This is the audio of a coaching session. COACHING GRATITUDE ON SOUNDCLOUD
TRANSCRIPT
So let’s go over it. Therefore dangers of gratitude for dangers. And we’re talking right now about the first one. And the the first danger is mistaking gratitude for elation. Which means being grateful for things for outcomes. So when you save up, save up your gratitude you save it up twice a day you do a gratitude exercise and you finally go I’m so grateful for having a way or I’m so grateful that my body functioned really well today I’m so you save it up. And then you save it up and you say I’m grateful for my family. I’m grateful for my friends. I’m grateful for things. The danger is that actually we’re giving ourselves elation. Because we’re grateful for great things, things we want. I want my family I want to be healthy. I want to do a P I want to have a good job. I want to get compliments and you go I’m so grateful for getting what I want. Which is not grateful at all. It’s celebrating, getting what you want, which is called elation. Grateful for getting what you don’t want that’s a that’s a tough gig. Grateful for getting what you don’t. But if you if you step out of that arena of bouncing between grateful for getting what you want or grateful for getting what you don’t want, which is a fairly chunky piece of an emotional shower or discard form. The The motto of gratitude is grateful for small things. The smaller the more micro you the things you’re grateful for, the more it actually is real gratitude. So the example I gave is I’m sitting at a wooden table I look at the wooden table and look down at the grain in the table. I see this beautiful grain I think about the tree it came from. I think about the forest where this tree grew up. I think about the insects and the ants. And the and the and the wind and the rain that caused this grain and I think about the forest around it and the trees and the leaves and wherever nature came from and whatever caused this tree to grow and be cut down. You know, chopped into thing and I think about the person who cut it and some I’m breaking it down and down. I’m going not instead of going horizontal, being grateful for a lot of things. I’m being grateful for the micro of something and it has nothing to do with what I want. I don’t want the grain in the table. I didn’t ask for the grain in the table. I’m just observing it. If I’ve got a pen in my hand I’m grateful for whoever designed the pen. Whoever made the ink in the pen whoever came up with the idea of the pen I’m going down and being grateful for the for it even though I got the pen and I’m taking for granted that I have a pen, which is a bit of a mistake but I actually can be grateful for all the ingredients of the plastic that it came from the people that made it the the recycling that’s going to have to take place to process it. So when we say the big mistake of gratitude is being grateful for to bigger things. People get grateful for the day they get grateful for their partner. They get grateful for the children they get there very big things to be grateful for. And I suspect the vast majority of people who are operating in the in the guise or in the belief that they’re being grateful are actually operating in a state of elation, which causes depression. What I’ve said before and I really I really believe this in my heart of hearts and I believe it’s proven because that’s how I help people. You can’t be depressed and grateful at the same time. You can’t be unhappy and grateful at the same time. You cannot. It’s impossible. But you can be depressed and elated. At the same time.
I honestly think it’s hard for me to tell you what I feel when I walk through the house from a gratitude point of view because it’s become organic for me to observe everything to operate at a pace where I observe everything. And I try to kick
if you were to walk through the House think Yeah
look, I think there’s there are events that take place where I go from my office to the kitchen and back for a cup of tea. I always tried to be aware. I think some people call it mindful of the way I walk the way I stand the way I move and what cup I get how I make the tea so I’m I’m considered, I think in every step, which is I think being grateful. But there are times when you do things where you’re not being confronted. So your default thought process just kicks in. So my default process after 50 years of doing all this my default processes. I’m sort of happy. I default to it. So I’m sort of grateful and I’m looking always looking around as I walk looking for if there’s a pencil in the wrong place looking to tidy that up if I walk past a fallen leaf from the flowers on the table, always pick the flower and put it in the pot. Always. I think the word is considered but I’m always sort of relatively aware of my environment. And I’m always keeping it pretty or keeping it beautiful. And I think the observation and the awareness and the consideration of beauty, what I’m wearing what I’m thinking what I’m going is gratitude. It’s gratitude personified. The witnessing and the sculpting of beauty in your environment. But I think if you just say that if that becomes a default, there’s times where we want to where we need these tools that we’re talking about with gratitude, when the going gets tough. So most often if we’re happy, and we’re walking through the house, and we’re happy and we’re singing a happy song, who, who’s gonna say, hey, stop, be more grateful because you’re happy. And you’re not going to think, oh, I need to be more grateful. But if you’re walking through the house, and you’re not happy, and you’re grumpy, or you’re pissed off, or you’re sad or you’re depressed or you’re frustrated or you’re angry or you’re jealous or are you in some state of mind, you know you would not be wise to be and you need more resilience to hold go back to the state of default which is you know, whistle while your work have a happy