In the 3 or so years I’ve now been studying Human Potential, it is my absolute belief that you will never learn to experience a sense of sustainable inner joy if you do not pursue your deepest truths.

So what does Deepest Truths mean? Quite simply, this means pursuing your own path, no matter what those around you are doing. This is the path of self-directed evolvement. This is the path of the New Human.

When you want to do something, and it contradicts what those around you are doing, do you do it, or do you stay in line with the heard, listening to and enforcing yours and the groups fear response?

Inspirational People act in spite of the fear. Inspirational people become so Unique, their brilliance and energy is obvious to all who come near them. Charisma, X-Factor, Genius. Labels abound for those human beings who seem to be such rare gifts.

The good news, is that they have got nothing that you haven’t. You both share the common element which contains all of this extraordinary creative power, which can be unleashed in your own completely unique way: The Unconscious Mind.

The difference is, those inspirational players have learned to harness this more than most. How do they harness it? Simple. By following where it takes them.

This is purely, and simply, what Human Potential boils down to in the end. One question. Do you, or do you not, follow where the unconscious mind tries to take you?

Few people do, and those same few people are the ones enjoying unparalleled quality of life. Influencing and inspiring people and living lives others can only dream of.

Here are the barriers that stop most people from following the nudges of their unconscious mind.

Denial or “I don’t know”

When you say you don’t know what you want, you are lying to yourself. You absolutely do know. When you say you don’t know, you are using your conscious mind to build a wall, blocking the communication from your unconscious mind. Denial. As long as you stay in denial, you are forever doomed to live life disconnected from your dreams. Your unconscious mind can not send through something you don’t want to hear. Until you can truly be honest with yourself, and admit that you want something bigger than what you have now, something that most likely scares you to think about, you will remain stuck. To some people, even admitting they want something is terrifying. Which brings us to the next barrier.

Fear

Fear is the ‘big’ one for most people. Fear comes along to tell us that we are stepping into new territory. That where we are going we have not been before. The unconscious mind is ALWAYS trying to bump you into new territory. And seriously, can anyone honestly consider that a bad thing? What if human beings had NEVER moved beyond this response? We would be extinct, period. There was another type of mammal alive about the same time homo sapien was evolving, which died off because they refused to leave the areas they were in. The bottom line? Nature favours creativity. If you want to stick to what you know, you’re not nearly as valuable to the Universe as those who don’t. Who do you think gets the rewards? Do you honestly think people with extraordinary lives got there by accident? Do you think they were born that way? They weren’t. Mozart had deformed hands by the age of 27 from how much he practiced. People BECOME Great. Through concerted effort. Like any other great genius, you can too become one. Start today, and you’ll notice the change in how you feel immediately. Fortune, and indeed the Universe, favours the brave.

So you’re out of denial, listening to your unconscious mind, have taken a first step in the face of fear but your dream looks so far away, and your mind just can’t see how it could ever be a reality. Do you give up? Or do you keep going, in spite of there being no apparent solution visable at this time.

Barrier number three, is Trust.

Trust in what I hear you say? Trust, that your unconscious mind knows more than you can possibly imagine. So much so in fact, that it actually understands the next steps of the Universe, and is pointing you in the direction you need to go in.

Ok so I probably just lost half of you. Responses like, ‘Yeah whatever’ are not uncommon here. I certainly used to think like that. The fact is though, is that you can only learn trust, paradoxically, by Trusting. If you never give yourself the chance to experience the world through the lens of trust, you will never, ever be able to experience the liberation that comes with it.

You honestly, totally, completely, do not need to know how you will get to your dreams. As long as you are following where your unconscious is nudging you to go, the next step will be revealed and the next problem solved when it appears. Building trust allows you to be peaceful in extraordinary circumstances, to the point where seemingly negative external situations start to lose their power of your state. Imagine feeling completely peaceful and stoked even though you’re not going to make rent this week, and you have no idea how the pursuit of your dream will ever turn into a financial success? This is my current situation, and one which is teaching me trust. Hard at first, and some days not something I want a bar of. However, the more I trust, the more I want to.

The Wrap

Basically, the barriers are just barriers to your evolvement. They all stem from an inaccurate view of the world and your place in it.

