Manage To Engage | Businesses Grow When People Do

How many times have you heard someone say, “curiosity kills the cat?” That is the way our society depicts curiosity — it’s a risk. So, even though we’re born innately curious, society quickly teaches us to stop. As a result, we tend to overcorrect and we transition from curious beings to fearful beings. That’s how most adults operate — chances are that’s how you, reading this right now, operate. But the simple fact that you’re listening to this show means that your conditioning hasn’t completely covered up your curiosity, so that’s a great first step towards living life with real curiosity. And you’ll learn more about how you can start doing that in this episode. By the way, this series is taken from the final session of the CLEAR Thinking course, an epilogue that explores the importance of real curiosity and its role in how we think. If you want to take this extra time at home as an opportunity to start living more intentionally, you can find the full 11-week coaching seminar at clearandopen.com. I’d l

Last week, we started a conversation about curiosity, real listening, and asking questions, and we established that good managers don’t just look at the content of the questions they’re asked — good managers also consider the context in which a question is asked. This is an expression of real curiosity. And in this episode, we are going to look at how people express both fear and curiosity in their lives — and, critically, how that expression relates to the ways in which they engage with life... or don’t, as the case may be. This episode is an excerpt from the final session of the CLEAR Thinking course, an epilogue that explores the importance of real curiosity and its role in how we think. If you want to take this extra time at home as an opportunity to start living more intentionally, you can find the full 11-week coaching seminar at clearandopen.com.

This is the first episode in a four-part series exploring the critical importance of curiosity, how you can start approaching life with real curiosity, and how you can help the people you manage do the same. This conversation is an excerpt from the final session of the CLEAR Thinking course. If you want to take this extra time at home as an opportunity to start living more intentionally, you can find the full 11-week coaching seminar at clearandopen.com.

In the last two episodes, we discussed how your identity consists of your conditioning — and why the conditioning that most of us received was inadequate. So, why do we cling so tightly to this conditioning, even institutionalizing it? Because, deep down, we’re afraid of losing who we are. This is a reasonable response from your lizard brain, but it’s holding you back from evolving your consciousness, which is really my goal with Clear and Open. The pursuit of consciousness is the lifelong pursuit of deconstructing who you are and what you believe so that you can cast away all that isn’t true — it’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s necessary if you want to break free of the prison you’ve built around yourself and live a full life. I also want to remind you that this episode comes from the CLEAR Thinking course. If you want to take this extra time at home as an opportunity to stop floating through life and start living intentionally, you can find the full 11-week coaching seminar at clearandopen.com. I

We’re all trained that, if we can learn to hold and process information better, we can become a more intelligent human being and, as a result, become successful. This conditioning puts us in the situation where we perpetually feel that, if we can just get one more piece of information, we can solve our problems. But this has no reference in reality — and this shared delusion is causing way more problems than it’s solving. Today, we’re going to look at an alternative: how consciousness, as opposed to intelligence, can be used to solve just about anything. I also want to remind you that this episode comes from the CLEAR Thinking course. If you want to take this extra time at home as an opportunity to stop floating through life and start living intentionally, you can find the full 11-week coaching seminar at clearandopen.com. I’d love your feedback. http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1234688298 (Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on Apple Podcasts.)

We’re going to start this three-part series with something that’s probably become pretty familiar to long-time listeners: a quick rebuke of the Western educational system. We’re going to look at how one of the beliefs and assumptions at the core of our education system not only doesn’t help us but actually sets us all up for lives full of overwhelm. Pretty much every single one of us experienced this same conditioning as a child, but it’s not doing us any favors now that we’re adults who don’t have to regurgitate information to pass tests. This series shares the final session of the CLEAR Thinking course, which focuses on the role of Consciousness and Conditioning in CLEAR Thinking. If you want to take this extra time at home as an opportunity to stop floating through life and start living intentionally, you can find the full 11-week coaching seminar at clearandopen.com. I’d love your feedback. http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1234688298 (Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on Apple Podcasts.)

