Giving up my freedom?

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
~Benjamin Franklin

How do I find my freedom?

How do I find my purpose in life?

A lot of people ask that. In our club fearless we have lots of questions and answers and it's great fun to live and play at that level of intellectual freedom and inquiry.

Instead of being "safe" and asleep.

One question recently was, “How do I find my purpose in life?” So I can live a purpose-driven life? Where do I find it?

Purpose is whatever you say it is when you wake up in the morning.

It is not to be "found" anywhere.

It is a creation.

And purpose doesn't carry over from day to day. You have to create it fresh when you wake up. And that's good news because it puts you in complete control.

If we all had a purpose that we "found" in a dream or in our hearts or under a mossy stone in the forest, we wouldn't be creative.

We wouldn't get to do the most fun thing on the whole planet! And that is to create and then produce our own purposeful project we love working on that day.

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My favorite Ayn Rand quote:

"Robin Hood is the man who became a symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don‘t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors."

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Recently a friend told me that his coach had asked him to check out the last lie, of the seventeen lies. To read the last of the 17. And so he contacted me and asked me what the last of the seventeen lies was. So I sent it to him. And it occurred to me that I might want to read that lie again to myself, so why not drop it into my blog. Then I'll have to read it again when I proofread the blog. Brilliant.

Lie Number Seventeen:

We are helpless

There are lies that make news: lies told by public figures and celebrities. There are also simple everyday lies, lies told by everyday people to avoid embarrassment.

And then there are lies to the soul.

A lie to the soul runs deeper than any other kind of lie. It is like a river. Like a river designed to chill something deep down inside us.

It's a lie whose unconscious mission is to kill the spirit. To remove the passion, and to deny our uniquely human power.

The lie is created to convince us that we have no power. That we are helpless.

But it is not true that we have no power. The truth is, we have so much power, it sometimes scares us.

As Nelson Mandela said in a speech, quoting Marianne Williamson, "Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."

Because of that fear, we lie. We are powerful, but we lie and say we are not.

I, too, am a liar.

Not as much of a liar as I used to be. I don't lie as often. Not as bad. Not as deep. But still, I am a liar.

I lie to make myself feel helpless.

I lie to stay out of action.

I lie about the power of circumstances. I say "circumstances prevent me." I say circumstances and other people are more powerful than I am. I claim they are always favored over me. By as much as 20 points.

Then I turn the lying inward. I say that I am defective. So defective that I am helpless. More helpless than Neil Young at his most helpless.

Helpless, helpless, helpless.

On a dark and lazy level it seems to work for me. If I seem helpless enough, maybe someone will help me. Someone powerful. Someone with money. Someone with love.

I then become ashamed of how helpless I am.

That's when my friend Steve Hardison looks me in the eye and says, "You are in the habit of making yourself feel ashamed because it keeps you out of action. Shame keeps people out of action. You shame yourself in order to remain passive."

I am ashamed to admit that he is right.

And in the end, the "helpless" lie works. It chills the body. It works! The body curls up. The body goes to sleep. The mind follows suit.

Because I am a human, the main racket I run in my life is convincing myself and others that I am a victim. That circumstances hold me back. That other people don't appreciate me. They don't thank me enough. They don't pay me enough. They don't understand me.

In this practice, I am not alone. In this practice, I am joined by everybody else. All of us do this. Some of us do it all the time. Some of us do it some of the time.

The way out for me was to finally allow myself to listen in on my own conversations. To become a total eavesdropper on my own talks to myself. I became more and more aware of what I was doing to myself. Which felt good. Because awareness was the way out. It was the way out of the deception. Because awareness will always provide an opening for action.

The goal of self-honesty is just this awareness. Awareness first of the lies, and then awareness of the truth. I can say that there are 17 lies we tell in life but, underneath, there is just one lie. All lies to the soul are the same lie.

The lie is: we are helpless.

The truth is: we are powerful

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My coaching prosperity school is filling up...email me if you want to be in it: stephendchandler@cs.com.  They always fill up and I always turn people away. I like to keep the school small and powerful so that the word "prosperity" really means something.

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Many great people have applied to become my apprentice. Still time to get into the running, but the financial commitment is huge, and so is the time and effort you'll need to give it. Don't apply if you don't want to pay a lot of money and then work harder than you've ever worked on your career.

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Club Fearless on the other hand costs next to nothing, and the benefits are bountiful.

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There are people on this planet who have never experienced the true joy of selling.

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I will leave you with these wonderful words from Howard Thurman,

"Don’t ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Comments

[darryl]

Benjamin Franklin owned slaves, yet we consider him an expert on the concept of freedom...seriously!??!?

[Michelle Burnett]

I watched a really powerful movie recently that addresses the concept of the lies we tell ourselves in a beautifully unique way. It's called INK, a Jamin Winans film. I not only found the film to be incredibly powerful, I was also so amazed and inspired by what the creators went through to see that the film got made. Truly a beautiful example of what living FEARLESS lives looks like. I highly recommend it. There was only 1 copy at my local Blockbuster.
I hope you'll all check it out!