What if there was a roadmap to access your true self? A way to interpret the signs that lead the way to your life's work, to fulfillment and satisfaction a la your own personal style?
There is.
We start super basic, with what you like, what you don't like, and how to begin honoring your likes and dislikes.
Because we go against our grain too easily, and that buries the quiet voice of our soul.
Want to hear your soul speak more loudly? Start to pay close attention to what you like to do— and how often you actually do the things you like to do. And what you simply can't stand doing — and how often you force yourself to do those things.
More about Maia at MaiaWilde.com
Maia's mechanisms for self-realization at MaiaWilde.Thinkific.com
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
The Big Leap Gay Hendricks
The Art of Loving Erich Fromm
"The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb."
Orig. Aired in 2019 on 91.3 FM WIOX
Note: The point of views of guests on this podcast are not always the view of the podcaster. And the podcaster is only expressing her own opinions. This is the disclaimer portion where we remind listeners to do their own due diligence, and that Maia is not a doctor or therapist and that you are a responsible adult, who is capable of knowing when to stop listening and when to seek professional support and help.
What if there was a roadmap to access your true self? A way to interpret the signs that lead the way to your life's work, to fulfillment and satisfaction a la your own personal style?
There is.
We start super basic, with what you like, what you don't like, and how to begin honoring your likes and dislikes.
Because we go against our grain too easily, and that buries the quiet voice of our soul.
Want to hear your soul speak more loudly? Start to pay close attention to what you like to do— and how often you actually do the things you like to do. And what you simply can't stand doing — and how often you force yourself to do those things.
More about Maia at MaiaWilde.com
Maia's mechanisms for self-realization at MaiaWilde.Thinkific.com
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
The Big Leap Gay Hendricks
The Art of Loving Erich Fromm
"The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb."
Orig. Aired in 2019 on 91.3 FM WIOX
Note: The point of views of guests on this podcast are not always the view of the podcaster. And the podcaster is only expressing her own opinions. This is the disclaimer portion where we remind listeners to do their own due diligence, and that Maia is not a doctor or therapist and that you are a responsible adult, who is capable of knowing when to stop listening and when to seek professional support and help.
This is Dirt Road Less Travelled, where we talk about life with a capital L and take on the big questions such as Who am I really? And why are we even here? I believe we're here to express the hell out of our true selves freely and unapologetically. So this is the show where we talk about how to do just that. I'm Maia Wilde, welcome to Dirt Road Less Travelled. How are you today, this is the show where we take a look at your inner compass we get you hopefully tuned in and aligned to your inner compass so that you are able to improvise on the road of life, find your way, when you are stuck in the mud, somewhere up a road you did not anticipate going down. Or when your GPS is not working, I was just taking GPS coordinates to go visit a friend tonight. And I copied the GPS coordinates and meant to text them to myself and I accidentally pasted something else into the text instead of the GPS coordinates. And that's what we're here to talk about under Road Less Travelled is what do you do when you've pasted the wrong coordinates in or you have no idea where you're going or how you wind up where you are. So I have found in my work as well. I've had many titles I've had life coach, personal liberation coach. Now I work as a an intuitive life and business strategist. So there's this beautiful medley of intuition, right tuning into your inner compass and strategy because we need some actual, you need to you need to know how to drive the vehicle. Right. So it's not just you know, I've seen this and I've worked with a lot of people. You know, I've hired a lot of different coaches and healers and teachers. And sometimes people are so strategy heavy that they leave the true you behind. I have found that at least, you know, paid a lot of money to work with a business coach who claimed to get people great results, but she just put out these templates. And I was also you know, English major over here. Lots of typos in them. I know that's not important, right? Really, if she's helping you build your business, but I felt like these templates they didn't. What's the word? jibe? Jive, I can't can't get those two straight. Which one is it? I you know that they didn't fit. They weren't the right fit for my personality to put these templates out there and to follow the rules of the game that she had laid out for us in terms of how to build your entrepreneurial business. It just it left me cold it left me out. And then I've also worked with coaches and healers and guides who I was thinking about this the other day, I was just shaking my head going. I was going through my closet. And you know, we moved into the house we're living in about just not quite six months ago. And so there's still some clothes folded on shelves that could be hung on hangers and going through this pile of clothes and I was finding oh this purple shirt, Michael Kors. So if you like name brands, it's this really shimmery deep purple with sort of a little built in belt on the side. It's very cute. I've actually never worn it this silky purple tank top that is meant to be worn under business attire a jacket, a purple and white scarf. I wear the purple and white scarf the other two items I have never worn and I've owned them for probably six years, maybe five, maybe for a number of years. Right. And I was looking at these items and they're pretty but I've never worn them remember when I got these when I had a coach I was paying a lot of money to who she said to me I think you need to wear more purple. I was not making any money in my business and I did not have any money. A lot of credit card debt at the time I was behind on my rent at the time I was paying her I was I opened up two new credit cards to work with this woman and it was a mess you get the picture right but I spent some money I took a trip into the city and I went to Macy's and I got a bunch of purple beautiful purple clothes in the hopes that this would help me start to make more money. So I use this as an example that I was just sort of like shaking my head and smiling to myself the other day I believe in the energetics I believe in the power of color that there's a vibration there and even if you don't want to get that esoteric you know you feel good in certain colors. I say as I sit here in the studio all in black, um I feel artsy and black. I feel creative. I feel grounded. I feel a little zany and free to be myself when I'm all in black. So you know to each your own right but so where I'm going with all this is to say that yeah, I believe in the energetics and I'm sure you've experienced it some colors feel good. Some colors feel like they're not quite it for you. And sometimes that's you know, we have to resolve our own neurosis around what color we look good in or you know, something like that. But I'm talking about this vague you know, not Directed, unfocused non strategic like wearing purple was the business strategy this coach was giving me. And while I'm a fan of intuition, getting tuned into your inner compass, and learning to listen to yourself, to your heart, your soul and using your mind to guide you strategically, once you figured out on a gut level, what it is that you really desire in your life. I believe there are tools from both ends of the spectrum, right, the intuitive side and the strategic side. But people can get a little carried away, right? People can be all strategy, all rules are all airy fairy, you know, like, maybe you need to change the color in your wardrobe. And sometimes that's right. Isn't that also, though, sometimes I'm going to contradict myself. Isn't that also sometimes very pivotal? Right? If, because there have been times when I've worn on black because I was out of shape or feeling sad, right. And it was not, it was not the true me. It was me, I was buried in the black. And so to then be able to free myself up and wear yellow, I actually have a story I've told on this show before about wearing yellow. It's in my keynote speech, actually, because it was a real breakthrough for me. So I'm not I'm not, we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater here as I talk about colors. But I, I want to get you oriented to the theme of the show, especially today's show, which is about getting you tuned into your inner compass and listening to your gut, listening to your heart, listening to the voice of your soul, and following your desire starting to trust your desires. And also what are some strategies to do that, right? Because I talked to a lot of people and often I hear I know what I need to do, but I'm not doing it. Or I've written in my journal for years and nothing's changing. What am I missing? So yeah, you need the strategy. And you need the intuition. And sometimes you need guidance to go deeper, right. So today's show here on dirt, road less traveled, we're going to start basic, and then we're going to go deep, and it's going to be a nice melding of intuitive soul searching, getting you hearing the voice of your inner compass, because that's your map, right? That's your roadmap. That's That's the voice that's going to guide you to live a satisfying life. I was actually listening to XM, Sirius XM on my way in and the show they were talking about they