Look Up!

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Years ago there was a women in the UK called Mary Whitehouse. She was the bane of every teenage boys life as she went on a puritanical campaign to purge everything that was fun from TV, including ‘Dr Who’, ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ and nipples.

She believed Society was fast forwarding into a bacchanalian abyss with TV leading the charge. The dropping of standards by allowing violence, nudity and bad language, she reasoned, would only lead to moral bankruptcy. And we all laughed heartily at the old lady with funny hair and silly glasses.

It seems however, she may be right after all.

The ‘F’ bomb made it’s first ever appearance on this blog in this post not but a few days ago. Yet after taking almost 3 years to turn up, it ‘s already back by popular demand thanks to todays guest poster, Lord Johnny of Truant

If I didn’t have a single other life coaching client in the world, Truant would without doubt be my favorite. Even though he spends a lot of his time using fruity language, posing with fresh fruit and ranting about fruit flies he isn’t as insane as you may first imagine. In fact, from time to time he says some deeply profound and moving things that question the very fabric of of our existence, or so he says.

So grab yourself an apple, slip on your best smoking jacket and put your feet up as you read why JT is starting to look up a lot more often….

I was going to call this post “Don’t Look Down.” As you keep reading, you’ll see how ironically imperfect that would have been, because that title would have contradicted a lot of what I’m about to write. The only saving grace was that I realized it and pointed it out before Tim could correct me, probably with a high spinning kick to the throat off of the top rope, which is something everyone knows he really likes to do to his clients.

Let’s start at the beginning. Sort of.

I wrote a guest post for this blog a while back in which I described my shitty financial situation and how afraid I was every day about it. I then metaphorically turned around and thanked my tormentor, pointing out how fear had a way of making people do things that they needed to do but wouldn’t do otherwise.

In general, people can be motivated by the promise of something good, but they tend to be much more motivated when something terrible is chasing them.

So I said, “Thank you, oh fear that has kept me in a constant state of skeletal rigor for a full year, oh great panic that has kept me from sleeping. Thank you so much for kindly nudging me in the direction of my greater purpose. I was like a battered wife saying that my abusive husband was a good guy who meant well.

Today, I’ve changed my tune. It’s three months later, and three months into the actions that the fear forced me to take. Today, I’ve told that fear to kindly fuck off.

Let me explain.

Fear is indeed a very good motivator. It has a wonderful way of declaring that you’re going to sink or swim — but you’re sure as hell not going to keep floating idly down the river toward the falls. If you need to get off your ass, fear is a great ally to have.

In my own case, it got me up and moving rather quickly. Shortly after writing that post about how fear was swell and cool and looked kind of like Hugh Jackman when it wore that one starched Hugo Boss shirt, I started an online business. I stood up, slung a pair of big balls over my shoulder, and said that I would succeed or go down fighting. And it worked. Things improved, fast. In fact, that business is very near to making its ten thousandth dollar. My problems were solved. Peace of mind was here at last.

Right?

Well, not so much. Every time I started to relax, I’d find reasons to panic. My mind was excellent at finding new, troubling fears. And what’s more, it seemed to intensify — because if things were going very well, the fear had to be very big to derail it.

But derail it it did, because my mind said, “If you’re not afraid, bad things will happen.”

If you’re not careful, fear can become a crutch. Your mind becomes like a junkie, telling you that you need it to survive. That’s what had happened to me. It was astonishing how I found new ways to be afraid, even if it meant coping with a groundless, vague sense of unease that had no logical antecedent at all.

So I’m here today to say, officially, for the record, in front of the assembled press and paparazzi: Fuck off, fear. You have done your job in moving me out of crisis, but I am no longer driven by the whip. I’m now driven by the carrot being held in front of me.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Tim’s my life coach, and he’s always telling me to mind my language – and not in the same way my mother does. I’d tell him that I “needed to move before the winter came” or that I “just couldn’t face doing my taxes.” But would I die if I didn’t move? Was I physically unable to do my taxes? I’d talk to him about fear, and worry, and panic, and sadness, and mild depression. No wonder I was always afraid and down. No wonder the prospect of doing those taxes kept feeling harder and harder.

So to replace the fear, I came up with a new metaphor. I wanted to be vigilant and work hard, but wanted to keep my eyes on the prize instead of on the problems waiting if I failed. I started telling myself, “don’t look down.”

Which was a big joke because what do you do when someone says to not look down? You look down. I was saying, “Don’t look at these bills.” I was saying, “Ignore financial problems.” It’s like saying, “Don’t think of a pink elephant.” You have to remember the bills, the ruin, and the elephant in order to deny them.

So I started thinking of what I actually wanted rather than what I didn’t want. I started telling myself, “Keep looking up.”

You can be motivated be good things; it just takes some mental training. It takes vigilance over the words you use to others and in your own head. And if you don’t feel it, fake it. If you catch yourself looking down, remind yourself that what you really want to do is to look up. If you start thinking about what you must do, start reminding yourself that the truth is that you want to do it because of how good you’ll feel when it’s done.

I work hard now because it gives me peace of mind. It allows me to relax without guilt at the end of the day. I work hard because it’s allowing me to move from Ohio to North Carolina, where it’s at least somewhat warm and sunny for the entire year. I think a lot about the future I’m building. It’s not accurate to say that I refuse to look down. What I do is to keep looking up.

Now if I could only find a counter-move to that spinning throat kick off the top rope. I’m considering maybe a figure-four leg-lock. What do you think?

——————

You can find Johnny Truant lurking here and also stalk him on Twitter here. A quick word about Twitter. I get about 75 new followers per week here and about 3/4 of those people unfollow me pronto when I fail to follow back. I’m not being a stuck up knob (no more than usual anyway), it’s just that I turned off e-mail notifications for new followers ages ago. The reason is, I get enough e-mails every day and I would rather decide who to follow based on who talks to me. It’s an old fashioned concept I know, but I like it.

An excellent new resource from Cath Duncan goes live today. She is condensing some great self development books into manageable chunks, so that you can get the value out of them without having to wade through all the fluff, Cool idea, huh? Check it out here. This is an affiliate link, but I know and trust Cath.

Finally I am going to get soppy. It’s my wifes birthday today (1st July) and I just wanted to say Happy Birthday to the gorgeous, talented, funny, wise, compassionate, patient, intelligent and always incredibly supportive Skippy B xx. Any women that can put up with me deserves praise, I think we can all agree with that.

Next Up: I’m starting a brain changing experiment that has cost me hundreds of dollars and is for your good. So tune in next time to find out what misery I’m subjecting myself to all in the name of self-development and helping lovely people like you.