re aware of may actually what may need “fixing” at this point.

What do you mean by that Ike?

Think about when we were little kids and we may see our parents fixing something and we innocently want to help them so we may hand them a tool they don’t really need or we do something to whatever they’re working on only to make it worse.  The truth of the matter is, our parents knew what they were doing, we didn’t, so it was best to stay out of their way.

It’s the same way our Creator.  We were created with a magnificent purpose in mind.  When we don’t have Divine guidance, many times we adopt a harshly judgmental attitude towards ourselves and go about working on the wrong thing about ourselves, getting in God’s way of the work He wants to do on us.  He may have an ENTIRELY different plan of what needs working on with us because He sees us in an ENTIRELY different way.

I mean, sure we all have faults, but maybe, just maybe, the faults that we think need to be worked on yesterday because they’re so shockingly bad may not be what God wants to deal with just yet.  It could be that what we think of as so appalling, God may see as no big deal.

We all need to stop being so hard on ourselves.

Instead, by making an effort to surrender to God, Source, the Divine, (or whatever you call our Creator) and letting Him guide us, He will invariably lead us to know what REALLY needs working on, and will empower us to change what really needs changing.

This is The Viable Alternative, when we experience growth according to the purpose of our core being.

Hope this helps.

Photo Credit

Note: If you haven’t read the first part of this blog, click here.

The Illusion

The experience I had with “self improvement” (or lack thereof) speaks to the issue that all of us face.  We’re unable to create what we want for our lives because frankly we’re unable to realize The Illusion that we’re all trapped in.

In The Illusion, it SEEMS as if we’re going in a particular direction (e.g. it seemed as if I was trying to improve myself), or it may seem as if we’re going after a particular goal or that we are being a certain way.  On the surface things may look that way, but in actuality something entirely different is going on below the surface such that the way things seem aren’t what they really are.

Hence The Illusion: we’re deluded into thinking what we see in terms of our behaviours, goals, actions and desires are really what they are.

Because we’re not aware that what we think is real really isn’t, we become increasingly frustrated when we don’t get what we CLAIM we desire through the actions we think we’re taking.

In life, we usually deal with three types of desires/goals etc.

• There’s our conscious desires.  These are our desires that are on the forefront of our minds.  They’re the desires that we’re aware of that we have, e.g. saving up to buy a home, financial goals, etc.  These goals/desires mask what’s really going on underneath.
• There are our unconscious desires.  These are our REAL desires that are masked by our conscious desires.  There are the desires which give rise to the actions that we take.  They’re based on the experiences we had in life, many stemming from our childhood.  They’re based on a false “self” of who we think we are.  Most of us are totally unaware of these desires almost all the time.
• Lastly, there are the desires that stem from our CORE being.  These desires are based on who we really are, not the false “self” that we created that’s based on our past experiences.  These desires are based on the fact that we are Divine beings put on this earth for some purpose, and our desires and actions stem from that SELF.  Sadly, most people will die never getting in touch with the desires of the TRUE self.  These are our ONLY desires that are NOT a part of The Illusion.

We’re not getting what we want because of the discrepancy between what we think we desire, what we’re actually going after, and what we REALLY desire.

Are you sufficiently confused yet?

In my case, I thought I wanted to improve myself, but I was actually trying to impress my mother.  All this hid what I really desired from my CORE, which was simply to be a good person.  The discrepancy between these three things, and also the fact that I was completely unaware that there was a discrepancy, guaranteed me not getting not only what I thought I wanted, but what I really wanted from the core of my being.

This is like planting apple seeds and when an apple tree sprouts, you then rage and shake your fist against the gods in heaven as to why they hate you so much for not giving you an orange tree.

I’m sure there’s been a lot of fist shaking and raging in your life, because there still is in mine.

You may be thinking, “What type of idiot can’t tell the difference between an orange seed and an apple seed?”  Well I have news for you: you, me and the rest of the world most of the time think we’re sowing one thing, when in actuality we’re sowing something else, and we are thus surprised at what we wind up reaping, expecting to have reaped something else.

Get it?

Think about the person who works hard all his life to graduate medical school and be a doctor.  What if in actuality his father used to call him stupid all the time when he was young and him becoming a doctor was a way of trying to prove to his father he wasn’t stupid?

On the surface, he went to college, studied hard, graduated with honours, took his MCATs, got accepted to medical school and got a medical degree.

However, that was all an Illusion.  What all those actions REALLY were was him trying to prove his father wrong, thinking that by achieving his goal he would finally achieve happiness, or feel smart.

