flowboy

@Jon_Bundesen We all need to unwind and take a break from the most important thing. It nourishes the soul and sparks creativity. If you know your direction and purpose, great. Put your best energy towards that. But there will be a chunk of your daily or weekly time, that you can not productively put towards that one thing. That time is better used recharging by doing something totally unrelated.

It could very well be a lack of life experience. I would trust my intuition on that. Ah, I see where you'd get stuck that way. Choices are hard when you have the expectation that they should last forever. Or that they should be "right". Or that they can be "wrong". There are no wrong choices. Everything is learning. And when you get sick enough of stagnating, you'll find yourself making choices. Those choices will get you the life experience you need, in order to learn what you want and don't want. Almost everyone who found a purpose, got their start by choosing a bunch of things that turned out to be "not it". So did Leo. So did I. So did everyone. What would have happened if Leo had expected himself to come up with his ultimate life purpose straight out of college, and put pressure on himself to choose the 100% forever "right thing" from his couch, before trying a bunch of things? He'd still be on that couch. The path is choosing what feels right, without overthinking it, because all we can do is work with the information that we have, and then when it turns out to not be right, we pivot to something else. You can not steer a parked car. It has to be set in motion first.

@Valach I understand the difficult position that puts you in. I also struggled with expectations and deadlines and got very stressed out with worries whilst communicating with companies that made job offers to me. More money is great, but that should only be a deciding factor if both choices seem good regardless of money. Here's a question for you to ask yourself: If I just heard from a psychic that with a 100% certainty, everything is going to work out for me, and I'm always going to have enough money, what choice would I make here?

@KoryKat I'm seeing a lot of different directions here: crypto trading, book covers, life coaching, affiliate marketing... these are worlds apart. The common factor is you, to meet your needs of making money to escape the 9-to-5. That's okay and that's valid, but the world does not reward a selfish interest. If you want to make money, online or offline, real money, you have to shift into wanting to help others, and then help yourself in the process by charging for it. Even the life coaching is just for you: I'm not seeing that you have a clear idea of who you want to coach and why, and I understand that, because you're looking for a way to earn money. That's fine and you will earn money, but only if you shift out of this needy mindset, and start thinking about who you want to help. It's literally that. What type of people would you love to help? The more affinity you feel with them, the better. You have to find a category of people (maybe they are like you, maybe they are like yourself from the past, maybe they are more people like someone you love and care about, your sister who struggled with X, maybe they work in a field you are fascinated with) When you define that, then you can start to find out what they need help with. By talking to a lot of them. From there, you can create a product or service, or even an informational website or channel and then monetize that. But it starts with an authentic desire to help a specific group of people you care about for some reason. If you don't really care and are only in it for yourself, people can smell that miles away and you won't make money long term.

@Husseinisdoingfine I've felt like this more times than I can count. There's been a lot of moments where I saw something being done, which I already came up with, but was not in the right position to execute on. I felt angry and powerless. These days, I just take it as a sign that I'm in tune with what is supposed to be created, and able to come up with good ideas. The attachment to one specific idea, and the discouragement when someone else already does it, comes from placing too much importance on a specific idea, and undervaluing my ability to come up with the right stuff at the right time. I noticed that whenever I came up with something good, I had an underlying fear that it was my one and only chance, and I'd never come up with a good one after that. Reality is quite different. It's not a race to "get there first" or else all is lost. It is only that if you make it so. Inventors and entrepreneurs pivot lots of times, more often than not, the thing that ends up making them successful at helping lots of people is completely different from what they started with. Your drive to help people, and your ability to come up with solutions, is where your value is. That's what matters. And no one can do it like you can. No one can think exactly like you, sense what you sense, come up with what you come up with, view things the way you do, perceive what you perceive, experience what you experience, learn what you learn, and give your own unique version of the value you give. And there's room for much more than one. If you look at any invention that has been successful, you will see that there's a handfull of companies producing different versions for different people, and many of them are successful. Because customers are different, they have different needs and preferences. One product can not serve them all. If you still want to help paralyzed people, then nothing much is different. As long as there are still paralyzed people who can not walk, you still have a purpose. Spinal cord stimulation will not work for everyone, and for the ones it does work for, it may cause other problems, have deficiencies, or there will be a need for other additional solutions to different pains and problems that arise when this one idea has been invented. The possibilities to help are endless, when you trust your creativity.