In the last episode, I introduced the concept of engaging with disengagement (to both you and myself, at the time). And that’s not just a step towards getting what you want — that process of inquiry, that working on why you’re not working on something, is what you really need. The journey is the destination. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to see that when you’re still early in the journey, but my goal with releasing this coaching call is to guide you towards that perspective. Although I can lead you to the water, you still have to choose to drink. Or, at the very least, ask yourself why you’re not drinking when you’re so thirsty.   ---   Also, I’m excited to announce the next upcoming live course called “Meditation For Awakening: How To Get With Reality” that begins April 16. Meditation has never before been so popular, but when things get popular they tend to become dilute. Meditation offers more benefits than I can name here. It reduces stress, can eliminate anxiety and depression, and when done corre

Over the last two episodes, we’ve been talking about the internal conflict we feel between growth and comfort, between “I don’t wanna” and “I wanna” — and we’ve established that these conflicts are man-made, not some inherent aspect of being. The easiest way to see the conflict for what it is, two sides of the same coin, is to develop a healthy obsession with whatever you’re conflicted over… but developing that obsession is not, in and of itself, an easy thing to do. However, there is a path of inquiry you can follow to get there: you can get obsessed with curiosity, you can get engaged with disengagement.   ---   Also, I’m excited to announce the next upcoming live course called “Meditation For Awakening: How To Get With Reality” that begins April 16. Meditation has never before been so popular, but when things get popular they tend to become dilute. Meditation offers more benefits than I can name here. It reduces stress, can eliminate anxiety and depression, and when done correctly gives you X-Ray vi

In the last episode, I asked you to consider those moments when we feel like there’s an internal conflict between growth and comfort — between the ‘I wanna’ and the ‘I don’t wanna’ — a misleading conflict brought about through social conditioning. We’re told to muscle through these conflicts with self-discipline. That’s a big part of the hustle mentality that’s taken over a lot of the conversation in the entrepreneur space over the past few years, and that’s probably something you were told by parents and teachers growing up. You just won’t want to do some things so you need to develop the discipline to do them anyway. That’s not really the best way to do something well, though. That’s certainly not the best way to learn, to grow, to become masterful at something. So, in this episode, I ask you to consider how you can achieve growth through healthy obsession, as opposed to struggling self-discipline, and how you can start to develop a sense of healthy obsession in the first place.   ---   Also, I’m exc

Every single day, you are likely presented with an internal conflict — do I do the thing that’s hard but rewarding or do I do what’s easy?  Over and over again, we weigh the relative advantages and disadvantages of growth versus comfort. It can feel like two different parts of ourselves are competing for our attention, and we’ve been trained that it takes self-discipline to overcome the part that just doesn’t wanna do it. But what if that social conditioning, that version of self-discipline, is a narrow and limiting way to perceive this internal conflict? Today, I offer you a new way to engage with the perceived conflict between growth and comfort.   ---   Also, I’m excited to announce the next upcoming live course called “Meditation For Awakening: How To Get With Reality” that begins April 16. Meditation has never before been so popular, but when things get popular they tend to become dilute. Meditation offers more benefits than I can name here. It reduces stress, can eliminate anxiety and depression

To close out this series on How Everything is True, we’re going to make CLEAR Thinking more practical. And to start, I want to break down the term “CLEAR Thinking” a little further.  CLEAR Thinking is thinking that is critical, logical, evidence-based, analytical, and reality-based. This is serious, productive thinking that actually changes you. This is a valuable skill because literally every single thing you do begins is a thought; thinking is the software that dictates how your biological hardware operates. So, as you practice CLEAR Thinking, you are better able to control the very thing that controls your actions. And it really is a practice. That’s why, after you listen to this episode, I challenge you to try the exercise that the students in this class participated in: create an argument in favor of something that you don’t think is true, like the earth being flat, and commit to it. Really put yourself in another person’s shoes. This will help you meet the people you manage — including yourself —

Over the last two episodes, we’ve established the value of being willing to advocate for any belief, even if that means putting yourself in the shoes of someone who subscribes to a truth that deviates from your own. Today, we start to examine the questions that you can ask yourself to practice this particular brand of self-inquiry. I’d love your feedback. http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1234688298 (Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on Apple Podcasts.)

We start today’s episode with another student advocating for an idea that they consider to be untrue — and this one’s a doozie. So, why are we doing this? Why are you about to hear someone make an argument in favor of a flat Earth? It’s because I want you to understand that what we were taught about the value of strong convictions is misleading — being convicted in your beliefs and being willing to advocate for them passionately isn’t a sign of good character or a considered perspective. And if you’re rigidly stuck in one point of view, a point of view that you likely developed as a kid before you were even conscious of having a point of view, then you will just keep butting up against reality until, inevitably, you either suffer or surrender. I’d love your feedback. http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1234688298 (Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on Apple Podcasts.)

