Ten New Realities (You Can't Live Without)
by
William Cottringer


Our personal, professional and spiritual development journeys (they are all the same thing!) can reach warp speed once we start letting go of older obsolete realities and begin exploring new ones. Below are ten new realities you can't live without- if you are serious about personal, professional and spiritual development.

REALITY CAN BE INVENTED.

Life is driven by thoughts more than physical realities. Once you understand a small portion of reality intimately and completely, and your intentions are right, you can change it into something entirely new. Such a new reality worth considering is this: You are really only limited by the smallness of your beliefs and what you are looking at. What you see actually depends mostly on where you are standing and what you are looking at. Changing locations opens up a whole new field of vision. One new viewpoint can help you see even bigger ones and the benefits start becoming endless.

THERE IS PLENTY OF TIME.

We waste way too much time rushing around like maniacs trying to control everything, always ending up short on time, which just furthers the panic. Time is one of our most precious resources. Ironically it is equally distributed but not equally valued. When we slow down and get more in touch with the now moment, we start to fathom the true meaning of eternity. When we start focusing on making the right choices in each new opportunity that comes along, we have merged the past, present and future. The mechanical illusion of time disappears and there seems to be enough time to get everything done.

YOU ARE A TEAM.

You do not really have a split personality and you are not separate from anything including God. When you start reconciling your own two halves and become a whole person, you can start putting the rest of the world back together again. When you do this, you will discover amazing governing principles. A good one to take advantage of is the Gestalt principle. This is the notion that the whole is much greater than the mere sum of its parts. Individual hemp fibers are fragile but when woven carefully into a rope, they become extremely strong. The collective synergy of a team made up of all your halves can achieve unlimited success. Your team can join others and become stronger and more successful.

DOWN IS REALLY UP.

Many things in life are not as they seem and some are really bass ackwards. Why do we make less money in the beginning of our lives when we need it most? Why do we invest so heavily in housing recalcitrant inmates and do so little for innocent victims? Why do we have to lose ourselves to find ourselves? Why do we have to experience failure before we reach success? These are more than just intriguing questions. They hide valuable clues. You can make significant progress in your self-actualization journey by resolving these paradoxical illusions and re-arranging some awkward priority reversals. You can start by answering these two questions: (1) are you concentrating more trying to change things outside you or inside you? (2) Are you living your own priorities or those imposed upon you?

IT IS NOT REALLY THAT SERIOUS.

Life is mostly a comedy that we too often mistake for a drama, tragedy, epic, action flick, foreign film or documentary. Seeing the humor in serious events dissolves their distaste and removes a very large barrier between where you are and where you want to be. Granted, there may be a few real tragedies in life, but you tend to miss their importance and urgency when you are being held hostage by an over-serious philosophy of life. Laughing at some of the insanity you are guilty of opens a wide portal to self-growth. Besides that, laughing is physically healthy for you.

YOU HAVE TO PAY TO PLAY.

There is definitely a down payment required to enter onto the highway of success. This dues includes finding out your main talent, deciding what to do with it and then figuring how to do it. You are entirely on your own in figuring out this personal mission, but there are plenty of proven success formulas from which to draw. My personal favorite is this one (because I invented it): (1) Dream huge (2) translate your dreams into goals by making them go from your head to your hands (3) work hard and smart to achieve those goals (4) be creatively clever and do something in a new way that others only talk about doing (5) keep focused on your goals and avoid the entertaining distractions everywhere else (6) never quit, knowing that success is probably just around the one corner you are most inclined to give up getting to (7) share your success secrets with others.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

People have more in common with one another regarding what they are thinking, what they fear and what they are trying to do, than most of us realize. The fact is that everyone else has an important piece of the big puzzle that can fit with yours to make your piece bigger. The more people with whom you share your suspicions and secrets, the bigger your piece of the puzzle becomes. This is the beginning of a team of teams all helping each other get to where we are all going.

THERE ARE NO WRONG TURNS.

The Law of Karma is just a friendly reminder to help you evaluate your choices so that you can eventually make the right ones that are effective in getting you where you really want to be. When you make wrong choices, you are not being "bad," but rather just loitering. All that you have done in the past is what got you to where you are now. A funny thing is that even the disasters always seem to work out for the best in the long run. If you don't like a particular ending, it is likely that you still have a work in progress. Be patient.

THERE IS WISDOM IN INSECURITY.

Oddly, when you abandon your comfort zone, it just gets bigger. Letting go of the illusion of external control and giving in to the natural flow of life results in a more real sense of security, peace and comfort. Change is one of the few certainties there are and once you start embracing that reality everything becomes less changeable and more stable. That way you can spot the things that really do need changing and be more effective in making those changes. Part of the wisdom of insecurity is giving up the silly notion that external things offer real security because they don't.

THERE IS NO NEW TENTH REALITY.

Surprise! Every time you convince yourself you have finally figured it out by including everything, something else shows up later or the rules get changed. Life is incompressible in its entirety and realities are only limited by our artificial need to have ten or so things. Our brains are only tiny peepholes to infinity and these ten new realities are just scratching the surface. What new realities can you explore and benefit from? What obsolete reality is keeping you from doing this?


William Cottringer is business consultant, sport psychologist, college teacher and writer from the home of the Championship Rams, St. Louis, MO. He is also author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too. He can be reached at (618) 288-4956 or ckurtdoc.charter.net