tune. Do your day. You have to be able to dig in with a tool and anchor yourself it’s a weapon. And you say I’ve got a weapon in my arsenal a tool in my toolbox that if I slip out of the space of being in a great place or a happy place, I know what to do and the first thing to do people say I know I need to be grateful. And then you go, Oh, well, I’m grateful for you know last year, or I’m grateful that I’ve got a holiday coming up Christmas. And straightaway they fling themselves into elation, because they think of a positive thought they think of a happy thought. They flick themselves into something good to think about to distract them from their bad space, but they’re thinking of a good thing and gratitude for a big thing. elates a person more and causes more depression. So to not do that to avoid the danger of that you say okay, I really if I’m in trouble and I need resilience, and I need to dig myself out of a pit and I feel overwhelmed and I feel in the ship and I feel confronted I’m really angry about something I’m going to start saying thank you for the toothpick. Thank you for the person who made the toothpick. Thank you for the handle on a toothpick. Thank you for the brush. Thank you for the person who thought about thank you for the dentist. Thank you and you start it’s really trivial. But what it does is it doesn’t distract you what it does, it takes you up into a part of your brain. That is really polished instead of down into your relation which is really clumsy. So it’s a tool and the the most important thing we say with all the work you’re doing in a wealth and all the work you do in Toronto up to get yourself lined up body mind spirit and try to get yourself lined up and into fully integrated. The most important part of it is practicing between performances. So if you go I’m going to do gratitude, gratitude in the morning. I’m so grateful for my day so grateful. And you do it twice a day. It’s very very likely you’re not doing gratitude at all it’s very likely you’re doing elation. Practicing between performances means at the beginning with this you go Thank you for that step. Thank you for that step. Thank you for that step. Thank you for that step. Thank you for that. handwash thank you for the door. Thank you for that. It kind of like sounds like a bit stupid but it’s not so this that’s what you just said is exactly right. If every single day you get little moments that this is the micro moments or the micro Grunch that he goes like, you know the kids running around the house and you go kids be quiet and you catch yourself don’t know I’ve got to get back to work now. And if it come back to work with our kids be quiet and you come back to work and go okay, everything’s alright. You put on a happy face and you start doing a coaching session. It’s more than likely you’re still pissed about the kids or still there’s still ramifications of it circulating. And to clean your ACT UP. You pull the tool out of the toolbox you go micro gratitude, micro micro thank you for thank you for the table. Thank you for the green you just look at something and in the end you start laughing at yourself you go Thank you for the computer. Thank you for the screen and thank you for the person who made the screen and thank you for the reflection of me in the screen and thank you for the door and thank you for the hinges and thank you for the handle and thank you for the Apple sign on my desktop and thank you for the bills that I’ve got mounting up over there that didn’t pay and thank you. Thank you thank you thank and it’s it becomes it sounds benign, but it lifts you up into a higher part of your brain by going into micro gratitude. It doesn’t take you out into depression causing elation. The second challenge of gratitude and we have to be really conscious of number two is a chip checklist so that you can use gratitude for what it’s really meant to be used. Is best told by sharing a story and the story is when in an in the past in parts of Asia. monkeys were a delicacy would eat monkeys career places they would eat monkey and the way you catch a monkey it’s really easy. In the same way you catch a human. You would get a coconut. You cut a hole in it. You put a banana in the coconut, the monkey and then chain the coconut up to a tree. The monkey sticks their hand in the coconut grabs the banana and can’t get the fist out because they’ve got a banana and they pull and pull and pull. And meanwhile someone just walks up bops the monkey on the head and that’s the end of the monkey. And the monkey is screaming and shouting, ah I can’t get away I can’t get away but if it let go of the banana, it’d be fine. So that leads us to the second danger of gratitude and that is getting grateful for the future. Getting grateful for something that hasn’t happened yet. So, again, if we get grateful for something that hasn’t happened yet, we’re running away from the present. We’re saying when I go on holidays, it’s going to be fan bloody tastic i I’m so grateful for the end of Year holidays. Well, we just put but we’ve just poisoned the chalice anyway, because we’ve gone I’m going to be so grateful I’m going to be so grateful when I when it I’m friggin not thankful right now. And there’s an example where gratitude is poisonous, because that’s the equivalent to the map to you grabbing the future. grabbing onto it sticking your hand in the coconut can’t pull your hand away from the tree, you’re stuck. And yet you have to be here present in this present moment to cook the dinner. Fill the report, sign up with somebody going I wish I wasn’t here. I’m like actually I can’t even be here because I’m stuck being thankful for the future. And that’s when gratitude becomes absolutely unadulterated ly toxic so we have to be careful. We don’t become a monkey or a baboon or revert to our ape ape history, which it is by grabbing the future in the coconut and you can’t get a handout. We do a vision.
