Manage to Engage

In the last episode, I invited you to make two assumptions about The Great Mystery: One, everyone can experience it and that does not require belief or being special. Two, it is always there. There’s no more of it in a church than in a gutter.   So if it’s always there, what stops you from being with it? That’s the question we’re going to explore today. I’d love your feedback. Click here to leave...

We often talk about wrestling with our own authority issues, namely the issues we have with our parents. This isn’t due to some Freudian hang up – this is because you can’t truly practice self-authority until you do the work to stop unconsciously or consciously submitting to your parents’ will.   And when you make this shift, something incredible happens – you start to relate to life itself, to th...

Your shadow is running your life.   Maybe not all the time, but your shadow is calling the shots more than you realize, and that’s why it’s so important to recognize those seemingly unimportant moments that we discussed in the last episode: when your shadow feels comfortable coming out into the open and you have the opportunity to make a choice and, with confidence, take charge of your own life.  ...

The moments when change actually happens aren’t the big life moments you might think they will be. They’re these seemingly insignificant moments when your shadow rears its head in broad daylight because it doesn’t feel compelled to hide.   These moments offer an opportunity to practice self-management, to practice being your true and authentic self in the face of an emotionally difficult choice –...

In the last couple episodes, we discussed how our natural inclination is to orient towards happiness – and why this is, ultimately, a problematic cultural agreement that almost all of us are contributing to.   Today, I suggest a new and more beneficial social contract, albeit a more challenging one: a cultural agreement to orient towards realness. This requires a certain level of awareness, which...

When you try to negotiate with reality, when you try to dictate your delusions onto your experience, reality will always win.   Because life doesn’t care about your happiness – but it does care about your perception of reality.   So in this episode, we discuss the role of accountability, for ourselves and others, in shattering our delusions. If you trust the process, trust the outcome, you can tru...

The pursuit of happiness is one of the three “unalienable rights” suggested by the the United States Declaration of Independence – but the very act of this pursuit is problematic, and the single most destructive element in your relationship to truth.   Because real happiness isn’t some destination that you can get to by constructing a long enough bridge. This false happiness is built on illusion,...

To learn more about Trey’s enterprise, go to Kommercekings.com I’d love your feedback. Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on iTunes .

To wrap up this series, we’re going to discuss the optimal and non-optimal outcomes of accountability – and how navigating the accountability path will allow you to get the optimal results more often. I’d love your feedback. Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on iTunes .

If you want to build a strong foundation of accountability, you can’t wait until someone screws up to hold them accountable. You will find the accountability path much easier to navigate if it’s forged through deep reflections of goodness, creating a context where accountability is viewed as more positive than negative.   The best part is that, unlike some of the other aspects of leading with acco...

Great leaders help the people they manage embrace rigorous accountability – but to do that, the people they manage have to feel seen and safe.   However, most of us don’t choose to be leaders, and we weren’t taught how to be leaders in school, so we reluctantly end up learning on the job; we are thrust into a position where we have to learn how to be vulnerable with ourselves and put others in a s...

When we think of courage, we often think of braving some sort of life-threatening situation. But almost every day, even the people who jump out of planes work to avoid holding others accountable or being held accountable because it invites emotional difficulty.   If you really want to be courageous, try intentionally confronting and amplifying your emotional discomfort – now that’s difficult, but...

To wrap up this series on Leadership as a Spiritual Teaching – in which we’ve discussed the definition of consciousness, how societal conditioning clouds our perception of reality, and how this prevents us from solving problems – we’re going to learn how leaders and managers can start solving problems by learning and teaching a greater sense of consciousness.   The problem is that you can’t just c...

Our society operates using the framework that problems get solved through intelligence – but I argue that problems get solved through consciousness, which has nothing to do with intelligence or skill. It is, fundamentally, the ability to step outside of your conditioning and see reality through a lens other than the one created by your own conditioning.   More often than not, we’re just missing a...

In the last episode, we started a metaphysical dialectic on consciousness. We established that consciousness requires an awareness of self because reality and our perception of it are not always the same.   Today, we’ll clarify the metaperception required to identify this gap between your story about reality and reality itself, and how the way you are conditioned clouds your perception. I’d love y...

To start this four-part series on Leadership as Spiritual Teaching, we’re going to go on an exploration of consciousness.   What is consciousness, how does it affect you as a leader, and how can a lack of awareness hurt the people you manage? We’re going to delve deep into the metaphysical to answer these questions, so let’s take a deep breath and dive in. I’d love your feedback. Click here to lea...

I am going to say something that might be simultaneously freeing and uncomfortable to hear: living in frustration is completely optional.   If you are frustrated, it is likely due to your expectations of and relationship with change, as we discussed in the last episode.   So today, I invite you to practice a frustration-free existence – which won’t be easy, and definitely won’t happen overnight –...

People want change, or they say they want change, but really they want to be told how to change – and then they want that process to be easy.   This reflects our skewed and unhealthy relationship with change; we want acute control over when and how change happens to us and in our lives and then, inevitably, we get frustrated because that’s just not how life works.   When we start looking at realit...

The culture that you live and work in has a tremendous impact on what you feel. And as a manager, you are responsible for cultivating the culture in your organization – and as a self-manager, you are responsible for cultivating the culture in your everyday life.   Today we’ll look at three things you SHOULD be cultivating in your culture and how doing so can radically improve the lives of the peop...

When someone is emotionally invested in an idea or a group, it’s almost impossible to persuade them to question their beliefs – even if you provide factual information that really should cause them to question their beliefs. Why? It challenges their identity and, as a result, they feel shame.   So, as we discussed in the last episode, people distort reality to protect themselves and their identity...

Shame is dangerous because, in our efforts to avoid it, we often end up distorting reality so that we don’t feel accountable – like, as we’ll discuss more in this episode, the man who sued United after HE knocked out a passenger – but confronting our negative feelings and the realities that cause them is a healthy and important part of personal development.   So in this episode, we will take our f...

Today, I want to talk about what makes the whole world go ‘round – not money, not love, but shame.   It’s always been a huge factor, and if you look through a history book, you will pretty much find a list of times powerful men tried to cover up their shame. But today, social media magnifies the role that shame plays in everyone’s lives. We’re practically spoon feeding it to ourselves every time w...

Are you doing the best that you can?   What if I give you a million dollars to do better... were you still doing the best that you could? Or does your best change?   The more aware you are of your discipline and engagement, the more difficult it is to accept the excuse that “you’re doing the best that you can.”   We naturally shrug off a challenge, striving to do the minimum required to get by – b...

If you haven’t already, take some time right now to do the exercise I described in the last episode:   Consider what you want that you don’t have, and frame it as an engagement problem; the source of the gap between what you want and you don’t have lies at the level of your engagement.   After you give this some deep thought, please continue with the episode and join us as we start surrendering to...

In the last episode, we discussed the first step towards finding our resolve and becoming more engaged: acknowledging just how disengaged we usually are.   With that awareness, we can now start flexing our engagement muscles and practicing this skill, as both managers of others and managers of ourselves. I’d love your feedback. Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on iTunes .