I love sharing my daily adventures… especially when they involve a gorgeous, sunny day in Hawaii or an epic alpine lake in Alaska! But social media shows a filtered version of peoples’ lives – sometimes literally. No one has this super happy blissed-out life where it’s gorgeous views and amazing fulfilling adventures all the time. That’s only half the picture. And while we may not see the messy sides as often, those messy sides are just as important – and necessary – to live a life in breakthrough.
The work we all do – meditation, yoga, thought work, etc – doesn’t lead to a 100% blissed-out life for any of us because we’re humans in a body with a human brain. It’s not supposed to be that way. Life is a contrast between suffering and joy, right? Yin and yang. And some types of suffering I have come to recognize and even welcome.
One of those types of suffering is what I want to focus on today: the breakdown before the breakthrough.
We’ve all experienced that moment when we’re on a path of growth, but we go through a tough time that spans between the way we think and live now and the way we think and live once we have achieved our goal or gotten to that next area of growth.
We may feel like we’re never going to achieve our goals and everything seems to…suck. This is where lots of people give up – in the breakdown before the breakthrough.
But what we don’t realize is that if we keep persevering, we will eventually have a breakthrough, that result we’ve been working for.
This is why massive action is so essential – taking action until we get our result, no matter what. We never know how close we are, so we need to commit and keep going for it because too many of us stop right before our result is about to happen.
And when that breakthrough happens, it’s MIND BLOWING! So it’s worth being in the discomfort.
Also: that moment of breakdown is a cycle inherent in all of our lives, and we often think when we are in it that something is wrong… but it’s actually necessary.
What is a breakthrough? We get to it by breaking old patterns. We break through our previous ways of thinking, our limiting beliefs, our habitual emotional and behavioral patterns that don’t serve us.
And I really believe that in order for me to teach you to live in constant breakthrough, that I also need to be living in breakthrough. For me, it’s where the juice, the mojo, of my business comes from.
How do we live in breakthrough?
Ray Dalio said, “The quality of your life ultimately depends on quality of your decisions.”
And I’d take that a step further and say it’s not just the quality of your decisions, but the efficacy with which you implement them and what you learn from the experience to inform the next decision.
So if we’re talking about creating a life of more freedom, adventure, and purpose, that means your level of inner and outer freedom is determined by:
- The quality of the decisions you make
- The efficiency at which you implement them (this means taking action on them)
- What you learn from those decisions to inform the next decision
That IS the path of living in breakthrough. And the more cycles of this we go through, the more likely we are to reach our breakthrough because we get better at making decisions, we stop being afraid of failure, and we are willing to keep going.
Despite how necessary this process is in to live in breakthrough, we often stop at one of the points within the cycle:
Decision: we don’t decide because we are afraid to fail and afraid of how we react. But we have to commit to massive action and remember that failure is part of living in breakthrough. We also need to make those decisions as if we had already achieved our goal… and keep practicing!
Implementing: It’s natural human drive to want to grow, but it’s also a natural human fear to want to avoid failure. So, we end up procrastinating once we decide. But avoiding taking action (MASSIVE action) is actually super exhausting because we end up spinning our wheels on the same problem over and over.
It’s important to not decide against something before you try it or stay stuck in indecision about something that you couldn’t possibly know about because you’ve never done it before. How would you know if you’ve made the right decision until you make it and try it?
But we shouldn’t make haphazard decisions either. It’s important that we slow down enough to get into having clean energy around it. Rash decisions come from thinking with a scarcity mindset.
Evaluation: Sometimes we don’t want to learn from our decision and actions because it felt so crappy that things didn’t go that way we wanted that we just want to forget about it and not think about it. But before we make our next decision, we are more likely to succeed if we evaluate what worked, what didn’t work, what we might have half-assed, and what we will do differently with the experience. The more specific we are, the more powerful our next decision will be. Sometimes we won’t change anything. We’ll just do it again with more experience under our belt and greater belief about our ability to make it happen.
Repeat: to reach our breakthrough and create our results, we need to repeat this cycle over and over until we get there. Often we give up just because it didn’t work out the first, second, third or 80th time. That’s where massive action comes in – taking action until we reach out goal.
This process holds true for more tangible goals like a new home or creating a new career, as well as less tangible goals such as forgiving someone, healing a trauma, opening your heart to more compassion, cultivating more courage, and progressing on your spiritual path.
Go out and experiment with this process. It may be hard to understand it at first, but the moment you start doing it, everything will change and it will make much more sense.
So, make decisions, implement them, evaluate them. And then ask, where do I need to grow? That will help you make your next decision. And ultimately, it will push you through that breakdown and put you right into your next breakthrough!
In this Episode you will learn:
// Why breakdowns always happen before the breakthrough
// How to not feel exhausted as you move towards your breakthrough
// What living in constant breakthrough can look like for you
// The 3-step cycle to get you to your breakthrough
// How to overcome indecision and fear of failure
Resources:
// Episode 60: How to Avoid Unnecessary Suffering
// Episode 62: Commitment and How to Take Massive Action
// Episode 63: Being Human Is Hard – the First Noble Truth
// Episode 70: Maximizing vs Satisficing
// If you’re new to the squad, grab the starter kit I created at RebelBuddhist.com. It has all you need to start creating a life of more freedom, adventure, and purpose. You’ll get access to the private Facebook group where you can ask me questions! Once you join, there’s also a weekly FB live called Wake the F*ck Up Wednesday, where you can ask questions that come up as you do this work – in all parts of your life.
// If you’re interested in finding out more about how to free your mind and free your life, join Freedom School. Enrollment is open, and we are diving DEEP into ways to cultivate clarity and courage so you can create your best life. There are also some sweet bonus courses for you there. It will set you up to live the best version of you in the year to come. Learn more at JoinFreedomSchool.com.