Setting Healthy Boundaries & How Natasha used Breathwork to Unblock her Throat Chakra - a fun conversation I had with friends

@Barna Here's the playlist I have used on a daily basis for years, to get deep work done: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/60cCUFP5ssk0U85BJzI71g?si=bd871008fe344de6

I was also bullied. It got rid of my desire to fit in. So I went my own way, but still had a desire to fit in somewhere, and being in groups would trigger the hell out of me because I was terrified of being excluded. Childhood conditioning can work in unpredictable ways. Do you still feel influenced by that?

Have your parents empowered you to make your own choices, or were you raised to do what your father or mother said, or else? If that's the case, then childhood conditioning can be at the root of this need to please people.

Don't combat. What you resist, persists. Start being grateful and curious towards everything you feel. Combine it with shadow work / inner child work. This is a must, if you want permanent growth. Use your favourite method. I also have a video on it.

@Valach Well, that's what an open relationship does. I've done it. I wouldn't recommend against it or for it, just to keep in mind that everything is reciprocal. What you get to do, she gets to do. It will confront you with your deepest insecurities, and this can be good for self-development but also takes a lot of emotional energy to work through. It can take away from the energy you have for your work. But this can be worth it. If you want to work on your jealousy by confronting it, it can be a good path. I learnt a lot about women's sexuality from being in an open relationship. Just don't expect it to be easy. If you take this path with your eyes open, being willing to be confronted with your deepest insecurities and willing to invest the energy to learn and grow from that, then it can be a good thing. It's not the "I get to do whatever I want with no stress" setup that it can seem like, though. What you can be trusted to do and not do, that's how much you can trust her. So you have to define the standards for behavior within the relationship, in a way where you can 100% be committed to embodying those standards, and also this is how you want to be treated. What you don't want her to do, you can not do. You're only as free as you're comfortable with her being. That means if you want her to warn you beforehand, or ask permission, or consult with you before she goes on a date, then you have to do the same (unless you define it asymmetrically) Regardless of what you call your relationship, your woman will only feel good if it's well-defined what the standards and boundaries are. If she's completely free to do whatever with no rules, then typically she won't feel safely contained in the relationship, and will start acting like she's single and her emotional commitment to you can become diminished. Because you're not embodying a masculine energy that contains her. If you don't create a proper framework, and just say "we can do whatever we want now", you may as well break up, because that doesn't feel like a relationship, especially to the feminine. So my recommendation is to sit down with yourself and create a framework of how you want the relationship to work, what's okay and not okay, and then propose it to her, get her input, and see if you both are willing to commit to that.

How would you feel if she went on the same coffee meeting with that guy you mentioned, only now you both agreed she's allowed to sleep with people? Would that suddenly clear up your unease, whilst sitting behind your desk working while she's out on a date?

You can see how these two things are at odds Your standard of behavior is to maybe make a mistake, but then be honest about it. So then, this is what you expect from her as well. And you're not okay with that outcome.

Two components to this type of jealousy: Reciprocal distrust. Might you go out for a coffee with a girl you used to sleep with, do you feel no doubt whatsoever that you wouldn't make out with her if she tried? If you're not absolutely clear and certain that you wouldn't "cheat", then you can't trust your significant other in the same way. This is also related to karma. People are wired to expect others to work the same way as them. That means that if you can't be 100% trusted, you can't 100% trust anyone else. Lack of groundedness and being 'enough'. The possibility of your girlfriend going out and getting hit on, and potentially seduced, is only scary if you're not 100% okay and happy on your own. If you feel like you need her to feel complete, you will get this type of jealousy. If you're grounded in yourself, then if she makes a mistake in the relationship, well that's a nuisance but you're still fine. The consequences are for her, because she's the one who stepped out, so she'll have to make it up to you or deal with a breakup. You're still doing great either way. And if you are truly this grounded, then the possibility of her cheating wouldn't even enter your mind. It just feels like a silly and ridiculous idea, because YOU feel so valuable! Where else would she even find that? This ties into our cultural norms as well. It's so normalised to 'need' the other person to feel complete, it's everywhere in pop songs and movies. No wonder then, that this type of jealousy is so common.

The mistake is to identify yourself as anything that limits you.

@PepperBlossoms I did that by deeply feeling into: what am I afraid of when I'm being too nice / not setting boundaries Because the being too nice is an automatic response, what helped me is to first "break through it" by going against that impulse. Especially the boundary setting is easy to mess up, because lack of boundaries is often connected to a very primal instinct to be safe. So agreeing to something you shouldn't, being too accommodating, often has happened already before you're aware of it. What I've done is just go back and undo it, whenever I notice it. I've literally revisited conversations so many times and said something like: Remember how I agreed to come over to your place and bring this and that? Actually, that doesn't work for me. I know I said yes to taking a walk, but now that we're here, I realise that I actually didn't want to. So I'm going to head back. Just correcting it after the fact. Eventually that turns into real-time awareness and behavior change. It's extremely uncomfortable, but necessary. If you do that, then you will be confronted with strong emotions. These strong emotions, resulting from going against your ingrained niceness, are clues to the root of your problem. If you do shadow work or inner child work on those, you can fix it and improve quickly.

