100 Things I wish My Dad Taught me. Episode 35. Bought to you by the fifth universal law – the law of the one and the many. Today’s episode: “By being humble and truly honest with yourself you unveil our true potential and express your greatest self worth.”

humility is not denying your greatness it’s actually recognising it. Many people think humility is smallness but actually we are born children of the universe every human being has every human quality and every potential we need for our entire life is born already within us just as a seed has the great tree born within it.

my dad beat this into us. He didn’t beat it into us knowingly. He simply knew that the moment we tried to be better than somebody else we failed. This is an extremely confusing idea because life is one long competition for resources. For example if you are in a rowing race do you need to do your best or do you need to simply beat the people who come second?

there are sports where you will hear the dominant strategy of doing your personal best, running your own race, sticking to your race plan and in this model there is benefit as reacting to anything will inevitably lead to loss. Then there are other sports philosophies which are based on beating the competition and monitoring their every move and staying one step ahead of it. So you can see that it might be confusing to consider whether we should run our own race, do our best at work, or compare ourselves to others and just make sure we do one thing, one step, one strategy better than others in order to reach the top.

with all this, it makes it even more important to consider being truly humble and honest with yourself. It means that either by comparison to another person or running your own race, being truly humble and honest with yourself remains the centralised theme of your life performance. Let’s explore being humble.

you are a magnificent child of the creation of the universe. You are born on this planet for a purpose that is critical to the functioning of the entire universe. Every thought that is ever been thought in the universe of trillions and trillions of stars is available to your mind and every thought you have influences the entire functioning of the universe of trillions and trillions of stars into the future. The greatest wisdom that was ever created in the entirety of this planet and the universe that it comes from is in you. You are a star. You were born a star and you will revert to a star after you are born. The things that you do on this planet change everything in the entire existence of nature. Everything you say is recorded in history forever. The people you interact with and work with and live with our influenced for ever by you and therefore in your existence you have influenced already and will influence for the future tens of millions of people. But that’s just the beginning of being humble.

Add to this the idea. You wake up in the morning and switch on a PowerPoint. Somebody, somewhere in the world designed that PowerPoint, somebody manufactured that PowerPoint, somebody installed that PowerPoint, somebody transported that PowerPoint to a shop, somebody went to the shop and bought that PowerPoint and somebody else sold it. So far we’ve probably added 100 people that put together their effort just so you, humble you, can wake up in the morning and switch on the light. Now consider that behind that PowerPoint is wiring that was manufactured, designed, installed, transported, invented, tested purchased etc and you’re going to get an idea of what went on just to make the electricity available to the PowerPoint. Now let’s keep going and work out where the electricity come from. And how many people do you think were involved in the production of the electricity that comes to your house that makes you available to switch on a single PowerPoint. Let’s even go to the lightbulb that the PowerPoint delivers part two and consider that that power goes to a lightbulb and it was designed by somebody, manufactured by somebody invented by somebody, sold by somebody manufactured by somebody else transported by somebody else sold by somebody else delivered by somebody else wrapped by somebody else just so you can wake up in the morning and have light. Humble is recognising the number of people that have come together in the universe just so you can wake up in the morning and without thinking about it flick on the light. Humble is greatness. Recognising the gift of your existence on this planet and what we so often take for granted that tens of millions of people have put together their lives so that you can switch on a PowerPoint. That’s humility. But what it does, it makes what you do, really really really valuable too.

Humility is recognising opportunity, humility is recognising the gift of existing with one single breath on this earth. Humility is acknowledging that there are people who are not recognising this gift. Humility is really seeing how huge you have this gift of just looking up in the sky and goin”son of a bitch I’m alive”

you don’t have to make a raging success of your existence. It is already by the mere fact that you take a breath today a magnificent recognition of how gifted you are to even be here. You might be born without legs or arms or missing something in your DNA but you are still here. Humility is recognising the gift of being. Yes you can have your expectations, you can feel disappointed that you aren’t something compared to something, but that is not going to cut it in the world of success because it is the least humble headspace you can have. Grateful for what you are for what you’ve got grateful for the opportunity to take a breath grateful for nature grateful to wake up and check on a light, this is humility and it’s huge and it’s powerful and it’s amazing. Yes you can have your expectations, you can expect the world to fall at your feet, you can expect to earn millions of dollars, you can expect to win a gold medal in a race, but if you start all that disappointed about who you are and gift of what has been given to use merely by the opportunity to breathe and live and exist and coexist then you’ve missed the boat. Humility is waking up with inspired by tears dripping from your eyes at the gift of the suffering of being alive.

when $53 million of my money went down the shoot when the world trade Centre was attacked I was grateful for it. It wasn’t a week later, it wasn’t an hour later it was happening while it happened. Our expectations that the world trade Centre would stay up, that my $53 million would stay in my hands are what blocks us from the humility of being in a real world that has written into it order in the chaos. Your capacity to see the order in this so-called chaos is the degree of your consciousness or enlightenment in this life. Success is failure if it ignores the gift and the humility of being born to influence the world, with your every thought, word and action. Every grain of sand in natures beach is important and when you diminish your importance, or the importance of every word every thought every feeling you have to the world large and to the universe large you are not being humble, you’re being self narcissistic indulgent. And that’s okay. But it is not humble.

