You can read books alone. You can journal alone. You can talk out loud to yourself. You can listen to your own voice recordings - a snake eating its tail for eternity.
It’s lonely and can be masturbatory. I need other energy involved to create something new. I need other people to make it worthwhile and to help me realize whether I’ve been sharpening the right weapons to get what I want.
I’ve done so many things alone. I’ve taken self-paced courses (and never started self-paced courses…). I’ve explained the stuff I’m reading and listening to to my friends to mixed appreciation. Hell I’ve definitely written here to crickets about what I’m researching, mulling, and experimenting with.
I’ve even joined big fat courses with hundreds of people in them that were so expensive that I borrowed money from my friends to be a part of them. The level of hype can be exciting but it often doesn’t lead anywhere.
Have you done these sorts of things ever? They kind of suck. I mean — they’re great. You get some stuff out of them, sometimes, and they help — sometimes. But I’ve also felt like a cog who no one cares about and like I got nowhere with myself trying to follow the course’s structured lessons that just didn’t have much to do with what I was experiencing. I’ve wished that I had someone doing it with me.
Small coaching groups and in-person experiences are far and away the best format. When a group of people gets together to refine themselves and it’s small enough that you matter, it’s not only much more effective but it feels so much more impactful. EVEN IF I never spoke to the people again, and I’ve kept friends from many of these experiences for years both in-person and online, I know that working on myself to be better or improve something works best with other people there doing it with me. It’s pretty fundamental to humanity to work best with a human touch.
In Listen Up 2 we’re upgrading self-reflection by doing it as a group and healing with the group. We’re upgrading listening by practicing with other people.
One example:
Have you ever journaled about the same thing several days in a row? We may use this as part of Listen Up 2 this weekend but I’ll drop the idea for you anyway because it’s too useful not to share. You get to watch your petals unfurl so to speak, revealing things layer by layer until you really get a feel that you’re finally letting go. Often the first layer feels numb or barely scratching anything, but doing it again reveals something.
Here’s what you do:
Think of something you say you want to do but don’t do. Write about it, free-flowing, for 5-10 minutes, trying not to edit but to let your words just get out on the page, and repeat the exercise with the same prompt for the next 2 days for a total of 3. Remember that every day is fresh and you might think you’ll repeat yourself but I promise you’ll actually be surprised.
There’s a twist I’ll be doing with the Listen Up crew…but this will be good enough to get a taste for what we’re offering to be a part of here at Sam’s emporium for a more fulfilled and connected mankind to self and other.
For more effectiveness, read your journal entry out loud to someone and tell them their whole job is to listen and say only “thank you” at the end, no matter what.
Or you could join the container and make it alchemical with us for the 4 week/4 Saturdays group that is already interested in this. Meaning if you went, “I don’t know who I could ask to listen to me read this for 3 days” or had a gut reaction of fear when you thought about it, I have a spot for you to do it already. Things always work better when the people want to be a part of it and let me tell you a secret about fear - you can feel it and do it anyway. If you want something and you’re afraid of it, that’s a direct line to something magical.