quoted, and she said she butchered the quote. So now you're here hearing it third hand here. But it was a Frank McCourt quote from she believed the opening of Angela's Ashes where he apparently wrote that book late in life and said that if he didn't write the book, if he didn't actually make himself sit down to write the book, he was going to go screaming to his grave. God, that's good. Do you have something in your life where if you don't get it done, you're going to go screaming to your grave knowing that that was my mission, I should have done that. I knew it all along. That's where we're going to be going today. And we're going to be starting really, really basic. Okay, so we're going to start basic, with the most beginning exercise of all, and you might be tempted to toss it out as overly simplistic and that I don't know what I'm talking about. But I promise you that this works. And as we go through the show today, I'll be leading you deeper and deeper. And you might even get surprised if you follow along with this. And you go, Oh, I thought this was really simplistic and a waste of my time. But it's showing me some things that I hadn't known about myself before, or had known but had been disregarding. So we're going to be looking at what are the things that you like? What are the things that you don't like? And where are you not honoring those likes and dislikes. And again, this is a really beginning, elementary foundational to put a more meaningful term on it a foundational exercise that I use with my consulting clients. And again, it sounds really easy and simple. And I don't know where you stand like, Do you know what you like? Are you doing things that you like? Do you know what you dislike and you don't make yourself do that unless it actually is, you know, turning the ship around, right, moving your life forward? Or you know, fomenting some kind of growth or something positive for your vision. And I want to say this as a disclaimer at first, right here at the outset, I'm not talking about being self absorbed Bewdley selfish, I'm talking about being soulfully selfish, and there's a difference. And sometimes from the outside, you can't tell the difference. If somebody you're thinking, wow, this person looks like they're really just self absorbed. And they might be following the call of their soul. And you might be following the call of your soul and feeling really guilty about it. Right? So there's a lot of nuance. And we're gonna play around in those murky waters a little bit, but really, we're going to start off just talking about what do you like? What do you not like? What are you doing that you like? And what are you doing that you did? Like, right, like, where could you maybe be a little bit more in integrity with yourself and what your, your sole mission is here on planet Earth, this go round. You know, and there's a lot of rules that we have about things we're supposed to like and things that we're not supposed to like. But the basic thing here is the basic premise. And reason here that I talk about something like likes and dislikes is that I really believe that our desires are given to us to point the way toward what we're meant to be doing in life. And I have people come to me all the time and say things like, but you know, I just really love spending time with family. And I'm like, Okay, well, we have a big rule in our society, that family is important. My boyfriend's niece was visiting the other day, and I had not known this, do you know this, I had not known this, the expression. Blood is thicker than water, right, which we live by in our culture, don't we? That family is more important than friends, family is more important than anyone else you could ever meet Blood is thicker than water. That is a rule. And it's hard when you like many of my clients, I had a session with a woman the other day whose mother had passed away a year ago, recently, the one year anniversary of her mother's death. And she was really struggling as and as we started to talk, we realized, which I had actually known going in, because I could tell there was some way that she was approaching it wasn't pure grief. There was some weirdness in there some guilt in there, some other stuff mixed in. And as we did a little personal inquiry together, we uncovered the fact that she was not grieving her mother so much is just like mad at her right now. And just really still dealing in her 40s with some of the borderline abusiveness that she got from her mother, and she was saying, but you're supposed to love your mother. And I've said we're not questioning whether you're loving your mother or not, or doing it right or not. But this is the kind of rule that keeps people stuck from actually healing and knowing themselves. And we have these rules about family. That's that's a great example of social rules that we've been conditioned to believe right? Blood is thicker than water. And my boyfriend's niece said to me, do you know we were talking about family, right, she comes to visit, she's 26. We talk all about family, and she gets to debrief about her mom and dad, right? My boyfriend's brother, and he knows he remembers back when all of the things happen that she talks about. And so we can take her side. And, you know, really, she gets to air stuff out with family in a way where she feels seen and heard. But we also share the other perspective too. But it's not that entangled, immediate family, mom, dad, sibling relationship where things are really gritty, right can get really gritty, and people can be very entrenched in their own perspective, and emotional experience of whatever happened and not be open to hearing the other side. So she was with us. And we were doing a lot of talking and barbecuing and listening to her and, you know, airing everything out. And we were talking about this idea, you know, this idea that will family you're supposed to you know, she was sad that there are some places where she just doesn't have a great relationship with family members. And I was saying I don't, I don't think that's the worst possible thing. You know, it's a lot of pressure to put on yourself to feel like you're supposed to have a certain kind of relationship with your family members so that if you don't, you're now a failure. Right? You're now failing. That doesn't that how does that help you? That doesn't help anybody. It doesn't help anybody. It just puts pressure on you. And it's not you connected to your truth. Right? You know, and that's a phrase that gets thrown around like, Well, my truth is, I'm not talking about it in some like, fake, you know, saccharin Hallmark card kind of a way. Well, my truth is right, that you don't have to be cautious or tiptoeing around or walking on eggshells, you can have a truth and tell the truth and know that somebody else has a completely different perspective. So telling the truth right, so my my niece, but My in law, my what? My niece by my boyfriend, I don't know, what do we have a term for that? I don't know that we do. She said, Do you know that the actual expression is the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb? Had you heard that before? I had never heard that before. The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb and we of course have extracted Blood is thicker than water, which is actually the opposite meaning then what the original intention was, and of course you can interpret that biblically scripturally right but I want to open it up so that you can interpret it to mean whatever most supports you in the moment but like oh, the blood of what your covenant your your Soul Covenant with your soul mission could be one way of interpreting it is thicker than what your parents want you to do with your life. How about that? That just came out of my mouth. We are talking about how to get you truthfully, unabashedly, unapologetically unskilled actually connected to your own inner compass your inner truth to your desires. And one way to do that is to look at those social rules that we've all been raised in. We've all been steeped in from before we were born. Do you ever think about that? You know, you were born into this world, we walked out into the light of day of this world, as it was with all of the rules laid down all those foundational elements that our family laid down and subscribed to and bought into and perpetrated. perpetrated, that's not the right word. perpetuated is the right word. But I like that slip of the tongue, because sometimes it feels like a perpetration, doesn't it? So, I think about that sometimes, like, wow, I was born into this reality, you were born into this reality. And then we just started absorbing the reality as reality. And if you ever talk to someone else, and you, you talk about, you know, what you believed as a child, and what you thought about certain things, whether it's family or love, or sex or money, right, what are some of the big ticket items? Right? You know, you'll see Wow, other people, they think completely differently about those topics. They have a completely different take on what is acceptable and what isn't. They have a completely different emotional response to some of those hot button items like money and love, and purpose. And what you're supposed to be doing with your life and who the authority in your life is. Maybe it's time to take a look at that right now. Like who's the authority in your life? Because I think, of course, it's you. But you know, sometimes when it's like, okay, it's you, and you're like you which one of me? Do you ever have that? Right? You tune in, you've got like, okay, my mind is saying all these chattery crazy things, I feel really nuts and anxious. And then if I really settle in, in my heart, I feel very secure. But there's a little bit of yearning for something more. Right in my body, I feel restless, but also really, when I start to meditate, or I exercise, I