November episode 10. The most dangerous word in the English dictionary. 

Can you guess what the most dangerous word in the English dictionary is.? Is it hate? Is it greed? Is it jealousy? Is it envy? Is it anger?

The most dangerous word in the English dictionary, to you as an individual, and to the world is the word infatuation.

Why is this word so dangerous that it would be on the top of the most dangerous word hit list?

It is not love that is blind, it is infatuation. And and yet, infatuation is also the secret to great marketing, romance, long-term relationships, staying useful, and resilience.

Infatuation is the cause of depression, domestic violence, bad leadership, poor financial decisions, affairs and mental and emotional illness.

Infatuation is dangerous because it is a necessary evil in our lives and yet it can cause so much trouble.

When you say I want to take control of my life and be the master of my own ship, you are talking about taking control of the word infatuation, nothing more nothing less.

Infatuation is essential for motivation. Infatuation is essential for healthy male erectile function. Infatuation is part of the process of pregnancy. Infatuation causes people to form relationships and work very hard for their lives. When infatuation is missing drive is missing.

In a simple language infatuation means positive thinking. It is a very corrupt science. When American psychologist suggests that the best way to think is to think positive they are both helping people to overcome negativity and at the same time causing mental health problems and poor decision-making.

So let’s examine what an infatuation is composed of. Firstly, infatuation is a mindset, a way of perceiving things. In Walker talk, infatuation is to see something with more positive than negative aspects. Of course this is the only major function of marketing and sales. So a person who is good at infatuating other people is considered to be a great salesperson. When we see an Apple and the Apple is ripe and ready to eat, we see no negative in that and the degree to which we become hungry determines the degree to which we have become infatuated with the Apple. But there is no such thing on earth as a one-sided object. The Apple has negatives.

The same goes when we meet people. Every human being has a public and private side to themselves. Their public side is the part of themselves they think the world will like. That side, the public side, is also the side of themselves that they like. Then there is their private self which, either through guilt or shame, or simply the ambition for privacy, is not put on public display. So when we meet a person in public we meet half of them. They express one side and repress the other.

Every human being does this. Eventually that habit becomes their mindset. They present to the world what the world wants to see, or more people importantly, present to the world what they think the world wants to see. And in doing so they conform their appetite for gratitude. We present to the world the part of ourselves that gives us the most pleasure. And reason we seek pleasure is because we feel thankful when we have it. So the body is hardwired to seek pleasure and avoid pain because it is seeking gratitude. That’s the feeling when we have pleasure. We are thankful.

The mind on the other hand, the ego, is seeking to be right. Whenever the mind feels reinforced, or ask the American psychologist would love to suggest positive, we feel grateful. So now we understand that hardwired into the body and mind of every human being is the appetite for gratitude. Positive thinking was meant to be a shortcut to this gratitude because when we think positive we think thank you. This is a very important thing for you to get your head around. Every human being on earth no matter what their behaviour is seeking to be thankful.

Infatuation means we are pursuing those things that make us feel thankful. And that is why discipline is hard. For example a person comes home from work and they are not feeling all that thankful for the day they had at work, feeling tired or beaten up, and a look at the whiskey bottle and think to them cells, if I just have a nip of whiskey I will feel more thankful for my day and for the night ahead. This is how infatuation works. It says solution to ingratitude with something that has a positive impact on them.

The business person who is at work and the results for this month are not perfect will not feel thankful for that. And so they will be triggered to make decisions, interact with people, treat themselves with ungrateful thoughts and therefore search for infatuation, a decision that will make things positive, grateful, and look for something that they can do to positively impact next month’s results.

A person who is in a relationship and is not thankful for their partner because their partner is not doing what they positively want them to do will start to feel negative about their partner. They will therefore not feel thankful and start to potentially infatuated with another person or feel completely depressed because they are not getting what they want. So even in a relationship the conflicts we have are often just ingratitude. We start comparing who we are with to who we could be with and then basically we are infatuating somebody else and presenting who we are with.

