TrackSuit CEO (version 2.0)

By Sacred West

Happy Lunar New Year everybody! Today is February 7th and this begins the Lunar New Year for 2008. In China they’re calling this the Year of the Rat , but for me it’s just the new year. I told you back in December I was on the Lunar New Year, and recommended it to you then in my post No Stress At Christmas With the Lunar New Year - did you follow my advice?

My brothers and sisters in the Shambhala Buddhism lineage will be celebrating Shambhala Day today:

“SHAMBHALA DAY marks the beginning of the New Year, and represents one of the most important traditions of Shambhala Buddhism. Based on the traditional Tibetan New Year’s celebration of Losar, the day is calculated astrologically according to the Tibetan lunar calendar, and changes every year to coincide with the annual lunar cycles.”

But for me it’s simply and modestly another day of sunshine and uplift, except this one is gathering the new year up in its arms as the world keeps turning and Spring approaches.

This is so much nicer than having your New Year at December 31st/January 1st. People at this time always talk about the old year as if they want to throw it away or leave it behind, and somehow start a magical new life in the new year. This always seems such wishful thinking to me, needlessly wasteful, and pretty much doomed to fail.

For me now, this year past is not thrown away, it still contains all of its energy and vitality. The old year remains swift and full of strength, and seems to hand this force to the new year today, like a powerful runner handing the baton to the fresh team member. What a better way to change years.

What is so nice about starting your new year at this time is the feeling of spring being just around the corner. Remember back in the Christmas holidays when it was so cold and dark? The parties were great, but, oh how good it was NOT to have to make resolutions for a new year as well.

How good it was to wait until now, when the days are lighter and milder, and spend yesterday evening reflecting on some of the last year’s surprises and achievements, and this morning give some energy to plans for the future.

Hey, it’s not too late for YOU to change your new year to the Lunar, we all have to start sometime. Why not take this day as the beginning of your New Year?

Then next year, on January 26 2009, we can all meet again and see how we feel about the impending Year of the Ox.

TrackSuit CEO will be at SXSW Interactive March 9 at 11:30

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By Sacred West

Don’t be stressed out by Christmas this year. Give yourself the gift of extra time. Change your life schedule over to the Lunar New Year, which in 2008 occurs around February 7th.

Since I started using the lunar year to change years, I have to tell you, it makes life a whole lot easier for me. Try it yourself for a year and see if it doesn’t relax and re-energize some things for you.

We place a lot of psychological energy on significant times, but for me the solemn moment of reviewing the old year and renewing purpose for the new year - none of this happens during the Christmas holidays.

I don’t have to undergo a period of deep reflection during this turbulent time at all, for me it’s fine to keep barreling through it all, with the extra zest of parties mixed in.

When everybody is thinking they have to stop for holidays and the end of the year - and then have to follow it with the dead of winter and the January depression - I’m just mid-season, still going strong.

I get quality work done during Christmas, what with two four-day weekends back to back, and everybody slacking off. The phone stops ringing, business pressures ease a little - and this matters to Sacred West, who is not a cave yogi by the way, he deals with the business world every day.

My goal this holiday season is to get certain projects finished - or else abandoned - by January 2nd, because that’s when I come charging out of the pen, ready to rumble, with a full head of steam and feeling sassy. I never stopped. I just enjoyed the parties and the sacred times and kept the calendar open.

The real new year for me will start in early February, close to Spring, and also close to my birthday as it happens. A time of great renewal and upward energy. That’s when I’ll relax and review the past twelve months, and hitch my hopes to the new world waiting just below the surface of the soil, getting ready to bud and spring forth.

Christmas? Merry Christmas! Have a great time, and give yourself an extension of time. Go Lunar! See you in February for the celebrations!

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By Sacred West

Seth Godin, the great marketer, makes a point we should all pay attention to, the difference in appeal between the words “more” and “less”, and he ties it to the looming ecological disaster we all dread.

We all worry about the disappearing habitat and the onrushing ecological disaster, and we all want to reverse this. So how then to act for the best? How to communicate, how to advocate, how to engineer, how to lobby, how to think?