No matter what your parents, teachers, or friends tell you, you are not separate from the world. You are intricately wound into reality itself. The Universe’s impulse to evolve means it supports anything that you choose to do to evolve yourself. In other words, the Universe is your number one supporter. Most of the time, people don’t want to get out of the starting blocks because you are scared of what they’ll see. “I’ve got it pretty good here” they justify. The worlds a rough place, I should probably stay here to be safe. Unfortunately that’s a little bit silly. Who would you rather have helping you out? A company with a finite and small amount of resources where you are little more than a number, or the Universe itself, with literally infinite energy available which is willingly channeled in your direction whenever you choose to evolve because without you, the Universe could not be what it is.

Never, ever underestimate your importance to the Universe. It needs you as much as you need it. Your dreams are the dreams of the Universe itself, because you cannot be separated from it. When you block yourself from dreaming, you block the Universe from dreaming. As such, you become less energized because you are holding back the evolvement and creative expression of the Universe.

This is the promise and the challenge of the New Human Being. The Self-directed evolver. If you want to realize your true potential, follow the calling of your heart.

Look out for the next thread popping up in your life, look for the next clue. Embrace it when it comes, because it will be taking you in a direction beyond your wildest imagination.

Live for your Dreams. And always, always, Pursue the Unreasonable.

Until next time

Cameron

Getting over the line is so crucial in life. The difference between achieving a dream and settling for something else comes down to getting over the line. What do you want in your life that you don’t currently have? And where are you not over the line?

Getting over the line generally comes down to overcoming fear. For me, beginning this blog was a scary thing. All my life I have avoided conflict, ever since I was a small child I’ve always been determined that everyone had to like me. From a young age, up until I was about 21, I used to smile at people even when I wasn’t happy because I thought that making other people happy was my responsibility. When I was at high school, University, and even in Corporate, I had a real challenge standing up for myself. I used to avoid it like the plague. This makes something like starting a blog a scary thing. Given that I’m only ever going to speak what’s true for me here, it’s natural to expect feathers to be ruffled, and people to experience a myriad of things as a response to my writing. For someone who has been afraid of standing out like that, that’s not an easy thing to come to terms with. Hence why it’s taken me six months to move from, “I would love to do that”, to “The blogs online”. Creating the blog wasn’t the hard bit, getting the website live in its first basic iteration took less than a day. The real challenge was getting over the line within myself.

Even in the first day after I put the blog live, I found I was resistant to telling anyone about it. Sure it was one thing to have it live, but another thing entirely to have people reading it. What would they think? How would they judge me? What if they didn’t like what I said and changed their opinions of me as a result? In the end, this is the price of my dream. And all dreams have a price. If I was not prepared to deal with those aspects of it, then this dream would forever remain unrealised. In the end though, these things will prove to be positive, because they will grow my inner strength to a point where I will no longer be affected by them.

Courage

If I think back to every major step change I have made in my life, there is one thing which continually pops out as a common factor. And that is getting over the line.

Getting over the line takes courage. It requires getting to the point where you decide you are no longer going to tolerate not getting what you want, and you are prepared to be courageous enough to face whatever fear is holding you back. The people who I know who have done this more times than anyone else, are unquestionably the most remarkable people I’ve ever met. Every successful human being on this planet has had to go through more than their fair share of getting over the line by developing courage.

Courage is such an underused term today, and people seem to forget about what it takes to get over the line. People view the successful people as having ‘made it’, but in truth, they still have to get over the line every single day. It took me 3 hours to even  get over the line to get into a space to be able to write this today, I didn’t know what I was going to write. Ironically, or rather, unsurprisingly, it was perfect because I’ve ended up writing about getting over the line!

Pause for a moment and consider your life as it is right now. Think briefly about a dream you have, something you want to accomplish but are perhaps currently feeling stuck about how you will get there. Now I would be willing to bet, that if you dig deeply enough, you will see that there will be a  fear based thought behind the choice you are currently making. You can mask it with all sorts of things, like I did with this blog for months, “Oh but I need to know X,Y and Z before I can start it”. But in the end, it came down, quite simply, to being afraid.