Interestingly enough, when the dude finally becomes a doctor, to you, me, him and the rest of the world, he may seem as if he’s carrying out his duties as a doctor, that’s The Illusion, but in actuality, his actions will be more aligned with his desire to be smart.  His desire to be thought of as smart, which in turn is actually an overcompensation of him really feeling he is stupid, will supersede his duties as a doctor and from time to time, may adversely affect his career as a doctor in one way or another.

Until you become aware of your unconscious, underlying desires in life , they will continue to control your actions and give you an outcome that doesn’t match up with what you consciously say or think you desire.

We all live inauthentic lives to one degree or another where we take actions that are neither compatible with our  conscious desires nor our core being.

Our actions most of the time are based on past experiences rehashed in our minds that we play out over and over and over again.  Thus we never truly live life in the present, but rather we live from our experiences.

We’re not able to live The Viable Alternative, which would mean to create from the desires that emanate from our core being simply because we’re not aware of what we really want.  We’re not aware of what we truly desire because are hearts and minds are blocked by The Illusion and we all sadly think it’s real in one way or another.

It reminds me of when we were kids, and we would be running around the house making noise.  Now, if our parents were to come home in a good mood, they may simply give us a warning to stop making noise, or if they were in an extremely good mood, they may even laugh at our gesticulations.  However, Heaven forbid if one or both of our parents came home in a bad mood because they got screamed on by their boss, or got caught up in traffic on the way home.  Most likely, we were on the receiving end of a sound beating.

Now on the surface, it would look like the parent was disciplining us, and they would claim so.  However, what was really going on was that the parent was in a bad mood and hit us to let off some steam.

Please, I’m getting flashbacks, someone give me a hug….

Anyways, really, it’s these inauthenticities that exist in all areas of our lives that keep us from creating the lives that we would truly want.  We react to experiences and our emotions rather than act from who we really are.

I also recall the many times I marveled in disgust when I go to the gym and I see a person who has been going to the gym for a number of years the same fat, sloppy mess that he was when he first started.  On the surface he takes the time to go to the gym, pay his gym membership, and work out, but if so, why is he still in such horrendous shape?

Well, if you look closer at his actions (barring him having some type of thyroid disorder), he’s doing EVERYTHING to guarantee that he doesn’t reach his goal.  He works out the WRONG way, and refuses to ask anyone for help, he probably eats like crap and doesn’t want to discipline himself to eat what’s healthy, and not only does he smoke cigarettes, but he probably lights one up as soon as he leaves the gym.

I recall quite a few times someone approaching me at the gym and asking me what he needs to do to get in “good shape”.  When I tell him, he walks away shaking his head, obviously overwhelmed, saying he could never do that and with a firmer resolve to stick to what WASN’T working.

What the hell?

“The hell” is that his intention was never to get in shape in the first place, even though he has convinced himself it was, and even if he complains that he’s not getting in better shape despite the fact he’s going to the gym or he engages in verbal masturbation by telling others who are in great shape that he wished he looked like them   What he may actually be doing is trying to prove to himself (or most likely someone from his past) that he’s not lazy, hence, to him, going to the gym on its own is enough to satisfy that goal.

There may be a million and one other reasons all resulting in one thing, him not reaching his “said” goal to get in shape.

What’s more, like I said before, is the fact that he completely unaware of what he’s doing.  He’s imprisoned by The Illusion, and as long as he remains there, not only will he continue to spin his wheels, but he’ll NEVER learn what he truly desires from the core of his being.

Oh…. and that goes for ALL of us.

In order for us to break free of The Illusion we need the tools of awareness, honesty and personal responsibility.

By awareness, I mean being aware of our actions and whether they line up with what we truly want in life from the core of our being.  For example, a person may have a desire to become a millionaire and delude himself into thinking that he’s taking action towards that goal.  However, when you take a closer look at his actions, you may see that they’re actually making him poorer.  Simply put, this person has no awareness of the underlying reasons for his actions, and will stay in scarcity until he becomes aware.

When you become aware, are you able to admit to yourself what you’re doing or do you become scared, pull the wool back over your eyes and shout the same complaints that you did before you were aware?  By the way, if you choose to CONSCIOUSLY pull the wool back over your eyes, you’re now choosing to live a lie, and let me tell you, choosing to live a lie costs a lot more than embracing the truth.

By honesty, I mean that after you become aware of the discrepancy between your actions and your “desires”, you become honest with yourself as to what you TRULY desire in your life.  You may realize that the thing you were originally “claiming” to desire but failing at may actually be what you really want.  Now that the lights are turned on, so to speak, you can go about bringing your desire about the right way.  Or, you may realize that you may not want that thing whatsoever and you’re now able to determine what you really desire.

