772 Words Later...

I started a "blog a book" project called The Art of Self Mastery. I was trying to teach and it created an argument and I stopped writing it. I can't just teach. So now I'm doing what I've been talking about today, shifting my goals around to make things work so that I don't have to argue with it anymore.

The vision of talking about self-mastery is still good. How I get to that goal needs to change though because I need to put myself back into it. If I'm not learning from it too, I won't do it.

Can I still blog about self-mastery? Yes.

Do I have to turn it into a book? Not necessarily. I could just make it another very topic specific blog.

Do I have other ideas for things I could write about that I could potentially turn into short reads or even full length books? Yeah, too many of them actually.

Can I stick with my original goal of writing down everything I've learned so far? Nope because it's too much teaching and not enough "me-ing". Can I make that a word? This goal is officially dropped.

I could take everything I wrote today around making choices and turn that into a short read.

I had an idea the other day to take the concepts of getting control over the mind, the emotions, and then the behavior, and turn that into a short read as well.

I could combine both of those shorter ideas add a couple more concepts and make a full-length book out of it.

I could make all that The Art of Self Mastery because it essentially is exactly that.

I could scrap it and start again. Not likely.

I could do all of it by writing the 2 shorter books and then combining them with a couple more concepts to make a full length book.

There are actually too many options.

But what do I want to do?

Not what do I think you wonderful people want me to do. Notice what that does. When you worry about other people, it makes you insecure and not confident in your power. Worrying about what other people wanted me to do was what landed me in so much pain to begin with. That was what created the powerlessness.

I see the connection now. I recognize the problem with that whole thing and now I shift the behavior. I don't need to go back and re-heal all the crap. It's not some gaping wound I need to deal with. It's a shift in my behavior and a tweak in my thinking that allows me to disconnect yet again from the original wound of powerlessness.

The mental clarity is helpful because it allows me to understand how the whole thing fits together. I don't use the mental clarity to give myself another wound to heal. I use the mental clarity to simply gain a better understanding of what I already know and how it's affecting me. Mental clarity is a good thing when you don't use it as a hammer, as a reason to beat yourself up and decide you're not good enough to do what you want to do. Mental clarity allows you to connect the dots, nothing more.

So, if I'm not bothered by other people, what does that do to my options, if anything?

Do I want to write all 3?

I think the blog is going to become the spot where I write about some of the things that come up with as I write the bigger book. Ahhh, here we go! Here's the clarity!

The Art of Self-Mastery is going to remain a book. The blog becomes my space to expand on the concepts that come up in the book. I've done that at times when I wrote previous books, now I'm going to make it more intentional.  Trust me, it will inform the book. The blog will inform the book instead of becoming the book.

I'm going to drop the short reads for the moment. The reason I like short reads has more to do with you the reader than it does with me. I see that now. That was what was messing me up. I love you folks, but my writing has to be about me. Right or wrong, good or bad, I can't write things just because I think they might be useful to somebody else. It just doesn't work.

It only took me 772 words to figure it out! Go me!

What I want to show you is how I twisted that around in my head. When I was posting on social media today, I talked about the idea of how to solve a Rubix Cube. Do you only look at one side of the cube to solve it? No. You have to look at all the sides. When you make choices, you have to look at all the options, not just the one that agrees with the story you're telling yourself.

This is what I did with my own thinking. When I was bought into the original story I was telling myself, it created an argument within me. To shift it, I had to be willing to let go of my own story and start to play with the ideas that were forming. I had to start seeing it from different perspectives, like one does when they try to solve a Rubix Cube.

It brought up the idea of how my perception of what my readers wanted was playing into things. It brought up the idea of short reads versus full-length books. It brought up the idea of how I was going to use The Art of Self-Mastery blog moving forward. It brought up the idea of making sure I was keeping myself in it. I can't just teach. I basically ended up having to remind myself of that this time. It allowed me to do away with the idea that I could just teach through my writing.

I couldn't have an outcome because I didn't know what I wanted yet. I didn't know where I was going to get to. I couldn't be afraid of going on what was essentially a blind journey. I had to be open to all the ideas, let them form, and see where I ended up. I took in all sides of the Rubix cube to solve the problem. I had to be open to the idea that a solution would show up. The fastest way for me to gain that clarity is through writing just like this. So, that's what I did. I took to my blog and I started to put the pieces together and here we are.

When we get stuck in the stories, it doesn't let us think like this. I've been doing the work on myself for a long time. What it's taught me is that I can be open to other possibilities. There are other options. It's taught me how to find those by showing me that being afraid of the outcome was keeping me stuck.

When you want to make a choice, any choice no matter how big or small, the outcome is often unknown. There is the outcome we think is most likely and there is the outcome that will actually happen, which may or may not be anything close to what we're imagining. When we buy into a bunch of fear around potential outcomes we keep ourselves stuck in the choice. We don't allow ourselves to move forward because we're arguing with an outcome we don't have control over.

If I had tried to control the outcome, I would have either been stuck in my choice or I would have ended up trying to write the short reads first. The idea that I should write for my audience would have won if I were focused on the outcome. That's old behavior related to the powerlessness that I experienced earlier in my life. That attempt would have failed. It wouldn't have worked. It would have been another trip around the loop. Is that okay? Sure, yes, it's fine. Learning how to manage it just allows me to avoid that extra trip. Do you see that?

I got some really good clarity around choices today that I will put in this new book. What I want to share with you here is that doing what feels right to you won't necessarily be okay for everybody else. Somebody that reads this may be mad that I'm not writing the short read on making choices because they've decided that they want that content because it would help them. Somebody else may not like that I wrote the blog at all. Will she ever shut up?

When we make all our choices about other people, we end up really unhappy. This is a lesson that I learned in a very, very difficult manner. I don't recommend that path to anybody. As a matter of fact, I want to make sure that you don't have to repeat what I've done. I've learned this to teach you how to do it so that you don't have to struggle the same way I did. By teaching it to you, I gain further clarity around it. It's a perpetual cycle that keeps me in almost never-ending content. It works out really, really well for everybody.

It's okay to do your own thing. It's okay to make your own choices. It's okay to live your own life. It's okay to be okay. Start trying to pay a lot less attention to the outcome and what other people think. Pay more attention to what you want and how you'll feel while you're doing what you want. It's not selfish to be happy and okay within yourself. It's necessary.

Love to all.

Della