get grounded. And I have this inner knowing that I'm fine. But then I start to worry again, and I think, oh, I don't know, what's the right decision. Right? There's, there's more than one element of you in there when you start to tune in. So that's, that's one of the reasons why following a roadmap are signposts like, what do you like? What do you dislike? And how can you honor your own personal likes and dislikes, not in a reactive way, but in a soulful way. So who's your inner authority or who's your I was, I didn't mean to say that, who's your who's the authority on your life, let's say it's you, or it will who's the inner authority, you need to be listening to. You know, often think of myself when I work with people, as I'm re parenting them, like know, you have permission to listen to yourself, because most of us, were not trained in how to do that. And so a lot of us don't even know what we like, or what we don't like we're so used to going against ourselves, and going against our inner grain or against our inner compass, or our own best sense of things are on intuition, right, overriding and got literally going against and you know, that feeling, right? When you push past yourself, that we're used to feeling uncomfortable, and a little bit irritated by life, and just by being alive. And I don't think that's necessary. In fact, I think we're supposed to be listening to our desires, because the goal here of honing in on what are your likes and your dislikes, and how can you start to actually live your life according to what you like, and you don't like? Meaning you do the things that you like, and you don't do the things that you don't like, but we're talking again, from a soul level, not a selfish ego level from but from a soulful, selfish perspective. Because I do believe that that's how our higher self speaks to us is through what we like and don't like, and that eventually will lead you to what are your big soul desires? And then what is your mission in this lifetime? And then what is your purpose, right, and there's so much comfort and freedom and fulfillment in living life from that, for lack of a better word, rulebook, then the externally imposed rulebook, and I mentioned the big leap book and Gay Hendricks because you don't have to take my word for it. Right? You can go to Gay Hendricks and he talks in this book about how he has spent more and more time in what he calls his zone of genius. Are you familiar with this? I know we've talked about it on the show before but why not repeated it so good. So There are four zones, according to Gay Hendricks one is the zone of genius. And that already sounds great, right? What's great about it, though, is that you have a zone of genius. It could be listening to people, it could be making a house beautiful. It doesn't have to be genius, according to the rules of our society, again, getting back to a lot of times, we can't even hear ourselves, because we've got all of these rules piled on top of our inner voice. And so there's this rule that we have in our society that Pablo Picasso is a genius. You're not right. I mean, that's really what it is. You and I are not geniuses, other big famous people across the ages are, and you have to do something really large to be a genius. And you might have to be a bad person also, right? Aren't those some of the social rules about genius? Well, this is very different, like a Hendricks talks about is very, very different. And he talks about, you all have unique talents. And the more time you spend in your zone of genius, the happier you are, and one way to get on the road to discovering your zone of genius is to do what we're talking about today, which is start to isolate what your Likes are, and to start to honor them. And he talks about how he has spent more and more time in his zone of genius, and doing things that he loves, and less and less time doing things that he does not love. Because he really believes that that is how we live fulfilled. Participatory. contributory, that is that a word? Contribute, how we contribute, how we contribute, I really love words and language, but sometimes I find when I'm live on air, you know, other words come to me, right. And so we're just gonna, we're gonna say that perhaps I'm channeling and give me a little bit of poetic license as well. But also to, to maybe, you know, let's just say I'm channeling some some deeper meaning here, if I get the actual word wrong, so yeah, he talks about that he gives you and me permission to live in our zone of genius. And that one way in defining what your zone of genius is to really start paying attention to what you like, and do that, and more and more of that. The other zones are your zone of excellence, it's directly below the zone of genius. And if you have a life that looks really good on the outside, and people envy you, and you're making good money, and life is good, but you're a little bored, you're probably in your zone of excellence. And people live out their lives there. And when you try to leave your zone of excellence, to fly by the seat of your pants, into your zone of genius, it's really risky and scary, and you might feel a nerve. But more importantly, the people around you are going to be substantially unnerved. And they'll, they're probably going to try to stop you. So that's another reason why we tend to hang out in a zone of excellence. But if you're feeling like something's still missing, even though it looks so good, everything looks good, you look good, your life looks good. You're pretty good. But you have that just that inner feeling of like, there's got to be more, and what's wrong with me that I'm not satisfied with what I have. It's probably just that you're living in your zone of excellence and not your zone of genius. And then the zone right below the zone of excellence is the zone of competence. I have spent so much time there. What about you working jobs where you're like, I am competent at this, and I'm doing it, because it's good enough, and I'm good enough at it. I don't really like it. I don't feel fulfilled by it. It's kind of nice to check things off the list. And I like that the organization runs smoothly, and my boss doesn't yell at me. Right? Or my co workers like me, but you're just competent at the thing and doesn't really light your fire. You don't hate it necessarily. Because you're decent at it, but it's not great. And then right below the zone of competence is the zone of incompetence. I have spent a lot of time there too. Is it familiar to you? I was talking to someone about podcast editing the other day, and I do not edit my own podcasts. Because the first time that I recorded a guided meditation as a free giveaway on my website, I spent three and a half days editing a 10 Minute. It's all I did. It's actually all I did. I didn't talk to clients. I didn't leave the apartment. I didn't exercise I felt absolutely strung out. And there were still some glitches in the recording. Because guess what editing zone of incompetence? Doesn't matter. Somebody was saying me the other day, we'll just watch some videos on YouTube. I can't manipulate the technology. And I just don't have the patience and I have this sense of I shouldn't be doing this makes me antsy, like threading a needle. I don't sew my Czech grandmother was a phenomenal seamstress. She could look at the picture of the outfit you wanted in a magazine and look at you measure you and then you'd have the outfit the next day. She sewed her whole life. She was a high end tailor almost seamstress in Prague in the Czech Republic, or then Czechoslovakia and she would come visit us here and just so all our clothes If I did not inherit that, I don't even want to thread a needle. It just makes me tense. I feel this tension in my chest. I want to like shake my body. It just makes me feel. I don't know like, I'm a glass that's being squeezed and I'm about to be broken. That's your zone of incompetence. You're bad at it. You hate doing it. Which zone would you like to live in? What's your favorite zone? What zone are you living in? Could you maybe percentage out your life? What percentage of your life is in the zone of genius? And the zone of excellence, competence, incompetence? Are you looking for an energetic, inspiring, knowledgeable wisdom and insight generating mesmerizing speaker for your club, group team or mastermind, that those are not my words. Those are snippets of testimonials from people who have attended my talks. If you're looking for a speaker, to galvanize your people into action to break through life's general malaise and the ruts we'll get into and even the fear and anxiety and depression that's running so rampant in the world today so that your audience actually has the lived transformational experience of connection, a sense of belonging and laugh their ass off at the absurdities of being human book me to speak at your event. My most popular talks are Driving the Dirt Road Less Travelled with a no regrets life as your Wild Free Self, which is a talk designed to motivate listeners to stop waiting for their real life to begin and to feel excited to get out of bed in the morning today. Heal old emotional baggage. Reclaim your fabulous intuitive self and uncover your true motivations. So you stopped falling off the wagon all while embracing the glorious mystery of being alive so you can finally express the hell out of your true self on this crazy ride we call life or you could go for This Is Not a Rehearsal a crash course and claiming the life you were meant to live where participants walk away knowing improvisation techniques for real life situations, create fewer regrets and recover fast when you didn't handle it the way you wish you had quick tricks for discovering your life's purpose and finding your tribe waste less time on people, places and things that are not right for you. And that laughter really is the