The most straightforward, simple way that I have discovered to move closer to your dreams, is to build courage. Almost every other strategy has been me avoiding facing fear. The great thing about courage is that it is literally 100% transferable. This means, that it doesn’t matter what area of your life you build your courage in, it will flow into all the others. If you find some action in your life that requires just a small incremental step of courage to do, do it! Maybe that’s saying a joke to your boss, telling a friend how much you appreciate them, or purchasing a piece of clothing that will make you stand out.

Whatever it is, if it takes courage, and it’s something you want to do, it is worth doing. Because in reality you only ever have two choices, and those choices are fear, or it’s opposite, love. When you take a risk to express your true self, you choose love for yourself, and face directly the fear that you will be viewed as not ‘good enough’ by others. When you expose your vulnerability to the world, you attain ultimate power, because you have chosen to become someone who is unaffected by fear in that moment.

The thing is, getting over the line, by choosing love over fear, means that you actually become someone else. The person you were before you made that choice no longer exists. Think about that for a second. You actually become a new person. Tell me that is not incredible.

When you make a courageous choice, you reinforce the circuitry in your brain that encourages courage, but at the same time, you are also directing energy away from the parts that lead to fear based choices. This is a big distinction, so I will endeavour to quantify it in some way.

Let’s say your courage can be represented by a number, and since more courage equals better results, the higher the number the better. Lets say a person of average courage has a level of courage of 10. And let’s say that a small choice that doesn’t require too much courage, will only change it by 1 unit. Not a big deal right? Well, let’s see… Since your choice will either add or subtract those 1 units from the number you have, we can see what happens.

If you choose to be courageous, your courage increases from a 10 to an 11.
If you choose fear, your courage reduces from a 10 to a 9.

Now suddenly, the impact of the choice is not actually one unit, it is two. This is true also of your choices in life. This is because by making a courageous choice, you essentially, ‘upgrade’ yourself, but by choosing fear, you reinforce the fear response, and make it harder for you to choose the courageous option next time. In economics, this is called the opportunity cost. It’s the cost of what you’ve lost by making a choice.

The importance of this impact on your life cannot be overstated.

People of courage level 9, can literally not get the results of people with courage levels of 10 or higher, because the prerequisite for those results is of course a 10 or higher. It’s just like at the amusement park when you have 15 coupons, but the big stuffed teddy bear is 25. Do you honestly think the freaky carnival guy is going to hand it over for your 15 coupons? Of course not, you’re simply not going to get it. Life is no different.

The thing is, you’re never present to what it costs you to make a fear based choice. You can’t exactly sit down after work, turn on the t.v. and see how your day would have played out if you’d made the opposite choice can you.

It’s really important to think about this. Think back to any time in your life (we all have at least one), where you got over the line and faced a fear, how did you feel mentally afterwards? Did you feel more peaceful or less peaceful? Did you grow wiser and stronger, or did you get weaker?

How many of us are living primarily out of fear? The most publicised event in the world right now is the recession. A fear fuelled frenzy. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that we live overwhelmingly in a world where people live their lives in fear.

There are a lot of things in my life right now where my fear is dictating the limits of the results I am getting. I simply have not built my courage up enough to face some of those fears. I say that, even though in the same breath I can also say with total conviction, that every single time that I have gotten over the line and chosen love instead of fear, I have been rewarded. And rewarded hugely. You won’t always make the love based choice. That’s ok. The point is about growing, and you can’t grow past your current limits until you know where they are. It is important however, to be honest with yourself about the choices you make.

When you make a choice, it seems like an insignificant thing, but its not. it’s not because there’s something else you must consider. And  this will either be easy, or difficult for you to swallow, depending on your current worldview. That is, that the Universe knows. Life itself, knows. If you think the Universe, or life isn’t aware of your choices, and that they aren’t impacting events and opportunities that occur in your life, then let me tell you, you’re not in tune with reality. While it is true, you can fool yourself through denial, you cannot fool life. It’s like the carnival guy again. Let’s say you handed over your 15 coupons, and said, “That’s 25 coupons, give me the bear.” Then, the Carny proceeds to count them, and looks at you with disdain, telling you you’ve only got 15, and that you can choose from anything up to the stuffed kermit the frog. Now you can get as angry as you like, but the fact is it won’t change anything.The fastest way to a goal is to simply accept that you need to grow yourself, and face the fear or fears that lie between you and the goal.