The mantra of “less” which is a natural offshoot of carbon-footprint thinking, combined with the mantra of “less” which is a natural offshoot of overfishing, combined with…

I’m more and more convinced that the best hope for the eco movement is to tell a story of efficiency and growth and ingenuity. More is easy to sell. Less almost never is.
- Getting sad at Whole Foods (more vs. less)

Yes. It will take heroic strength of nerve not to break under the sadness of what is happening to the world as we turn to work towards the solution, if there even is one.

But to be successful we will have to bring abundance, and brightness, and energy to the desperate tragedy. Great strength of nerve. More is easy to sell.

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by Sacred West

Did you ever wonder why all the great tips on how to succeed seem to involve doing something opposite to the way the normal world thinks you should? I’m going to give you the underlying secret to why this is so. You can learn, here and now, how to make your own tips for success.

The secret is: Everything works opposite to how we thought because we have it all backwards. Reality really is like the red pill in the Matrix. Just take the pill, and reverse your vision.

The secondary part of this principle is this. There’s no hidden cosmic law - out there - of how to manifest things. In reality, everything in our minds is already here. What’s missing is that we don’t see clearly what’s in our minds, and so we don’t know how to change authentically what’s in our minds.

Everything we grasp for is forced to flee away from us. Like the mirage and the end of the rainbow, what we desire has to keep moving away because desire itself only manifests more need. Feeding desire is the surefire way towards emptiness of satisfaction.

The way to manifest something is to be that thing, and give it away. How does this work with, say, wanting more money?

Save your spare change in the car. At the intersections where the homeless people beg for money, pull out a couple of bills and give it to them. Be sure to look them in the eye, and wish them - sincerely - a good day. What they want more than money is to be treated like a human being, actually, so be sure about that last part, or you’ll fail in the exercise.

The exercise, by the way, is to change yourself, not the outside world.

This exercise will increase your WEALTHINESS, and real wealth only comes to real wealthiness. There is no spoon. The martial arts practitioner knows that the board is already smashed before the fist connects.

Are you getting the picture? Do you see that success is preordained on the inside first, but not with make-believe surface thinking, only with real change?

Prosperity can only settle on you, you can’t seize it. You can encourage it to come to you, and you can do this quite deliberately. I can give you loads more tips, or you can make your own by reversing your needs-based thinking into surfeit-based planning. How would you truly feel if you were already full of the thing you want?

Practice this new power of success in the material world, and soon let’s look at success in your own heart. Since we’re turning the tables on our life’s lot, let’s go straight for happiness itself - even better than money, right?

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We rush so fast we miss it all. Everyone knows how busy we all are nowadays. The TrackSuit CEO wants to shoot for the stars and still spend his entire life with his family, and somehow this seems to me the most reasonable thing in the world. How to achieve this?

As so often, the answer begins inside ourselves.

When I was a kid, rushing around hither and thither, my mother would tell me to slow down because, “more haste, less speed,” using the old British proverb that takes notice of fools getting nowhere in a hurry.

Carl Honore has written a book called “In Praise of Slowness: How A Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed”. I haven’t read it yet, so this is not one of TrackSuit’s famous Reviews. But I have read the Amazon reviews to it, and here’s an excerpt from one review that made me think of TrackSuit’s readers:

“The chapter I most appreciated was the one on parenting. Children do not understand the need for our fast pace, and what they need more than anything is our time. This book made me realize the number of times I tell my daughter to hurry up/we’re late for school/we need to go now/blah blah blah. I do not want my daughter to grow up like so many kids in our culture: overprogrammed, overscheduled, and stressed out.“

The problem of speediness impacts us as Americans today - while the rest of the world watches, amazed - but the Europeans aren’t off the hook completely, because this business of moving too fast is actually a part of human nature that has been observed from ancient times.

Buddhist practice revolves around “mindfulness”, which involves holding your mind in attention to the very moment as it’s happening. You can do this by returning your awareness to each and every breath, even in the middle of any action.

And it’s a funny thing about slowing down in this way: it’s the way to move quickly also.

