What Gets in Our Way of Making a Difference

I recently gave a talk to a group of police officers and firefighters who were attending an advanced peer support training class. Peer support is a group that provides emotional assistance and support to peers in need, typically after major events or crises, but also when people are dealing with personal breakdowns like divorce, death of a loved one, etc.

This group is clearly committed to making a difference for people, and I was asked to speak on any topic I thought might help this group either professionally or personally.

I came up with four things that have made a profound difference in my personal life and in my ability to make a difference for other people. I'd like to share those things here.

1) Over self-identification, or more specifically, ego. What does this even mean? Well, the ego looks like I, me, and mine. When we are over-identified with it, we do things that feed, fuel, strengthen, and bolster the I, me, and mine. More simply put, the more we make things about ourselves, or the more we act out of looking good and being right, the more we are actively feeding our ego, and simultaneously, living in an egoic state. The problem this creates in making a difference for people is:

1. We are not a safe space - character communicates and people who are in it for themselves are usually pretty apparent

2. The world exists as an opportunity to look good and be right, not make a difference for others; thus we just aren't personally available for others in a way that might make a difference for them

3. The key to making a difference for anyone is the ability to be in their world, aka empathy, and when we are in an egoic state, this is impossible; We can't be empathetic when all we care about is ourselves

So what is there to do? Be aware. Be conscious. Be honest and authentic about who you are being in each moment, and let go of anything you are over-identified with. Our egos are never going to make a difference for anyone because our egos are only interested in finding problems that feed and grow our egos, and this is always at the cost of everything and everyone else.

2) Making Others Wrong/Yourself Right - This is the natural state of the ego. It exists to do four things: be right, make others wrong, look good, and avoid looking bad. In one word, we can describe this as dominance, or seeking to dominate. The ego exists to dominate.

When we are existing in dominance, we are 100% totally not available for anyone, not even ourselves. We are a slave to our own self-righteousness. The way we know we are in this state is, again, awareness and consciousness. Listen to your thoughts, to what you're saying, and pay attention to what you're doing. Does it fall into one of the ego's fatal four? Awareness is the key to acting outside of and in spite of the ego's games.

When we are in a state of dominance, we are not a safe space for others, and we are not capable of empathy, which is the key to accessing and making a difference for other people.

3) Resignation - When we live without any possibility, without the idea that anything can be different, or better, we are living in resignation. When we live in resignation, nothing is possible; we are always going to have exactly what we currently have. We become resigned to the way things are and that nothing could ever be different. Every experience being stuck, in a rut, stopped? That's resignation.

When we are trying to make a difference for people, we should seek to be the light of possibility. Nothing will ever be different as long as we can't see the possibility of it being different. Possibility is the birth of change.

What does resignation look like? We all know what these people look like (and sometimes it's us!). Have you ever had an idea about something and before you can finish your thought or sentence, someone puts up 100 roadblocks between your current position and your vision of where you want to be? Resignation sounds like, "That will never happen," "That's impossible," "Things will never change," "Fuck that, fuck this, fuck them," etc.

Breakthroughs in life happen with the idea that something else is possible. However, we have to be OPEN to the idea of possibility in every area of our lives. Where this makes a difference for people is that we leave those we come into contact with inspired and energized.

Possibility is the nature of our spiritual being; however, our egos can't have it and are always fighting against what's possible. The ego needs problems to thrive, and thus is always working to keep us in a state of resignation, or the absence of possibility.

4) Reasons and Considerations - When we are living in our reasons and considerations, we are playing a very safe and small game with our lives. When we are living in our R&Cs, we stop ourselves from taking risks and being vulnerable because we think we know how something is already going to turn out. We live in a state of believing all the reasons our ego gives us about why something won't work. We have considerations about what someone might say, what they might think, what they like or don't like, all the possible ways we can fail, and then we stop. It's important to really understand that breakthroughs in life ONLY happen when we work outside of all our R&Cs. I call this having a case of the "fuck its." Like, all these things might go wrong, but fuck it, I'm going anyway.

How does this impact our ability to make a difference for people? When we are in breakdowns, the access to the other side (a breakthrough) is to get outside of our R&Cs. We cannot lead people to places we have never been, and if we see our problems through our R&Cs, we are most certainly going to see other people's problems through our R&Cs. The sub-category to this is agreement. We use agreement to keep us stuck in our R&Cs. This means we go out and seek those who will agree with us about why something is the way it is and why it's not possible for it to be different. People in breakdowns don't need agreement about their situation, they need the gift of possibility; the gift of inspiration. This is not to say they are wrong or that they need to be told they're wrong. They are not, they have just forgotten that something else IS possible. These are very different things.

In all, these 4 things open up our capacity to get into other people's worlds. Being in someone else's world is essential to making a difference for them. When we can be in other people's worlds, they feel heard, feel understood, and feel gotten. Like someone gets them. And this is where the magic in making a difference for anything or anyone happens. When we can pull all this off (and this is the most important sentence in this whole post), people see and listen to us as someone who can make a difference for them, or said another way, people then give us access to making a difference for them.

Cheers to waking up every day stoked AF,

Chris