We see the banana in the coconut and the banana is inside the coconut and the coconuts attached to a tree. It’s in the future. We see it but we’ve got to set it and forget it. And if we’re not thankful for what we’ve got right now, we’re going to be totally totally totally jerked by the chain. Because we’ll try and pull back to where we are but we can’t. We’re stuck being grateful for where we’re gonna be.
isn’t making sense? Any of this mirror good. Okay
yeah, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And guess what? It ain’t broke. Right now is the best moment you’ll ever have in your life. And if you can’t, if you’re so stuck in where it can go, and I’ll be really thankful when I when I went home whether or or that place in the Whitsundays called someday I’ll
someday I’ll need to get a job someday are someday I’ll It’s an island in the Whitsundays. It’s like the denial is like denial like denial is a river in Egypt, right.
That’s a dead joke. So, let’s go to the third one. The third one is chest beating. This is, I think, more common than everybody knows. So the purpose of gratitude is to thank something else for what’s transpiring in your life. So it is a big part of religion because they want you to thank the church or thank God or thank the guru or thank something but the the happiness of life comes only when you give thanks. Not when you receive it. So, giving yourself thanks. That’s like tickling yourself. You go. Oh, thank you to me for being su discipline with my yoga practice. And thank you to me for being such a loyal citizen. And thank you to me for being such a cool dude. And thank you to me for being blah blah blah. Thank you to me, for being self talk Okay, so the question. So so your question, your question is, when does self talk become chest beating? And the answer is if you only do one of the parent or the adult or the child or the motivation, reward, and motivation instruction reward if you just do one of them reward it’s just been Oh, look at me, look at me. Look at me. Well done. Me Well done me. But motivation is driving you to the next opportunity. Motivation prevents you from stopping in yourself and going look at me, look at me, look at me, which is target practice. For problems.
So, if you’re practicing gratitude, which is not the act of self talk, if you’re practicing gratitude is the purpose of it is is to bring you closer and closer to love. Closer and closer, past your own expectations of yourself, to love, to love for self love other. So the purpose of gratitude, it is the most tangible way to move you in the direction of loving someone or something. If you are grateful, micro grateful, not future grateful. I’ll be grateful when you change your whatever. Not. Not future, not future growth, not macro grateful. I’ll be grateful when you finally shut up or something. I’m grateful for you now. I’m grateful for you as you are. And I’m going to give you gratitude. I’m going to give one I’m going to go and sit down. I’m going to think how can I give you more gratitude. How can I express? I go wow, had a beautiful day today and thank you so much for for helping me make that happen. You give your gratitude. You give it to the universe. You give it to a god you give it to community you give it to your company, you give it to your children, but you never give it to yourself. Chest beating is the biggest mistake of gratitude and unfortunately, it’s what Oprah teaches. Accidentally. She doesn’t intend to, but what most people who follow the gratitude of a pseudo psych psycho pseudo therapist is they think they need to thank themselves. Now, they’ve taken the very thing that causes happiness, which is giving and turn it back on themselves, which is called narcissism. So sometimes the most persons practicing the most practicing the most Gratitude is the biggest narcissist amongst worried about himself ungrateful for me. I’m grateful for what I did. I’m so grateful that I got to do what I did today. Not passing the gratitude out, talking to themselves. Internalize. So gratitude is giving. And every time we give, we are actually recognizing the quality of the blessing of our life. We’re blessed because when we give thanks, we’re basically acknowledging we are blessed. Thank you for causing me so much trouble today, giving me such a big headache for this problem. Because without you giving me this big problem and this big headache, I wouldn’t be confronted like this and I wouldn’t feel so challenged to step up into the zone of questioning myself as to what my motives are here. What’s my intent? You’ve really pushed me into my stuff. Thank you so much. Now you could say fuck you so much for pushing and challenging me and withdraw Thank you. You could pull you could stop being a taker and energy take it was damn you for calling me that damn you for saying that. Damn you for confronting me that damn you for that. And we’re trying to suck the gratitude from somebody back on ourselves, right? This is the complete inverse of what we’re trying to say here. We’re trying to gift gratitude and when you do gratitude exercises and gratitude to the day you’re thinking of who and what and what a diversity and what a spectrum of human beings and circumstances you can be thankful for. And the more you give it, you give it away your more say thank you, thank you. Thank you, the happier the more inspired and the better. off you’ll be and and the more your self worth will grow.