best medicine, no more crying over your life situation, but instead happily embracing the absurd and laughing your way right through this lifetime and into the next one, or you gonna invite me in for a channeled event created exclusively for your people book me at Maia.Wilde.com, or by emailing me directly at Maia@Maia.wilde.com, where you can request my speaker sheet, media packet, or to reserve your next level Self Realization event where the talk is deep, but never happy. That's Maiawilde.com, or email me directly at Maia@maiawilde.com Then we're talking about this very nice tool, very simple tool to, you know, I want to say this nice, simple tool that could really shake up your whole life, and make a bunch of people around you mad and scare you. So if you need a little more thrill to your simple tool here, that that might give you the thrill that you're after, I also want to say this, and I guess I'm in the mood to give what's the word I used earlier, not caveat. I just, you know, translate this into your own language, if you hate my language, or if you get really annoyed by or, as we like to the lingo we like to use in the the coaching and consulting world that I am a part of, if you get triggered by what I'm about to say, you might want to take a look at it. So that's exciting, right? When we get triggered, it's really uncomfortable. But it's it's exciting, because it points to a place where you're unhealed or where you're not paying attention to yourself and your inner self is asking for your attention. So okay, so I really believe one of the reasons why we're hanging out having a whole show about what do you like, what don't you like? And how can you get yourself doing more things that you like, is because I truly believe that God speaks to you through your desires. I really believe that your soul, your Higher Self, your angels, your guides, speak to you through your desires, they tell you what to do, by telling you what you desire to do. The Universe speaks to you through your desires. What's the word that you like? Right? Like I said, you might be annoyed by my language. So if there's a trigger in there, great, great, take that do a personal inquiry on it. If you can easily translate into whatever your own language would be to talk about spiritual things, great, do that. But the important thing is that you take this idea on because again, a big societal belief that we have is that it is selfish, to do what you like. And we also have the Protestant work ethic as a foundation of our country and culture here in the United States. And there's this idea that work is really important and hard work is how you earn your keep here on planet Earth. It's how you prove your worth. And so this is a radically different idea and it you know, there's always people who are negative models have any idea right so There's always people who you look at them and you think, Oh, God, that's really that's what they're doing with their life. It's so it looks like such a waste thing about being a spoiled brat, because that means that you're a ruined human being, and you're not going to be even competent Forget being in your zone of genius, you're not even going to be in, you're not even going to know what your genius is, you're not going to know what you like, right? So actually, okay, here's a good idea. Let's just boil it down. Let's just start at the, at the basis at the foundation. So I had a client once and I was working on this project with her and every time she tuned in, she get this sense of I need to experience more joy. She had some disordered eating issues with money, and she was just basically not happy. And she just kept feeling like, wow, I need more joy. And I meant to embody joy. And what about joy. And when she did this exercise, the only thing and I think I've talked about her a couple of times on the show before because she's such a great example of this. Figuring out what you like and why it's so important. She could only think of one thing that she liked, which was so so get this she had the vision and the desire to experience more joy. She had a great relationship. She had a great career. But she had a certain level of unhappiness and unhealthiness. And not trusting herself and overriding herself and over eating certain things like that, right. So she had this vision for joy. She was experiencing or suffering from these sorts of symptoms. And then she found herself in this place, like, okay, there's this gap between that vision of joy, what my life really feels like right now. And what I'm doing, so she was getting the sense of I need to do something different to get to the vision, right to go past these obstacles of overriding myself and not liking myself and just being generally unhappy. And, you know, emotionally eating. So when she had that vision of joy, and she sat down to do the exercise, I gave her a voice Do you like, you got to do more of it that like that's the assignment, what do you like, now go do more of it. She could only come up with the one thing that she liked to take baths. And so she started to take a bath almost every day. And she did this for weeks. And then she just she came to one of our calls. And she said, I think I need new things that I like. So we talked about it. And she really wasn't tuned in. She couldn't she couldn't say like, Oh, I like this. And I like that she could come up with 10 things. But she came up with two more things. And they were this, she loved sitting in a chair by a window and just staring out the window. She loved that. And she loved leafing through catalogs and magazines. So she added those to to her daily attempted joy, like her daily stab at joy. So she would take her hot bath. And sometimes she would sit and look out the window permission. She was a hard worker, right? So permission to just sit and look out the window. And she would leave through magazines and catalogs. And she just started to feel more soft and delicious. Inside, she started to like herself more. Because here's the thing. This is a little spoiler alert, right? But so this is the truth of it. Why am I leading you down this path of looking at your likes and dislikes? Is it so that you can live in your zone of genius and live some big outstanding life? No, it's yes. Okay. Yes. And it also is this more like basic sense of what if you could be soft inside and like yourself more? What would that do for you? What if you could slow down, relax, feel soft inside, like yourself more. And know that you could tune into your inner compass and it would tell you, this is what you desire. Follow this. And guess what happens when you do that? When you start listening to your likes, and you start following them. And then it leads you to these bigger and bigger and bolder and more vivid soul desires. And then you start feeling really tuned in and tapped in and like oh, I know myself, Oh, well. Let me try this and see what happens and you start getting cooler and cooler results. And you're not living in a zone of incompetence, or even competence or even excellence. But you start to access your own personal brand of genius. And you start to connect to your purpose and feel like you have a purpose, and that you hear the voice of your soul. And you're listening to it and you're living your life from it. And you can now start to trust yourself. Because you have a tool to know which way you need to go on the road of life. And you believe in it and you can trust it. And you know because now you've got the experience of honoring those nudges that are coming at you from inside and you're seeing They're yielding positive results, you're feeling better, maybe even your life looks different on the outside. I mean, what kind of mastery is that? Imagine that feeling all the time? How do you do life? How do you grapple with your own inner terrain shifting or the outer terrain shifting or feeling lost? Or, you know what happens when you do compare how you feel inside that might be kind of messed up with the fact that it looks like everybody else is doing fine. I know I've had that in the past. That was one of the things that kept me going on this process of self discovery. And you know, hiring healers and coaches and reading all the books and doing all this personal inquiry and meditating and screaming into pillows and all of the other things that I have done religiously for the past 10 years. It's because I thought there has to be a way that I can feel as good as it looks like other people are doing right, I really and I had this moment where I really, I was hitting bottom and I was I stayed down there for for a while. But the thing that started to bring me back out was a conversation I had with a friend, where I asked her if she really thought there were people out there who liked their lives. And she said she did. And that really, I'm actually getting emotional revisiting that conversation, it really hit a chord inside of me of you know, that moment when you ask a question that's really true from from the bottom of yourself, right? Like from like, the guts of yourself, like, what's your real question that you need to ask? Like, what are you really on a very basic level can concerned with scared of worried about hopeful for, I just wanted, I want, I want to have a great life, I want to feel like I'm contributing, I want to feel like I'm having a great time, a lot of fun. I want to feel like there's meaning and, and power is the word that comes to me but like that internal personal power, right? Not like I'm just a pinball getting battered about by circumstance, some satisfaction, fulfillment, feeling alive, right? Feeling good. And feeling right. And so, you know, when I wasn't experiencing that, I would look around, I think everybody else seems to be fine. Now, if you're walking around thinking that there are some people who are fine, and there are some people who are great. But there's