In life, if you make a choice that requires courage, you resonate at a new, and different level. Subsequently you attract different things. Opportunities and experiences come into your life in line and worthy of the new person you have become. The Universe is not objective. Life, is not objective. It is not an accident that people become successful. It is not an accident that certain people experience what they want in life and others don’t. If you choose fear, instead of love, you are proclaiming loudly to the Universe that you want to continue to experience what you are experiencing, and so, you do.

On the contrary, when you choose love, in the face of fear, you tell yourself and life that you are ready for something new. You show that you have grown to learn what that challenge was there to teach you, and you have become who you needed to become to move beyond it. If you look at your choices this way, you will soon see that life is merely grooming you. It knows your dreams, and it knows what you must do to get them. It even wants you to achieve them. To this end, it is continually sending you what you need in order to learn how to achieve them. How grateful are you for this? How grateful are you that life is giving you everything you need to become the ultimate you? I know that I certainly have a lot to learn in this area.

The part of you that you need to get to achieve the next level of success in your life, lies beyond the fear. Learn to be courageous, and life will know.

The Wrap

Make a conscious choice today to experiment with this, make one different choice, one choice that requires just a small amount of courage, and see the what happens. See how it makes you feel, see how it changes the rest of your day. It may even affect your sleep that night, setting you up powerfully for tomorrow. Whatever happens, I’m sure that once you start, you’ll want to do it again, and again, and again. After all, knowing you can achieve your dreams is a pretty powerful place to be.

Until next time

Pursue the Unreasonable

So How do you know if your mind is working to it’s peak?

I believe the answer to that question is this: Are you living the life of your Dreams?

If you answered no to that question, then your mind isn’t working at its peak.

Allow me to explain.

Two years ago I began working in Corporate, and I was doing a job I really didn’t like. In my final interview, I said that I enjoyed pretty much everything, but I really, really didn’t want to do Finance as I had tried it at Uni and hated it. So roll around February when I was due to start, and my first role in the company? Yep, you guessed it, Finance. Thanks guys.

For those of you who have done things you didn’t enjoy (school anyone?), you know how hard it is to focus when your bored senseless right? I really wanted to find a way to get through this boring work easily, and after a while I started thinking about my mind. I thought, if I could somehow focus easier, I’d be able to get my work done quicker and it would be less of a pain in the ass.

At that time, my knowledge about the mind was virtually non-existent, and I soon was asking HOW could I even know if my mind was working to its peak? And how would I be able to tell if something was making it work better or worse? After all, I couldn’t exactly ask my mind. “Hey Bud, you working up there or are you and the eyes having a game of poker, because they don’t seem to want to focus either…”

The fact is, I had no way of knowing whether my mind was a high flyer or the mental equivalent of Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel.

I had done well at school, and could perform in exams well with very limited study, which was great.

I thought this must mean my mind was doing pretty good. But the truth is totally different. The truth is that exams only measure one thing. The task in exams basically being a test of working memory. Let’s be honest, how many exams are you really thinking for yourself? It’s very rare. Now I know those of you would love to say how great you were and how much hard work you put in, and you’d be right. But in the context of success in life, exams simply don’t cut it. It is, above all else, a working memory test. You remember the ideas you have recently memorised (study), and repeat them in a logical format. The more information you can recall, and the more accurately you can relay that information, the better result you will get.

Unfortunately, in life, a great working memory simply isn’t going to cut it. And right away we can see the obscenity of the education system. The ever increasing complexity of the problems being faced simply isn’t going to be handled by such a linear way of thinking. You need creativity. So exam, school or even Uni success is absolutely not a barometer for success in the ‘real’ game of life. Nailing the education system is never going to guarantee you nail life, because the system has no real relevance to life whatsoever. If you did it blindly, and assumed you were being bred for success in life like I did, It might be discomforting to realise you busted your balls working your way into such a linear way of thinking over all those years only to realise you could have spent your energy on so much more beneficial things, but it’s better to know the effects of that now than to be ignorant of it.

