Who makes the decisions?

I trust my higher self.

There is a version of me who is connected to something bigger, who has access to more of the puzzle and who makes infinitely better choices.

I don’t trust any other version of me. I’ll listen to what those versions have to say and let them know that they are welcomed to contribute, but they don’t call the shots.

When my higher self makes an important decision or creates a new structure or habit, I will defend that to the end. If I’m feeling exhausted or sad or angry, I won’t allow myself to override what was decided from a higher energy state. If I leave my little boy in charge, every day will be an adventure and a spontaneous, chaotic mess. I’ll take note of what these versions bring it up at the next internal board meeting, but there’s a very clear hierarchy.

It’s higher self above all.

Who's calling the shots around here?

At the core of my being, I consider myself to be a builder and a scientist.

I build products, technologies, and teams that help humans be better, and I create experiments to test my wild assumptions and hypotheses about the ever-changing world we live in.

I have noticed recently that I have been allowing my Human to be calling the shots with some of my experiments. I wrote yesterday about a major change to that. Let me explain.

My Human optimizes for moment to moment pleasure and pain avoidance with a very short term focus. My Higher Self only wants one thing: to actualize my potential within this lifetime.

With my Human at the helm, my experiments often result in falsified data.

For example, about a year ago I tried banishing alarm clocks and normal sleep schedules from my life. I would go to bed when I felt exhausted, and I would wake up naturally when my body was well rested. To my Human, this was incredible. Total sleep freedom. To my Higher Self, it was a hot mess. No schedule, no consistency, no rhythms, no structure. Every day was an adventure, which is certainly exciting but definitely not optimized for getting shit done.

When I'm out of alignment, the wisdom of my Higher Self gets diminished and the voice of my Human wins.

I'm realizing that I have done this with so many things. Work, diets, exercise, distractions, video games, finances, relationships. The list goes on and on.

When I run these micro experiments from an unaligned place, its easy for my Human to justify the results to be more focus on the here and the now. Now, there was nothing wrong with letting my Human run these experiments. At the time, I'm sure I needed more sleep or craved distractions. My Human has got my back. I know that.

This simple yet profound awareness explains so much of the inner conflict that has been present recently. I am past the stage of needing the protection of my Human. What a beautiful gift to have my Human know exactly what was needed when it was needed. Thank you.

Now it's time though to let the Higher Self back in the driver's seat so we can make it rain abundance on the whole damn planet.

How can I view myself from a higher perspective?

During a conversation at dinner last night, we stumbled upon a place that we all know is true: it is easier to see blind spots and opportunties for others than it is for ourselves.

While this is the core foundation of coaching and outside leadership, there is so much value to cultivating that skill internally as well. One of my main goals in working with leaders is to help them improve their self-assessment and understand what can be seen so easily from the outside.

This ties directly in with my favorite principle from Ray Dalio's book:

"Look at the machine from a higher level."

If we use Ray's analogy of our bodies as machines, we have a higher self that has the ability to write the code and make the decisions for this machine. Other times though, we let the machine overwrite the rules. We may have too much to drink, skip the gym, not get enough sleep, procrastinate at work on something important. Our higher self knows that all of these things are in our long term best interest, but the machine responds with a hard "Nope!"

How can I best design the system so that the machine is happy, satisfied, and satiated while allowing my higher self to be running the show?

It starts with a radical self-assessment and understanding the wants, needs and desires of the machine. If I neglect the human for long enough in pursuit of the path of the higher self, the human revolts and things break down. That's how I've tended to operate in the past. Long periods of high accomplishment followed by the crash.

Once I intimately understand the machine, it is then possible to design a life that allows the machine to feel like it's getting everything it wants while operating from the higher self.

I realized that this is a pretty far out there concept, and I'm still at the beginning steps of embracing this myself. I look forward to sharing more as I find the symphonic balance between the machine and the higher self.