This series on How Everything is True builds on a lot of what we discussed in the previous four episodes on How You’ve Been Conditioned to Think Unclearly. So if you haven’t listened through that or need to refresh yourself on what Transjectrivism is, you might want to go back and listen through those because we will be looking at truth through a transjectivist lens throughout this series. These series are both parts of the CLEAR Thinking course, which is now available online at clear and open.com.  CLEAR Thinking, by the way, is reflective and independent thinking. It teaches you to use your ability to reason and it makes you an active learner rather than a passive recipient of information. And when you learn and practice CLEAR thinking, you can better control the thinking that is controlling you. That’s why this episode begins with everyone’s favorite libertarian making an argument in favor of the minimum wage — because changing the way you think about and perceive truth requires practice. And if you’

The rapid rise of extreme subjectivism — which we’re still experiencing, and it’s really impossible to tell when we’ll reach an inflection point — has led to the rapid death of critical thought. We can see it everywhere, especially on social media. So, today, I offer you an alternative to either objectivism or subjectivism, a philosophy I call Transjectivism. I’d love your feedback. http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1234688298 (Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on Apple Podcasts.)

In the last episode, we traced the historical development of how Western society shifted from extreme objectivism to extreme subjectivism. It’s easy to adopt a subjectivist or objectivist perspective on the world, and both perspectives will provide you with the comforting illusion of understanding reality as it is, at least for a while — but both perspectives are inherently flawed and life doesn’t support false beliefs for too long. So, in this episode, we’re going to look at how this conflict is still developing today so that, next week, you have all of the context you need before learning about Transjectivism. I’d love your feedback. http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1234688298 (Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on Apple Podcasts.)

We spend a lot of time memorizing people and events and dates in school, even some big ideas, but we rarely learn about what those things actually mean to us — and that context, that perspective, can be quite meaningful and useful. So we start today’s episode with a look at the history of objectivism in Western society and how the ideological homogeneity seen in many societies ends up creating these illusions of absolute truth, illusions ultimately used to secure power and control people, that still permeate through the collective unconscious to this day. Then we’ll look at how absolute objectivism was eroded by systems of belief that favored subjectivity, and how the conflict between the two presents itself both in modern culture and inside our heads. I’d love your feedback. http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1234688298 (Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on Apple Podcasts.)

This series on how you’ve been conditioned to think unclearly comes from a course that I started last year called CLEAR Thinking. My goal with both the course and this series is to show you how to wake up to reality and begin to understand how your mind works...and how it doesn’t work so well. This series begins by examining the tension between objectivity and subjectivity that occurs as a result of both the nature of the human brain and cultural conditioning. Your mind is constantly filtering its experience (an inherently subjective activity) to validate what it already thinks is true (an assertion of objectivity), resulting in a positive feedback loop of, well, delusion. So how do we get around that? The answer to that question is the core of our discussion on today’s episode. As an added note, we start this episode by talking about managing with inquiry. If you aren’t familiar with this concept or you need to brush up, you can go back to episode 236 for a crash course on what Managing With Inquiry means

Life is your teacher, and life doesn’t care about how happy you are. Life doesn’t care about how comfortable you are. Life is fundamentally about your resistance to change, and it is conspiring with the universe to push you towards embracing, looking at, and healing your resistance to change. So, if you are experiencing significant suffering or pain, pay attention — that’s life providing feedback and trying to teach you. And as I have mentioned throughout this series, you are not qualified to turn your nose up at the solution a teacher offers if you don’t try it. So that pain is an invitation to get honest with yourself about your resistance. The earlier and more actively you do this, the less pain you will have to experience. After you’re done with this episode, I recommend going back to episodes 206 through 209, which is a series focused on embracing being tested. It will provide you with a useful frame through which you can view the challenges that life presents to you, and that is a valuable tool for n

Your job, then, as a person who wants to grow and evolve, is to learn how to track your resistance and make yourself optimally helpable. That means tracking your excuses, tracking your BS, tracking your laziness, and most importantly, tracking your fear. This is true if you are a student, an employee, or anyone engaging in the practice of self-management. So, today, I invite you to start earnestly examining the iceberg between where you are today and where you want to go. I’d love your feedback. http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1234688298 (Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on Apple Podcasts.)