I learned this pretty quickly when I was staring blurry eyed at a computer screen learning more about Microsoft excel than I ever cared to think I’d know, and wondering why when I was supposed to be doing such a ‘dream job’, I was so unhappy.

And then there came that question, how did I know if my mind was working to its best?

At the time, I didn’t know that answer. It’s only 3 years later, that my answer to that question is now; if you are not living your dreams, then something is broken.

Huh?

Something is broken because, paradoxically, your mind both is, and isn’t working right at exactly the same time.

Huh?

If you are a healthy individual, then your mind is already perfect. It is an incredible piece of equipment which is constantly arranging itself in order to provide the best possible results for you. Neat aye? We could go into how but it is not really relevant here.

But, when you look deeper, and I mean, beyond your conscious awareness, into the powerhouse of your mind, your unconscious, you also find a completely contradictory answer, and that is that your mind is actually horribly broken.

Huh?

Let me explain.

While it is true that your mind is constantly doing its best, there are a few key things which the mind itself does not have control over.

The most relevant and important of these things, is the way you were brought up. Or more specifically, the beliefs that were assimilated and subsequently reinforced about yourself and the world as you grew up.

When you were a child, your brain learned about 10,000 times faster than it does now as an adult. This is because it is learning what it needs to in order to survive. Everything is new. You, as a child, without even realising it, decided on creating unimaginable limitations for your mind and hence your life.

As a child you take on the beliefs of those in positions of authority around you. These include beliefs about the world, about who you are, your abilities, what is possible, and how the world works to name a few.

This is not a conscious process, it just happens. The mind is building itself a survival strategy, and the smartest way of it doing so is to mimic the strategy of those around it. Authority is regarded by the mind as being the most optimal blueprint for survival, and so the mind begins to mimic those beliefs which are held by those in power over you. Which as a child, is virtually everyone.

These beliefs become meshed into a massive network of limitations within you. Your mind cannot violate these limitations because they have been installed by the operator of the mind… You. The thing is, that you as a child had no idea you were doing this. In fact, it would be accurate to say that between 95-100% of your parents, teachers, friends, and others you came into contact with as a child didn’t know this was happening either. This same process has occurred within children since the dawn of human history. The crazy thing, is that in the generations above us, and even our own, there was and still is almost zero mainstream awareness of the implications of this.

So the reality is that you were educated by people who, despite their best intentions, NEVER focussed on ensuring your mind was not building itself into a cage for you. They had already lived their lives in their cage, without even knowing it, and so they simply didn’t know any better. The model of reality you were fed as a child within the education system (which was reinforced everywhere you looked as you grew up), and the understandings your mind has built in to its functioning about yourself and the world (and I’m talking about you right now, reading this), are about 99% likely to be so incredibly flawed that you wouldn’t believe it if you could somehow be shown.

This is not some ‘Oh maybe this didn’t happen to me, I had a good upbringing’ babble. This is fact. Virtually every single individual in the world brought up since the beginning of human history has had this happen.  The cycle reinforces itself. With fear as the enforcer. Do you notice that fear occurs only when you try to do something different? This is your minds way of saying, whoa dude, this is contrary to the optimum survival strategy I have worked out for you, this could be danger. Evolution was smart, stay with the heard, and you’ll survive. So it built you to think like the heard, because they are alive, so it must be good.

That used to be a good idea. It got humanity through some very difficult times. It helped increase the chance of children surviving no end, ensuring higher probabilities of the species surviving. But there is a new problem for people now. Survival isn’t the problem. The problem is living your potential. And thinking the same as everyone else simply isn’t going to cut it if you want to start walking down that path. How can thinking the same as the person next to you possibly work for you as an individual? Do you think that you want what they do? It should be obvious that thinking the same as the guy or girl next to you isn’t going to work to get what you want.

Remember how we should be measuring this: If you are not living your dreams, somethings broken.

So what does this mean for you? It should be obvious by now, that improving the quality of your mind, will improve the quality of your life.

But from what I have seen over the last few years, there are so few people truly interested and committed to delving within themselves. People admonish their friends for trying. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say to others, “Oh that’s intense man”. Is it really intense to try and find out how you think? Is it really intense to attempt to learn what you need to learn to live the life of your dreams? What does it say about the way we have been conditioned if this is what we call “intense”?