Instead of being like a vacuum cleaner and saying, Damn you for upsetting me today. I don’t feel grateful for you, which is vacuum cleaner.
Sucking both your own energy and their energy. So the last one, which we need to get to before your folding sessions finished, is the most complicated in our lives, there are four things that make us dysfunctional. Four things, four separations which split us into a war between our inner self and our outer self for battles, Battle Royales if you want to call those four separations, masculine and feminine self and other pleasure, pain and right and wrong. So let me go through if I start saying, I am so grateful for being right we’ve just taken our spiritual human and turn it into animal human. The animal self wants to be right. Or let’s say, yeah, the animal self wants to be right. So when you say I’m so grateful for getting it right and I’m so grateful for that you are wrong and because I proved how right I am and I’m so grateful for that and we start celebrating that we are dis what’s it called fragmenting ourselves fragmenting that’s the word we split ourselves apart into right and wrong. Now, we express the righteous we repress the wrongness. Now the battle goes on, right on the outside. I’m wrong on the inside, and by being grateful for the right I make it even worse. That’s the ego right? I want to be right I want to be right I want to be right. I want to be right for me, right. So ego and ego is protecting us. So we don’t want to necessarily reinforce the ego. We don’t want to kill it or we don’t reinforce it. Second, separation is pleasure over pain. And if we if there’s a state lower than a human animal, which is a basically a binary cellular computer switch, which is on off I’m on or I’m off it’s pleasure and pain in the human body. Whenever we go into binary state, which is oh, there’s so much pleasure over there, there can’t be a pain. It’s basically running as basically like giving a balloon to a porcupine. It’s running full speed into a cactus. We we start heading down the track of splintering our perception of whatever’s going to take place into a pain without a pleasure. But no matter what pleasure at the end of your days, and you look back on it, it was painful to so being grateful for pleasure is actually fragmenting us even worse than being right. Choosing pleasure, that’s okay. So I choose pleasure. I know there’s a pain in it, but I choose that’s fine. Do that. Then you’re grateful for pleasure and pain. You’re not stupid, but if you if you just say I’m grateful, what a pleasure, then you become ignorant. It’s like poking yourself in the eye with a stick. The third separation which is a really, really dangerous, one is self another. And on the discard form, all of these separations are reemerged. That’s why it’s such a powerful, juicy process. And the idea of the discard form is to say, I know there’s a possibility to fragment myself, but I can stitch it back together anytime I want. And be grateful for both sides of everything. So in the discard form, the first column, the second column of every form is who thinks I’ve done this same shit, right? And who thinks I’ve done this same shit is basically saying, Well, I’m poking my finger at that person for being an idiot, but really, I’m actually poking a finger at myself for being an idiot. And if I’m not grateful for them for being an idiot, how can I be grateful for me to being an idiot? And therefore, self and other? I can become grateful that I’m not an idiot and they are. I can be grateful for me being so called superior people do this more than they know. I’m glad I’m better than that person. I’m glad I’m better than the old me. I’m going to be a better me next year than I am this year me. So they even start perceiving that the den that has more money that them that has more sex or more fun is a better version of them that they are now and that is basically condemning ourselves to hell. Because if you’re not perfect already, when you get to there, you will still not be perfect. Because the habit of seeing imperfection will travel with you wherever you go. So when we’re grateful for being better than someone, we actually breed a part of ourselves. That’s ungrateful for being worse than someone and then all of a sudden people will come into our lives where we feel insecure. It will get