a lot of people who are faking, even being fine. And I know this because I talk to people all day long. And even people again, whose lives look fantastic. There's always this yearning for more, right. And that's the cutting edge of being human. Right. It's that creative edge of what's next. And I think we have not necessarily been taught how to work with that quality, that ever expanding, ever evolving that creative edge, it's always just out of reach that next thing is just out of reach, right. And we have taught been taught instead that you can nail down your life and then confirm your satisfaction and your security forever. All you have to do is write and whatever it is from wherever, you know, whatever your family culture was, or whatever the world was that you come from, is it for me it was, there was a lot of artists influence in my life and a lot of creativity. But you go to college, you know, and then in you know what your art is going to be. And then you become very successful in it. I also thought I moved to New York City. And now I'm going to be a successful actress. I can tell you, that is not how it happened. I did move to New York City and I was an actress. But it didn't be it didn't segue into this massive career. And so I had to I had to grapple with that. And I had to redirect and course correct in the middle of that. And so what is it for you, you get married, you have children you live happily ever after. And somewhere in the middle of that you realize, Wait, there's 50 years that I need to fill right now like with day to day? Am I just gonna I can't it's it's not vague, amorphous, it's the actual living out of this vision. And it's different when you're on the ground. Right? So that is one reason why we're looking at what are your likes? What are your dislikes? How do you connect to your soul desires? How do you connect to your inner genius and start living that out? Because, and also, you know, another thing that I cover I've covered in other shows is how do you deal with some of the emotions of being human? So when I looked up Chris Cornell, who let me just say I want to take a look here if there's anything that I can tell you. He of course, was Soundgarden was his original band, you might know from the 90s. But I saw that he was born on July 20 1964, and he died May 18 2017. Again, supposedly from suicide and I know that there's a lot of theories I read at the time. Perhaps it wasn't suicide. Perhaps he was on some kind of a medication that led him to commit suicide when actually he wasn't suicidal. Because I know that I've heard that sometimes the medicine is worse, you know, right. What did they say the cure is worse than the disease sometimes. But what was noteworthy to me when I just looked him up now is that July 20, is also my birthday. And I'm a cancer. When I see somebody who was born in July who's a cancer, I just, I get all squishy. And I'll say I've dated a couple of guys who had sons born in July, I dated one man whose son was born on my birthday, same birthday, July 20. And I was like, just be kind to him because he is feeling so much right now. We cancers are these deep feeling right? soft, squishy inside crab is the is the, the symbol. So you have this really hard exterior, right? So we might look tough, and we might look a little mean, right and edgy, as Chris Cornell, you know, lead singer for Soundgarden. But on the inside, there's all this squishy emotion. And a lot of us have not been taught how to deal with that, really, honestly, to how to deal with that. And so just I wanted to throw that into the mix. I didn't want to let his song go by and we didn't talk about him. Because I think it's important. And also just for you, wherever you are in your life, what are some of the squishy aspects of yourself or the emotional aspects of yourself that you maybe need to be paying more attention to? Or honoring a little bit more? And, you know, because how do we? How do we keep going as human beings, when it feels rough on the inside or rough on? Life can be rough on the outside or on the inside? Right? And so how do you how do you roll with that as it's all happening. So these are some of the thoughts we're going to add into we're gonna, we're gonna stir into the mix of talking about getting connected to your soul desires. We've been talking about getting connected to your likes and your dislikes, and actually following through and happy finding permission to adhere to and live your life from this place of I know that I like this. So I'm going to do more of that. I don't have to adhere to this sacrificial self punishing philosophy that maybe you inherited, I think most of us if not all of us inherited it to some degree, if not specifically from your family, from the culture that we're living in, that we're born into. There's this rule that you need to work hard, life is hard. And everybody has to do things that they don't like to do, you know, and that you're really lucky if you don't have to do you know, almost as if there's something you should feel guilty about, if your life is so good that you don't have to do things that you hate all the time. And almost as if you really are earning your stripes if you do things that you hate, right, you know, that expression like oh, she's such a saint. I hate that expression. I hate that expression. Who wants to be called a saint? Well, okay, I am going to answer that question. Because I do know that there are, there's again, there are some people, maybe you're one of them who love this experience of sacrifice, and I've seen it a lot. I started going to a Christian church about seven, seven years ago. And I noticed this pattern in the Christian churches that the the Christian women are so focused on the sacrifice that sacrificial element. So the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made the sacrifice he made for us on the cross, right? And everybody seems to forget all about the redemption in that story. I love that story that like we're all free, world good. It's okay. Like you can rise from the dead. To me, that's the exciting part of that story. Is the redemption, the rejuvenation, I'm not even using the right religious terms, am I right? But that thrill, that excitement that you get another chance, you're going to be okay, even if things fell apart, right? And even if you made a terrible mistake, or many, many terrible mistakes, it's okay. You can re re envision your future, you can recreate yourself, you can apologize, you can start again you can try again. I think that is a beautiful, beautiful story. And I think that is actually the story of Christ. Right. And in fact, now that makes me want to look up what the meaning of Christ is because we have in fact, I don't know if you know this, but there are people in the world today who are followed as a current incarnation of the Christ consciousness. And when I started having all these mystical experiences, where I may as well just come clean here, I got visited by Jesus Christ. It's happened multiple times. But the first time it happened, I was like, What is this? It was this golden light and it was the best feeling I've ever felt. And my mind was reeling going, that's crazy. And then the feeling kept happening. And I kept. So the experience was balling me over in my mind was still there going, Wow, this is nuts. Oh, no wonder some of these hardcore Christians seem so naive and like, as if nothing could ever go wrong, because that's how it feels when you're having that experience. So I come out of this intense mystical experience about seven years ago, and I immediately go to my iPhone. I, I admit it, oh, but I started Googling Christ consciousness because I wanted to make sense of like, what just happened to me? What about Christ consciousness? Like, I didn't want to go to suddenly becoming a born again, Christian. I want I'm like, well, there's got to be a how do I mediate this experience with what my current belief system is and who I want to be in the world. Maybe I'll talk more about that on some other show, I've actually thought about inviting the priests to went, I started going to a church in the Hudson Valley and had some amazing relationships with people there. And I thought about inviting the priests from that church onto the show. And maybe that's something we can talk about. Because I think that I know that the more that I talk to people, and when I share my experience, people have these hidden experiences, these secret hidden experiences that they haven't talked to anybody about. So I invite you to talk about anything and everything, and that we're leading actually into telling the truth, learning how to tell the truth. And I feel like I didn't wrap up that last thought. So if I left the thought dangling, you can always let me know, you can find me on Facebook. I'm Maia Wilde, it's Maia Wilde. If I left something unanswered, feel free to tell me what it was, reminds me and I'll address it on another show. And maybe it'll come back to me now in the moment. But what I am leading up to is telling the truth. And one of the things that we need to start doing is telling the truth about what we like and what we don't like, and about where we are really honoring ourselves. And we're dropping the ball, I want to say we're letting ourselves down. Where are you letting yourself down? That's a question I didn't expect to ask right now. But I think it's a good one. Ah, it just gives me this feeling of like, I know, there's somewhere I'm letting myself down just by the physical response I had when I said that question out loud. So where are you letting yourself down? Because a good way to start to get back. I don't there's so many ways to say this. But like, get back in integrity with yourself. That's not exactly how I want to say it. Because it just, again, that's been said so much that it loses a little bit of its its the intensity of its