The real reason is not that it is “intense” to do these things, the real reason for any response like that is simply fear. If someone is challenging the way of thinking established within someone, the mind senses its survival strategy may be under threat. Obviously the mind doesn’t like that, and often a person will go to extreme lengths to avoid the discomfort the mind gives the person when having that strategy challenged. People avoid fear because of how uncomfortable it is. Ironically, this only reinforces the broken patterns and perpetuates living a broken life. If you want to master life, then you have to master fear.

Ask yourself, how much do you really know about your mind? How much do you really know about yourself? How much time in your life do you put into your own personal development? Remember, the quality of your mind is very closely approximated with the quality of your life.

If you wanted to race formula one, but never learned what a gearbox is, you’d be pretty terrible tearing round the track in first gear. The car would break down constantly, you wouldn’t be winning any races, and you’d be left frustrated wondering where you’re going wrong.

The same is true of life. If you don’t take the time to learn about such a key piece of yourself, then you’re heading for troubled waters. More people have heart disease, cancer, and depression than ever before, and these rates are only going skyward. None of those eventualities sound like the life of my dreams.

Can you honestly say you want to go through another day of life driving in first gear? Anyone who claims that they do, in my opinion, is dead already. This is not about arriving, no ones life is ever complete, not until you’re dead. The journey of growth never ends, because there is always another level. There are many, many things in my life right now which are a far cry from where I want them. But the point is that I am living the journey towards making them happen. That is not easy, but it is so worth it. Because I am living that journey, I am satisfied with myself. Writing this article is the beginning of realising a dream for me.

The Wrap

Reading this may not be comfortable. In fact, for someone who has no intention of moving beyond their box, it will probably be the exact opposite. How comfortable is it for you? Are you even able to entertain that you may have a completely delusional model of reality and yourself that you continue to live your life through each day? Are your current beliefs giving you everything you dreamed of? Because if they are not, how can you possibly say they’re working for you?

I should point that this is not about me trying to create more beliefs for you. There are more than enough sources trying to do that in the world (Got Religion?). It is my view that every individual should find their own truth, why would I want you to think like me? It’s going to help the world a lot more for you to find your own voice, not a replica of mine. However, I will make it clear, that it is my intention to drive a metaphorical bus into the walls of your belief system. Through this writing, through presenting my perspectives, I want you, even if only for a second, to have the opportunity to see a glimpse of what might lie beyond your current level of thinking.

After all, if life isn’t about living your dreams, then in my opinion, it’s a waste of time.

Until next time.

Pursue the Unreasonable,

Cameron

But since I can’t get rid of the nagging pull of my intuition that its something I need to do, here it is. Time will be the judge of the decision, but it’s definitely a good place to test the “If you can’t get it out of your head, do it already!” philosophy.

So here begins my blog about Human Potential…

It’s really not a particularly unique place to start, there are plenty of others online on the subject of personal development etc already, so no doubt the Point of Difference will work its way out over the coming months.

Really though, what I want to explore is helping Uni students and Teenagers. I’m 23 now, and if I had been taught what I now know at school, life would have been a whole lot better, a whole lot quicker. So I want to provide information that can circumvent another 1-50 years (dependent on what generation you are) of staying in the paradigms being taught in our current (and highly dated) education systems.

I’m staunch in the belief that we’re continuing a cycle of imparting a completely inaccurate structure of beliefs around the true nature of Life, and Human Potential to our teens.

As I have pursued the conscious deconstruction of my belief system, I’ve had more than few experiences that I’m sure can provide value to someone. Learning to see the world through new lenses has been the most rewarding and eye opening thing I have ever done. So much so that it now dominates my entire waking life. I live this now. Every day something changes, and every day I’m looking at what needs to be deconstructed and rebuilt. It can be a sometimes painful, frustrating, and annoying process at times, but the rewards are that life turns into an absolute adventure. And I don’t know about you, but I F**king love adventures!

If the sharing of the experiences I have had while I have done this, helps even one person, I’ll consider this blog a success. After all, I’m doing it for the love of it.

Until next time

Te Amo

Cameron