identity

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

Choices are happening all the time. Billions, trillions of them. At an organelle level within a cell there appear to be something like ‘choices’ about what micro-functions will be carried out, how and when. Then there are choices at a cellular level, for example, stem cells choosing what they will become.

Choices at tissue level dictate, for example, how the connective tissue in the skin reacts to a change in temperature. At organ level, there are choices which, for …

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

This is the saddest chapter of the book to write. Because Identity Wants are unrelated to current reality, because they are unfulfillable, because they look vital to survival they can result in a whole spectrum of harm to our own bodies, to other people, to animals, to nature.

There are no limits to the damage and devastation human behaviour can wreak in an attempt for the individual mind to find peace and wholeness. This is what we call having a lost mind: a mind th…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

I recently watched the streaming series Love is Blind. For those who haven’t seen it, the participants interact with one another from individual pods in which they can hear their date’s voice but not see them.

Lines like those above were said at some point by pretty much everyone in the pods. They ‘fall in love’ with each other never having met, never having worked through any real-life situations. As long as they make each other feel special, then bingo! They get e…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

It’s fashionable in coaching circles to focus on the ‘Why?’ inside the want. The ‘Why?’ relates to a personal, driving motivation. The motivation might be through the roof, but it is a survival motivation. The attention is not on the project. It is on trying to secure an individual Identity that doesn’t actually exist.

It’s a great idea to expose these personal ‘Whys’. It is not a good idea to take them seriously, as though they are something that can ever be achieve…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

The other day a client said to me, “I just want to understand myself. I just want to be true to myself.” It led to an interesting conversation about what the self really is and what it means to be true to it. What are we? Are we the beliefs about what we are? Are we the behaviours, actions and words? Are we our habits? Our values? Our opinions? Are we the experience of being us? Our tendencies and preferences? Our personality?

It is amazing how through this work eve…

In their book, Stealing Fire, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal calculate that the industry of ‘shutting off the self' is worth $4 trillion a year. They include all the activities, substances, experiences and practices that ultimately have the result of shutting down – even if only momentarily the burden of self-focus.

As they pointed out, many of these are ‘impulsive, destructive and unintentional’. They include activities such as legal and illegal drug taking, pornography and gambling which can, o…