meaning. But where can you get more true to yourself? Right? Where can you lock that in? Like, who am I? Who are you? What do you want? What are you meant to be doing? What's the truth of your experience? What's the truth of who you are? And where are you letting yourself down? Because you're ignoring? Hmm, I think that's a good question that I just want us to all step in for a minute. Don't you think that's a good one? Like, Oh, where are you letting yourself down? Hey, it's Maia, I am excited to announce Maia Wilde's prescription for a personal revolution. That's a fancy way of saying that I've got some cool new mechanisms for you to get out of your own way in life and start expressing the hell out of your true self. Come over to maiawilde.thinkific.com. You can take my free Life On Fire Self Assessment Quiz, because you need to know where you are, figure out where you're gonna go. Next, you can join my private Facebook group Wild Women On A Cosmic Mission And A Few Bold Men where you get to meet and hang out with like minded people as your real self. And I've also got a guided meditation on Lighting Your Inner Fire along with some journal prompts. There's a new masterclass to Set Your Life On Fire: The Three Keys To Ignite Your Life. It's available also at Maiawilde.thinkific.com. You do not have to walk this road of life alone, and you definitely do not have to stay stuck. So click the link in the show notes or just go to Maiawilde.thinkific.com. And if you enjoy this podcast, make sure you subscribe, share it far and wide. And leave a review on Apple podcasts. I love hearing your experience of the show. And I love having you as a listener to this podcast. And we're talking today about how to not even just how to listen to your likes and dislikes. We're going to get into that right now. But like that you're even allowed to that you're even supposed to pay attention to what you like and what you don't like. And, and again, this isn't about living a soft life and being a weenie right, this isn't about, you know, well I just I only do what I like because I'm scared of the world and of expressing myself you know, then you never want to challenge yourself right? And you're always protecting yourself from risk taking. That is not what I'm talking about. And that is definitely the dark side of this kind of a quest or of you know of any kind of a like that you have you can get stuck There, you can get stuck doing only things that you've done before. And that is a risk in and of itself, right, that's its own kind of risk. And so that's not what I'm talking about at all. And but what I've seen is that people who get dedicated to the path of honoring what they like and trusting that their desires do lead them to their right life, that, again, that creative edge of being human, you'll keep expanding out into the next thing, you know, we don't actually lock it down, some people do. And maybe maybe that is the kind of life that works for you, or for some people, because again, different personalities, right, different generations, we come from different places we live. So I'm not talking about needing to live a big avert risk taking adrenalized life, I'm talking about really listening to your inner sense of truth and what you like to do and following that. And so there's a couple of threads that I dropped as I talk today. And one of them is truth telling, which we are going to be talking about. The other is, I just want to lay out this simple exercise for you that I share with my private life strategy clients, which is this, you're just going to make a list of all the things that you like to do. And again, what I've seen is when people start to honor that kind of a list, it leads to your next desire, it leads to your vision keeps opening up, this actually opens all the doors and windows in the house of your life. It really does. And so this is an intuitive strategy, right? I'm an intuitive life and business strategist. This is an intuitive strategy. So it's a strategy. It's an exercise, but it's also you getting you more tuned, tuned more deeply into yourself, which is what I like, Isn't that where it's all that that's where it's all at. That's where the roadmap to your life is. So you're going to make a list of everything that you like. And again, that client I shared about before who was like I like baths that was it. And she laughed months later, she said I think I had to take something around 40 baths before I got sick of it, and was ready to look for something else that I liked. At which point she started gazing out the window and leafing through catalogs and magazines. And then that led eventually to her. She had never told me this. We worked together for about nine months. At about the six month mark she mentioned Oh, I have a grand piano in my apartment. It came with the apartment. And I love to play piano but I have I never play. I didn't even know she had a piano. That's kind of a big deal, right? I mean, how many of us have pianos in our houses? Fantastic to have a piano right? My mom used to always play the piano. It was in a back room. I remember it was this. What do they call it was a stand up piano an upright. And my parents told the story, they got it for$15 moved into a back room. And I remember listening to her sometimes before dinner, she would play and sing and you'd hear the sound wafting through the house. It was fantastic. So having a piano in the house can be amazing. And it's not. So it's not common. We don't all have a piano in our apartment. Right. And so on her her path, her pursuit of joy, this client went from having taking baths medicinal a, I would say more than pleasure to play. And then she started giving herself permission to gaze out the window and leave through magazines and just take a little time for herself. And then she started playing the piano every night when she got home from work. 15 minutes, she played the piano. And it just started to open again, all the doors and windows to pleasure. And she wound up she was an artist. And she'd been talking about leading workshops and hadn't done anything about it. And after we stopped working together, I saw her advertising some workshops that she was going to be teaching. Her work was in hot demand, people wanted to know her style and technique. But the path to her getting to that next career move was pursuing joy and paying attention to what she liked. And then actually going and doing the things that she liked. And she said she had this horror story in the middle of it all, where she got on a call with me and she said, You know, I realized how much I override my inner voice. Because on Saturday I was tired. And I really wanted to stay home be with my man clean and organize the house, play the piano, right? Just have a little downtime a little me time. But she had a date to go bike riding with a friend. And she had this fear that we had located which was that if she didn't do exactly what everybody else wanted, nobody would love her. Right? So that's we all have stuff like that. So, you know, that was one of the things that we discovered of hers, so she overrode her desire to stay home. And she went on this bike ride with this friend and she got into a rough accident. She didn't break anything but she was beaten up. She was battered and bruised. And she said it drove home the point to her how deeply ingrained it is for her to override her inner knowing and her inner sense of what direction she should move in and how entrenched that belief is that nobody will love her if she doesn't do exactly what they want. It was what they call right the the cause Make two by four came down and got her. And so what we're talking about today, listening to your likes and dislikes, and honoring what you like to do, and doing less of what you don't like to do, is actually so that your soul starts to trust you, you start to trust yourself. And you can start to guide your life, you're steering the ship of your life, right? You get to, you're getting guided, and you can now take the right steps in the right direction, and not get hit by that cosmic two by four. So, um, and she wound up again, playing piano and expanding her career. And all of that began from this simple pursuit of joy and starting to do what she liked more of that. So write down a bunch of things that you like, and maybe you'll be like that client who could only come up with one at first, or maybe you like tons of things, and you do some of them, but not all of them. Or maybe you do all of them. This is an interesting thought. Maybe you do all of the things that you like, and you're in hot pursuit of entertaining yourself and keeping busy and doing all the things that you love. But you're still something still missing. That will be a message, that there's something else to take a deeper look at. That might be more like let me think what it could be a couple of thoughts are coming to my mind. One might be that you're on that cutting edge where the vision is about to expand, and you need to pay attention and consciously put your mental awareness on it, you know, is there a bigger creative project I need to take on? For instance, like my client who stayed in the same career as an artist, but she started to teach workshops, right, she didn't move out of her house, she just started playing the piano that was in her house. So there might be another step in the same direction of pursuing your likes, and then leading to your soul desires in your zone of genius. Or it could be that in the rabid pursuit, this came up with two clients recently in the rabid pursuit of feeling great all the time. You're ignoring some old emotional wounds that are still festering inside. I was talking to a client the other day. And I said to her, she's in California right now she lives in New York, she's in California, she was just at some Music Festival in New York. And then she is now in