insecure in meetings, we’ll get insecure. And people say we’ll just stand up and speak and we’ll go, oh, I don’t want to talk about anything. It’s because we think we’re better than everybody else, and we don’t want to prove it otherwise. So when we come to gratitude, being grateful for being separate, like, you know, as I say, the true mark of a person who’s released another person in relationship or doing a great day’s work is the person who can say I’m thankful for the past. I’m thankful and ultimately for our parents. And the final one, which is really politically interesting right now, is masculine and feminine. So there’s, there are seven areas of life and therefore seven areas of values. What some people will think is, I’m a male, I have masculine values, which is mind, career and money, they’re the masculine values, and my partner is a female therefore, she therefore must have feminine values which are health relationship and social family. But the fact of the matter is that is so binary antiquated. It’s unbelievable. And there’s still people who do it and create codependency in relationships. And they what they say is, oh look after my highest values, if you look after your highest values, if your highest values are my lowest, then I don’t have to worry about my lowest values because you’re in charge of that. And if my highest values are your lowest values, I’ll look after my dad will therefore look after yours, and that person becomes antiquated, irrelevant. Old Fashioned. The bottom line is we have seven values, seven areas of life seven values, and they can they can be orientated, masculine, feminine, that masculine value, feminine value, masculine value, feminine value masculine value and feminine value all seven irrespective irrespective of what gender we are, which is why the wisdom of transgender although it’s been a little bit hijacked with some level of advertising the bottom line is we’re all transgender. And our value set means every value is important. It’s not a matter of saying forget the lower values of me, because if suddenly you say my lowest values health and my partner excited for our health, and all of a sudden you’ve got Bloody, you know, anal cancer or something like that. Then they can’t look after it and all of a sudden, you’ll see it’s really important. So, it’s a matter of being a whole human being with seven values a hierarchy of those values, irrespective of masculine feminine, owning the lowest value and saying how does fulfilling the lowest achieve the highest? How does achieving the second lowest value achieved the highest? How does achieving the third lowest value achieved the highest value? What happens is people have got three low values and something goes wrong in those three low values and they think the three low values suddenly become their highest values because there’s a problem. That person then become super famous at lowering their self worth attracting calamities, disasters and humbling circumstances, doing the right thing by getting their health back on track or their relationship. So I know a lot of people who are humming along in business, their relationship goes a bit pear shaped, they think I better value my relationship much higher than I did. They start focusing on their relationship and things get worse. Why? Because they’re now giving more attention to a lower value. That’s not the solution. The solution is to work out how linking a relationship how it actually more helps their highest value and focusing more on their highest value where their self worth comes from. If their self worth goes down, so does the relationship.
So gratitude for our masculine and feminine parts. It’s not about left brain right brain so much. It’s about the value chain. Gratitude for the fact that the bottom value achieved helps us achieve the highest, the second bottom the highest, and gratitude means Lincoln, Lincoln or singkat is basically my word for gratitude for the value. There are the four amazing warnings about gratitude. And I can’t emphasize how important this is because a lot of people are doing themselves harm.
Work working on gratitude. Separation separation, separation the four separations being grateful for being set separated. If that’s a word, separating pleasure and pain separating right and wrong separating self another separating masculine feminine anything that anything that encourages separation takes us down into our dirty darker self. And and quite often people are grateful for things that make them more separated.
Which means that they’re poisoning themselves by doing the right thing being grateful. So gratitude is a great catch all word. We have to be careful because it’s got a it’s got barbs on it. It’s a pleasure and pain. Remember it’s got positive and negative it’s not immune from the universal laws of it’s got good and bad.
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