Whatever the case, you’ve now taken the path of The Viable Alternative because by being honest with yourself, you’re now living and creating a life that comes from the core of your being, and are no longer fighting the phantoms of The Illusion.

And lastly, by personal responsibility, I mean after becoming aware of your mismatched actions, and honestly determining what you really want, taking responsibility to deal with those issues that caused you to pursue the underlying goal or action that was hidden below the surface of the goal or action you claimed to be taking.  If you don’t, I guarantee you that it’s going to come back and bite you in the ass once more, and sabotage success for yourself in the future. Dealing with these underlying issues may involve simply just letting go of some false belief you held about yourself, accepting something about yourself, or even receiving some therapy or counseling.

Personal responsibility is also taking responsibility in doing what’s needed to bring your desires into fruition.  That could very well mean confronting your demons and stepping out of your comfort zone.  Many people choose to stay unaware and refuse to be honest with themselves because to them, it ultimately means that they would have to assume responsibility to create the life they really want for themselves,  and that is too daunting a task for them.  Thus, they choose to live a sub-par life to what they can really have.

When I had the conversation with my mother and realized that I wasn’t genuinely seeking to improve myself but rather, I was seeking my mother’s validation that I was a good person, I had to be honest with myself as to what I really wanted.

To me, it was a no brainer, I really did want to be a good person who had good character and integrity.  Now though, I was able to see myself with clearer eyes, not from the eyes with which I thought my mom saw me.  Thus, I was now able to take actions that were more congruent with my CHOSEN objectives.

Now I had made the conscious decision to improve myself, I also had to agree take responsibility of letting go of the negative beliefs I had placed on myself because of what my mother had told me, I had to learn how to disengage myself from seeking the approval from my mother, and I had to learn to trust my own intuition of what direction I had to take, instead of looking for it from others.  All this didn’t happen overnight, but rather was a process, that I might add, is still going on.

I also had to take responsibility for the ugly truths that were sure to come up for anyone who chooses to embark on the path of self improvement.  Nothing prepared me however, for how UGLY some of these truths were, however, I knew if I didn’t deal with them, no one else will.

This was my own way of achieving victory over The Illusion and embracing The Viable Alternative just a little bit more.

I also have to say that just because I received this insight that changed the direction of my life doesn’t mean that the process is over.  There are still many, many, many, many places in my life were I don’t know that I don’t know where I’m being inauthentic because I’m claiming that I want one thing but actually seeking something completely different, all the while upset for not getting the results I say I want.  Shoot, you might even read about a new “discovery” I made in the near future.  All I have to say is that life is a CONTINUAL process of peeling away our inauthenticities on our path of self discovery in order to expose more the beauty of our core that has been hidden from us and the world.  It never ends until we take our last breath.

So, if you’re frustrated because your life is a mess for not reflecting what you think you want in life, you have to really ask yourself what’s really going on.

Is that goal you’re pursuing really what you want?  Or is there some whole other agenda going on that you’re not aware of?  Have you been pursuing something different all along that you haven’t been aware of?

Take a look at the actions you’re taking to pursue your goals, and ask yourself, what are they really telling you?  What are they revealing about your true intentions?

Are you REALLY married to or dating the person you’re with  for reasons other than what you’re consciously aware of?  (Hey, I’m not trying to break anyone up, I just want you to think and WAKE UP.)

How about your career path?  Why are you really doing it?  Was it an attempt to piss someone off, or prove someone wrong, or gain acceptance?  Are you really on this path for the reason why you say you are?

Be brutally honest with yourself.

If the answer doesn’t come to you, put the intention out there for it to come to your unconscious mind, to the Universe, to God or who or whatever you believe in.  Believe me, as the guy who thought that nothing worked out for him, you WILL receive an answer.

If you take a look below the surface of The Illusion, you’ll find a whole other world out there that’s been running your actions, behaviours, desires etc.  It’s a world that’s made up of your false beliefs, lies, fears, superstitions, etc that you accepted long ago without truly knowing what you were doing.  In fact, this is part of The Illusion as well, because it doesn’t represent you either.

In any case, by uncovering the lie that had been blinding you all this time, you’re now more capable of finding the truth which is expressed from the core of you being, and live and create a life that is truly and authentically YOU.  This is The Viable Alternative.

And I promise you, that along the way, you will get some REAL self improvement out of it.

Hope this helps.