If she says: I only date people who drink alcohol / smoke / inject cocaine, I would just reply: Well, it was nice to meet you then. And turn my body halfway away from her. If she was serious about that, it's not a match and she'll walk away. If she is still interested in you, now you conveyed non-neediness and she'll chase you. Thereby you are holding the frame and she's falling into it. If you respond to a statement of standards like that with any form of explaining yourself, you're conveying low status and neediness. It's only downhill from there, because you're telegraphing that you're willing to bend to someone's standards in order to get love, attention and sex. High value people don't do that.

@AndylizedAAY

Same thing here, simple follow natural curiosity. If you're not excited, then you won't come up with conversation topics that excite her. If you're with someone interesting, you'll naturally wonder about hot topics, like what in her life makes her passionate, whether she has a good relationship with her friends, the way she dresses, what she's wearing, how her skin feels, how warm her hand is, what excites her, whether that lipstick comes off when you kiss her, whether she's a good kisser... All that stuff will come up naturally as thoughts, and then you can bring it up, by saying things or doing things.

If you're not there because you'd potentially want to sleep with her, it's not a date. That's not dating experience you're racking up, that's ... platonic networking experience? Are you playing it too safe by picking girls you don't want anything with?

Exactly

She doesn't want to be fixed, @amps . She just wants to be able to share her difficulties with you. Your job as the boyfriend is to listen and experience her feelings with her, without making her feel that something is wrong with her. And without coming up with solutions, or telling her to do something about it. Because that makes her feel like something is wrong with her. This is a classic masculine/feminine communication issue. When a man hears something that sounds like a problem, he interprets: "this is being told to me so that I can fix it". When a woman shares her problems with her man, she just wants to be heard. That's all. If you make the mistake of coming up with fixes, tips, tricks, or action steps, then you failed to make her feel heard. And then she'll try again. With a bigger problem this time. Something else maybe. To you it seems like it never ends. To her it seems like you never get it. Until you finally go: I hear you, baby. That must be really tough. I understand. I'm here for you. I love you That's all she wants. Got a video on giving advice to friends, the first half of it also applies to relationships so maybe that's helpful for clarifying

@Space I think you're doing a great thing by just meeting lots of women on dates, and see what works. To win at this, I would shift the focus from "what works on them", to "what works on me". Meaning: instead of putting awareness on how much you are exciting them, stay with how excited you feel by her. Then you can also know when it's the right time to make a sexual move. I've struggled with "sexualizing" a conversation and couldn't figure it out for the longest time. I found over the years that it all converges to authenticity. Meaning: how you act has to be aligned with how you feel. Then it doesn't feel weird. That means you have to feel drawn to her, when you take her hand. And you have to feel turned on by her, when you move in for the kiss. Then it's not weird. Well, if she's talking about her travel experiences and in the meantime you find yourself distracted by wondering what it's like to kiss her, then you can interrupt her, say that you weren't listening because you started to wonder what it's like to kiss her. And that's really hot, so she'll probably be turned on if you say that, and if so you can kiss her right after that. See how easy authenticity works? You can see how this is a problem if you want to make sexual moves and not feel weird about it Good luck!

I can not answer this question because it's the wrong question. The question should be: how do I stop seeing resistance as a problem? I'll share some wisdom with you: resistance correlates with importance. Therefore, you can use it for your own good: simply do what you are most resistant to, first, because that's usually the most important. Everything is here to help you. Including resistance. Next time you feel resistance, thank it for showing you what you really need to do, and get going. The alternative is to be a victim of resistance, viewing it as a problem, avoiding it, and let it defeat you. That's the start of a dark path of life long procrastination, mediocrity and mental suffering, my guess is you wouldn't be on this forum if that's what you wanted.

Your counsellor is an idiot. Saying this with love. He's coming at this from what is called a "fixed mindset" - which means that you assume that you can not change. Things are just the way they are, better accept them, and that kind of nonsense. Whereas that's a great idea for external problems you can do nothing about, it's terrible to treat internal issues that way. Here's my life philosophy: Find out what you really, really, really want Then go for that and solve any problem that's in your way Anything else won't result in happiness. And I know this not only from my experience, but also my clients'. Social anxiety is part of your Hero's Journey apparently. It's the monster you have to slay to free the princess and marry her! The question is: will you accept the call? @Anirban657