Mipham Rinpoche, a Buddhist teacher, says in one of his books or videos that when we get in a crisis we start to panic and get speedy, whereas if we would force ourselves to relax we could actually generate the extra energy needed to deal with the situation. Practitioners of the martial arts know all about this too.

There is much more I could say about this, but we have plenty of time

What do you think? Could it be that slowing down allows us to get more done?

Read more at Sacred West about Success, Buddhism and living and succeeding in modern America.

If you’re interested in writing a guest post please Contact Me.

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On the road to success, how do you expand your current limits? How do you train for success?

I like what the Tracksuit CEO says about self-sabotage, it’s a lot more useful to think of this as self-limitation.

But expanding your limits takes a gentle touch because when you push anything, there’s going to be an equal and opposite push coming back to you somewhere along the line. I won’t go into why this is (unless you ask me), but I will advise you: don’t take it personally, use it as a natural force.

How to use it as a natural force? Well, it works the same with positive things also: when you pull something up, and give energy to it as an uplift, there’s an equal pull coming your way also, and it can seem like a gift. Let’s tell the story to show how this works.

~~~

Here’s my own recent story to illustrate how to train for success. I’ve embarked upon a new project just this month, and it’s been a long time brewing. Finally all the preparation and thinking is over, and I’m launched on a new course that I know is absolutely right.

So imagine my utter shock this month to find myself slacking off and blanking out, in the middle of a mission that absolutely inspires me. I started wondering if I was lazy, or too old, or had some secret will to failure - all the things you think when you’re trying to move forward and you stumble.

So I called my business coach in California, in panic. She’s been part of my planning for the last two years. Fortunately, she set me straight.

My mentor reminded me that the course I was embarked on was carefully chosen, that I had authentically laid all the ground for this next push. And it will work, we both know this; the course itself is correct.

I was out of shape, she said. I was taking myself to the next plateau of success, and I was simply out of training for this enlargement in my expectations. I was out of condition for this next level of success.

As the Tracksuit CEO keeps trying to tell us, it’s the inner game that makes the difference in the whole plan. Sure enough, I recognized the wisdom in what my coach was telling me. So how to train?

~~~

I knew I couldn’t just go to my desk and make myself do the right things, perform all the tasks with the serenity of a master. I was a master of the previous level, but I’m just a grasshopper in this one.

I realized I was out of shape physically too: I had no energy, I was tired when I should have been glowing with excitement. The answer was to start running again, which I hadn’t done for two years, what with all the business changes and the excuses we make.

I knew I couldn’t win at the desk, but I knew I COULD win on the street. So the next morning I got up and went for an early morning run. I did what I committed to do, in an area that I knew I could succeed in. And I could easily measure how out of shape I was, and I’ll easily measure my improvement over time.

You see the lesson here? I’m training through a surrogate practice. If I try to expand my limits at my desk directly, I’ll fail, especially if I push too hard at this stage of the process, and I know this. But I can work with these limits on the track, and the deal I’ve made is that this covers the desk too.

And it’s working. When I slipped and spaced out the running, the desk went to hell - noticing this, I picked the running back up, and here came the good energy again at the desk. The running is the way I’m keeping faith with myself, and conquering an area that I simply have too big a hex with to tackle directly.

A lot of this by the way is simply the showing up. If you show up when you said you would, whatever life hands you will be okay, even a failure - after all we don’t create the future, only our response to the present. But you have to show up, even if you sit unable to cope, you have to show up.

For me the running is more about the doing of it than the doing well. But that’s just my configuration. I have doing well hard-wired in, it’s the showing up that could use more training. Your mileage may vary.

Humans are funny. We’re very complex, but at the same time, everything is workable. It’s just a matter of figuring how to work it each time. We can make deals with ourselves, and when we can’t tackle our issues head-on, we can train around our limitations.

By the way, one day I’ll surpass a benchmark at my desk first, and from this I’ll perform better on the track later. It’s a two-way street, and I started with the possible.

This is how you train for success.

yours,
Sacred West

Read more at Sacred West about Success, Buddhism and living and succeeding in modern America.

If you’re interested in writing a guest post please Contact Me.

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