When you ask to take control of your life and in particular the negative feelings of life, the in gratitude you have for whatever is going on you are asking to take control of these infatuations. But it is Human Nature to seek these infatuations. You get left with three different choices.

The first is to accelerate your appetite for positive thinking and when the negative of those positives reveal themselves you will have to surrender to the dark side for a period. That means the first option is to go harder into the infatuation with yourself or others or some outcome and when it doesn’t perfectly manifest just feel depressed for a period of time. You have to be very very tough to handle this repetitive punch.

The second is to develop the skill of taking anything negative, anything you are not thankful for and mastering the art of flipping. They spin doctor in the political world will take something that is going wrong and re-engineer it so that it sounds positive. Yes, she had an affair and lied to Parliament but she did it in order to protect the nation from an impending disaster. This is the art of maintaining infatuation. Another example of this art is when a company does something publicly that is bad. A product recall or the discovery that the company has use child labour by accident in a third world country, will diminish infatuation with that company and their products and so the mission will become to spin the story into a positive, infatuated state.

The third, is called wisdom. Because I personally am obsessed with taking control of my life and being the master of my own shit I don’t want to flip backwards and forwards between infatuation and resentment. I don’t like negative surprises and I do like to make wise choices. And therefore I seek balance. Balance means to see the two sides of everybody and be thankful for both. This mindset satisfies mind and body plus my heart. That is not always important to people. So I’m not saying it’s the only way it’s just the way that works for me. I love nature and I don’t like being disconnected from it even in my thoughts and the way I perceive the world. In nature everything is balanced and it feels good to see that balance. So I try to see as much balance as possible.

When I don’t see balance in someone or something I know I don’t know them. As a leader this becomes a crucial skill. Nobody is going to follow an infatuated leader because that person will also be resentful and trigger their emotions on the downside when resentment appears for the infatuation they had. Truth is a powerful weapon in leadership and truth is that there is balance in everything.

I also do not subscribe to the idea of being motivated to buy and do things with the idea that it’s all going to turn out perfectly if I just follow my instincts. I’ve seen too many people stuck in their head trying to make a negative into a positive instead of being thankful for the negative. It’s like trying to change something that doesn’t need to be changed.

So, I’m not a fan of chasing my tail. That’s not to say I didn’t try, and still don’t. That pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is so damn attractive.

I took the 34 hour flight to Canada, to present an advanced human development retreat. My agent in Canada booked the venue and we had a 60/40 arrangement for the revenue. I needed at least 15 advanced graduates of my introductory program in order just to pay my flight and travel cost. I arrived and there were two people. Infatuation had got the better of me again. I love flying, I love hotels, I love being mobile running retreats, but paying money out of my pocket to fly around the world to present 10 days to two people was not the image. Infatuation had blinded me. Again.

It was 3 years earlier when, on a mountain in New Zealand it nearly cost me my life. Infatuation with the life of another person I’d gone to NZ to learn mountaineering skills. I paid the excruciating cost of equipment and hiring a guide only to find myself riddled with fear and worse, incompetence. Infatuation had driven me up the mountain but it would not get me down.

Infatuation was also the theme of my spiritual search. Going all over the world to be with Guru’s to learn. What I learnt was the books were wrong. There’s two sides to gurus too.

Real is a big word. Real is the solution to infatuation. Real kills motivation and smashes fantasy in the face. It’s hard, because the body wants fantasy but hates reality. Ego wants fantasy but hates reality. Environmentalists and protestors are infatuated with the opposite to what they protest about. It’s hard, the world is build on Infatuation. And therefore spends most of it’s time dealing with the opposite. Resenting partners and kids and boss’s and the government. 

The alternative is real. 

Real isn’t boring. And when you finally discover how good it can be, you’ll say, Oh, yeah, I knew that. Funny isn’t it? 

You know real. But aspire to infatuate. It’s the myth, the cosmic giggle.

More about this tomorrow.

With Spirit

Chris