being honest with yourself is the other aspect of today’s lesson from my dad. When I would come home with accolades or a trophy for winning some thing my dad would pay no attention. He was not interested in trophies or false accolades. My dad was interested in the truth. What are you doing what you said you were doing? Are you passing your exams as you said you would? What sort of person are you being while you win those trophies? Dad was tough on this and I bought those trophies home quite often to win his approval which he refused to give. It was an extremely demanding environment but what it was basically saying is be honest with yourself. If you’re happy with what you did I’m happy with what you did.

one thing I remember mostly about my dad in this topic of honesty is that when we did work, hard physical work in the garden, and he banged his finger with a rock, or dug a fork into his foot, he would hit through his teeth, shake the handle foot, and get back to work. He had a technique of dealing with pain. It was a powerful honesty. He never blamed me when it was me who dropped the rock on his hand. He just got angry at nothing and got back to work. I think he was being really honest. The event had already happened, no use crying over spilt milk and he didn’t want the rest of the moment in time afterward to be infected by that past event.

Being honest with ourselves can be measured. Are we in this moment in time? If we are, there is honesty. If we are bemoaning the past, living in anger at someone or something that happened either 10 seconds ago or 10 years ago, becomes a powerful reality test. If we are worried about the future it is another reality test. Reality, honesty is measured by how balanced, centred and calm we are in this very single moment in time.

Chew a sultana and see how long you can hold it in your mouth. It reveals how we are either thinking about the past or the future while we eat. The longer you can hold that sultana in your mouth the more present you become. Presence, being in this moment in time is the powerful measure of your truth. But it is not just being here feeling pain in this moment. Pain is from the past. Fear is from the future. That is not being present, thinking of pain or fear. Being in this moment in time is love. Loving the taste of the sultana, or loving the fact that you can taste that sultana. Thinking about the fact that it, the sultana came from the earth, grew as a tiny grape in a huge plantation and was nourished by the sun, nourished and fed from the earth, watered by hand or machine or sky – then picked and transported, dried and cared for hygienically, and then packed perfectly, sold, trucked, shipped, shelved, sold, carried, put away, taken out and served to you so you can chew. That’s humbling, that’s powerful, that’s presence. Total honesty is can you be in this moment savouring whatever you are doing as a wine taster would savour a good red wine in a wine competition. They can tell you what time of day the grapes we picked. That’s powerful presence. Immersion.

If you can’t be present, if you are agitated and thinking so much that you talk all the way through a meal and didn’t taste the cow that sacrificed itself for your plate, or the heat that cooked it, or the butcher that cut it. If you are so up in thoughts that the eating is done unconsciously then you are at least being honest, you are in a hurry to your grave.

Rushing through a meal and not tasting the universe, or nature in a pea, a bean or tofu you are eating is like rushing through a project at work and wondering why you hate work. It doesn’t take time to savour life, it takes self honesty. If you can’t be in this moment, thinking about what you are tasting, the feeling of the keys on the keyboard, the arch of your spine, the depth of your breath, then, there is dishonesty. You mind is abandoned you. You are alone and that is awful.

My Dad said, over and over, if you are going to do it, do it well. Otherwise let someone else do it. Dad respected the it. Whatever “it” was that we were doing, it was important. It’s really old school but “it” is the everything we do. Maybe dad’s ideas were less philosophical but he nailed it in teaching, if you are going to do “IT” do “IT” well. Not for the money you get, but for the self-honesty in focus, presence and doing something with all your heart.

The most humble people I’ve met are successful. Humble means they appreciate the opportunity they have to reach out and grab as much of life as possible. Sometimes a war, or persecution has give a person this view that there is an extreme gift in reaching out for opportunities, to take as much as the universe will allow, in the extremely short time we have to be alive. Humble people know what can be taken in a blink and therefore hang on to it with gratitude. They milk every opportunity to live alive and reach for their star. My often mentioned discovery is that great athletes are great people first. Successful people are successful people at home, before they go to work. This is where self honesty, and humility come in. We have so much to be thankful for and yet, we complain when the toast is cold.

What I’ve discovered from working with people is that the default for most of us is to see what’s wrong, even when there are one million things that go right. We might have a beautiful home, two legs, a bowel that works, safe community, income, wealth, health and love in our lives, trees and no storm ripping our lives to shreds and so much to be humble about but, if the amazon delivery is one hour late, or we didn’t get the right tennis ball, we go into a state of self deprecating rage. How pathetic is that?

That’s the end of today’s episode. 100 Things I wish My Dad Taught me. Episode 35. Bought to you by the fifth universal law – the law of the one and the many. Today’s episode: “By being humble and truly honest with yourself you unveil our true potential and express your greatest self worth.”

With Spirit

Chris