California, you know, in the redwoods, and with a bunch of cool people. And so she's one of these people who travels a lot, goes to great concerts, you know, really seems to take on the good things in life. But she has this unsettling feeling inside that something's wrong. Something's not right. And so I was saying to her, you seem to really have a strength. And not everybody has to pursue, like the art of enjoying your life, you've really got positive feeling nailed down. But there's also some squirmy stuff inside, you know, old stuff from your past marriage from your childhood with your parents. That you are not looking at, because seems like it's not your strength to sit with the dark stuff. And I said, am I right? Am I wrong? Like, tell me where I'm wrong? And she said, No, you're right. All all of that, yes. And so you can look at where you might be. Sometimes, if you're doing all of the good things, and you're still not feeling right, like something's still missing, you might need to look in the opposite direction, which is to tread the dark side for a little bit. So but okay, let's stick with this exercise, let me I want to send it to, I want to give it to you all the way. So you're gonna write down everything you like. And then you're gonna write down stuff that you really don't like doing, that you're doing or that you're afraid you're going to have to do. Again, you're going to make a list of both of these items. And then you're going to start honoring, you're going to start doing more of the things that you like, and fewer of the things that you dislike. And what will happen in this moment is any obstacle, inner or outer, that is standing in the way of you living fully in your zone of genius, and on your sole mission. And living your life on purpose will rise to the surface, it'll either you'll feel really guilty or your spouse will throw a fit, right? Something will happen that will show you it'll expose the obstacle. And so then this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where you start to develop a little bit of inner strength, right and personal power, where you're going to need to decide now I believe in this and again, that book I mentioned earlier is the big leap. That's a great companion if you're going to try to start adhering to your likes and your dislikes, you know, honoring yourself, because it's hard to do it alone. And people are going to push back and your inner stuff is going to push back. So you might need a little bit of support on the path. And that's a great book for that to just give you permission remind you like I'm allowed to do this. I'm allowed to do what I like more of what I like all of what I like and less of what I dislike Today we are talking about liking and doing what you like. And acknowledging what you don't like and not doing that as much, and that you're allowed to, because that actually is a really concrete tool you can use to get in touch with your inner compass, which is what is inside of you, and meant to guide you on this crazy road of life. We're talking about getting in touch with your likes and just living your life from the things that you like to do and from your soul desires. And I have a book with me in the studio today. It's called The Art of loving, you might know it it's by Eric frome. I might be mispronouncing his name. This is from 1956. Why am I bringing a book called The Art of loving into a conversation about what you like and what you don't like? Well, there's a few reasons one, I'm going to share a few very concrete concepts that he lays out in this book that we struggle with in our culture, and in this day and age especially. But also because this is an art, the art of enjoying your life, the art of being fully you the art of honoring your likes and dislikes, the art of living in your zone of genius, right? This is an art. So it's it evolves like I've been saying it expands. And maybe you can't even make any mistakes, which I love. The idea of this is a masterpiece. This is your life that you're creating. That's unfolding right now. And so wherever you find yourself right now, what's the next right move? What's the direction you want to move in? What do you want to express? Who do you want to be? Right? And we dropped a question into the middle of this conversation. Where are you letting yourself down? That might sound like a heavy dark question is really important. Are you relating to this at all? I, yeah, I can't reread this We can't just avoid, again, you know, you are not going to get to where you want to be in terms, even if we don't even have to be talking about living up to some external potential. But just that feeling of what's true to you, what's the real you who's the real you that place, you can't get there, right? Unless you tell yourself the truth you're willing to pursue. You keep an open mind about all of this. And you're willing to ask yourself the hard questions and tell yourself, even the worst stuff. And I see a lot of times somebody said this to me the other day, she was a potential client, she wanted to get on the phone for a strategy session. And she said, I at the end of the call, she said, I feel good, I feel much lighter and clearer and stronger inside myself. And she said, I honestly was nervous getting on the phone with you. Because she said she didn't want to feel some of the feelings, she was afraid we would be going into that, you know, the deep dark stuff we went there. And that the important thing about going there is that there is truth there. And then there's also cleansing from spending enough time there that things actually start to heal, right, you bring things up to the light. And they really do start to shift into light. I don't I don't have any other way to say it. And it's pretty spectacular to witness it inside myself and with people all the time. So if there's a place where you're ignoring something, remember, this is an art form that you're practicing the art of being human. It's an experiment, it's an improvisation, you get to do it your way. And there are some great tools out there that will help to guide you. And it's it's okay to be scared. But you don't have to stay stuck in the dark stuff. But going in there is really important because you need to go down there to heal, to cleanse, and to come through the other side. So I'm going to read a little bit from chapter four in this book, The Art of loving again, it's by Erich Fromm from Yeah, sorry, if I'm mispronouncing it, this chapter is called The practice of love. And he says this, "The practice of any art has certain general requirements quite regardless of whether we deal with the art of carpentry, medicine, or the art of love. First of all, the practice of an art requires discipline. I shall never be good at anything if I do not do it in a disciplined way. Anything I do only if I'm in the mood, maybe a nicer, amusing hobby, but I shall never become a master in that art. But the problem is not only that a discipline in the practice of the particular art say practicing every day, a certain amount of hours. But it is that of discipline in one's whole life. One might think that nothing is easier to learn from modern man the discipline. Does he not spend eight hours a day in a most disciplined way at a job which is strictly routinized. The fact however, is modern man has exceedingly little self discipline outside of the sphere of work. When he does not work, he wants to be lazy to slouch or to use a nicer word to relax. This very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinization of life. Just enough. Let me just read a couple. I'm not going to read because man is forced for eight hours a day to spend his energy for purposes, not his own, in ways not his own, but prescribed for him by the rhythm of the work, he rebels and his all of what he says about the next couple of items. But I love rebelliousness takes the form of an infantile self indulgence. In addition, in the battle against authoritarianism, he has become distrustful of all discipline of that enforced by irrational authority, as well as have rational discipline imposed by himself. Without such discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic and lacks in concentration." That is from The Art of Loving by Eri From, and it touches on a lot o things that we've talked abou in today's show, right? Like who's the authority in you life? Are you the authority? An how is your inner authority whe you tune in, like who's i charge, right? Because there's lot of different aspects to wh we are. And when we're not full integrated. We do have tha infantile aspect, who is perhap guiding us to do things that ar not actually leading us into ou best life, or our biggest visio for ourselves. And when I firs read this about 20 years ago, loved that idea, because I sa it to be very true for myself that when I was working a jo that I was going to eight hour a day, I was waitressing a lot and then teaching English a second language living in th city, being an actress. On m time off, I was not focusing o my acting career, because tha all required self discipline right. And it was like, I neede to be a self starter. And I fel like I really deserve som downtime, some beer and Chines takeout and a bunch of comedies I go down to the local DV store. Yeah, back in the ol days before Netflix, right? Oh there's such a, there is a grea way to relax. And that' nourishing and replenishing. Bu this really hit home for me thi idea that my real life i passing me by because I lack th discipline, to actually I lac the inner infrastructure t actually make something ne happen. And I feel like deserve this downtime, because have worked at a job that he talks about discipline because it's true. Also, you know, when I have talked to people and I've seen this for myself, certainly, when I am not plugged into a program, it's very easy for me to be Lottie, da, right. And I see this with people who are struggling with self actualization, trying to make something new happen from inside themselves. To just do some free courses online or read a book can be you can have a lot of epiphanies. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you're walking it into your life right out in the world, because that's hard to do. And so I've seen when either people lock themselves into a program working with me or I have locked myself into a program, working with someone or studying something, a class a course of some kind, a weekend away, it acts as discipline, it imposes the discipline on me right when I don't have it coming from inside myself. So I really like what he says but discipline, right? If you want to start honoring your likes and dislikes and listening to your soul desires, and having your inner compass guide you in your life, that is actually going to require discipline. This is not an amorphous, airy fairy far out. Whoo, whoo, la dee da thing. It requires active discipline. The next thing that art from says is that concentration is a necessary condition for the mastery of an art. And that that is hardly necessary to prove anyone who ever tried to learn an art knows this. Yet, even more than self discipline, concentration is rare in our culture. I'm going to interject here, he wrote this book in 1956. It's 2019. How's our concentration as a culture? If I put my phone away for a few days, which I'll do over the weekend, I just won't touch my phone. I noticed the first two days or so my hands are itchy. I want to touch it. I want to get my phone. Just my nerve endings are like these tentacles out there wanting to grasp the phone and, you know, the touchscreen. There's I'm programmed. I have programmed myself for that. And so I forced myself to concentrate. I also have had severe ADHD. I've been bouncing off walls, my whole adult life. And in the past few years, I've really gotten a handle on it. I still though I now feel grounded in my body and I do different meditate. I have a meditation practice and there's things that I do too, with my diet and exercise and sleep and all of that right. Those are very important, but I also still have to remind myself like no, you're not checking Facebook while you're emailing. Just sit here and breathe if you need to, if you need something to do while you're waiting for this page to load, sit here and brave and so yeah concentration he said it in 1956. "On the contrary," he says, "our culture leads to an unconcentrated and diffused mode of life hardly paralleled anywhere else. You do many things at once you read listen to the radio, talk, smoke, eat drink, you are the consumer with the open mouth eager and ready to swallow everything pictures liquor knowledge. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves to sit still without talking smoking, reading, drinking, it is impossible for most people. They become nervous and fidgety and must do something with their mouth or their hands." Wow. And he wasn't even around for the smartphone, iPad. What else do we have? What are other devices? I mean, isn't this incredible? But if you want to master the art of doing what you like, and living in your zone of genius and loving your life, right you need to practice the art of concentration. He next talks about oh you're not gonna like this I don't like this. I dislike this. This is this is interesting because I dislike what he's going to talk about now but I know that it's a good thing. And so there's also that right that nuance plays where you're going to have to get clear with yourself and maybe get a witness to help you discern Is this a dislike that I'm just not comfortable doing it because I'm it's not a habit yet or is this a dislike that it should be something that I don't do okay? He says this, "A third factor in mastering an art is patience. Patience. Again, anyone who ever tried to master an art knows that patience is necessary if you want to achieve anything. If one is after quick results, one never learns an art yet for modern man patience is as difficult to practice as discipline and concentration, our whole industrial system Foster's exactly the opposite quickness. Of course, there are important economic reasons for this. But as in so many other aspects, human values have become determined by economic values. Modern Man thinks he loses something time, when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it." Go Erich Fromm, right? The Art of Loving 1956. And there's one last piece here that I want to share with you from this book that applies again to anything it could be the art of loving, it could be the art of loving yourself. It could be an actual art or business or any kind of a discipline, or any kind of a vision that you'd like to realize. He says this,"Eventually a condition of learning any art is a supreme concern with the mastery of the art. If the art is not something of supreme importance, the apprentice will never learn it. He will remain at best a good dilettante but will never become a master. This condition is as necessary for the art of loving as for any other art. It seems though, as if the proportion between masters and dilettante is more heavily weighted in favor of the dilettantes in the art of loving than it is in the case with the other arts." We're not talking about the art of loving necessarily here, but you know, maybe we could apply that what he says there, too. I know that I've been cornered, I was at a book club once and I didn't know anybody. I was in the city for a few weeks. And I went to a book club somebody invited me to and when they heard this one woman in the group heard that I was a life coach, she basically cornered me but in front of the entire group of people I didn't know and said, Life Coaching. What's that sometimes people just need to get a job, right? She's talking about her sister, she was struggling with her sister, not working and you know, soul searching and trying to find herself in life. And, you know, I really, I think I'm revisiting it now as I'm talking about it. And it just, you know, again, we are each on our own path, right? And I am in huge favor of mastering things. And perhaps her sister at that time needed to master the art of doing nothing or master the art of finding herself or getting to know herself. And I don't prescribe anything for people, right, we come to a conclusion together. It's client led, as well as coach led in the sessions that I do. This idea that there's a prescription or right prescription like this woman had this idea that there's this right prescription for all of us. I don't know what's right for her sister. I didn't meet her sister, although I did have a sense of this woman potentially hitting a wall later in her own life of having just worked and never taken the time to do some soul searching. And that I think that making things that seem she clearly was dismissing anything that smacks of airy fairy spiritualism to her. She was dismissing it out of hand, but to her sister to appear to be of supreme importance. And so I am just, I don't know why that story came to my mind. So I'm just sharing it because it's interesting how different things are of super importance to each of us. But I hold firm, that this kind of personal inquiry and soul searching, it's the heart and soul of your life. You can't just stay there forever, because then you'll get nothing done. So then at a certain point, you need action steps. And I actually had two people tell me a few weeks ago that I was the only coach they'd ever talked to, who gave them action steps, and didn't just say, well, the answers are inside you. And you'll know when it's time and you'll know what to do. And that blew my mind. It also made me feel better about some of the investments I've made in my life where I hired coaches who didn't know they couldn't give me anything concrete to do. So, you know, I just throw this out there as food for thought, as we're talking about discipline and supreme importance, and what is of supreme importance. Ultimately, you're the authority and you get to decide, where do you what do you want to master? What art Do you want to master. And then the final thing that Erich Fromm talks about is that anyone who aspires to become a master in their art must begin by practicing. So you practice discipline, concentration, and patience. And he says, throughout every phase of his life, every phase of life, clearly the language is dated. That's from the art of loving by Erich Fromm from 1956. And I want to talk a little bit in our final minutes about truth telling, because you need to tell the truth about what you like and what you don't like. And you need to tell the truth about why you're not honoring your likes and dislikes. And you also need to tell the truth about where you're letting yourself down. And some of the other heavier questions that you need to be taking on in your life. You need to be telling yourself the truth. What's the Dirt Road Less Travelled? It's owning the unexpected adventure of your life. Yeah, you're covered in mud, no map in hand, but you feel so alive. Like your life has real meaning, and you're absolutely on the right path. You've been listening to Dirt Road Less Travelled. If you like what you hear, share an episode with a friend or share many episodes with several of your friends and make sure that you hit subscribe. And if you want to find out how to connect what we talked about on the show to your own life. Check out what's happening at MaiaWilde.com, the conversation over there is all about how to live like you're on a mission and what's that mission? Doing life as the real you living on purpose, healing all the old being able to envision the new and of course expressing the hell out of yourself. That's MaiaWilde.com. I'm Maia Wilde. This is Dirt Road Less Travelled. Until next time, stay true to yourself out there.