www.noahcebuliak.com
There’s a pattern I keep seeing in myself and in almost every man I work with.
We take action toward the life we want, but from the identity we’re trying to escape.
We create plans, set goals, and sequence steps, and then we grind forward as the very person we fundamentally don’t like, trying our hardest to escape from him.
The theory is that if we just do A, B, C long enough, we’ll eventually arrive at D -- the version of ourselves we actually want to be.
Then we’ll finally get to feel how we want to feel, because we’ll have earned it.
But here’s the problem with that.
During all of that striving, we’re treating ourselves with contempt.
Every action is taken from a place of lack, of not being enough yet.
And so even when and if external results show up, internally nothing has changed.
We still don’t like ourselves.
So we just go in circles, grinding away but never arriving.
I’ve lived this. I’ve watched other men live it. And what I’ve found is that no achievement closes the gap, because the gap isn’t external.
It’s a self-love problem.
It’s the difference between “someday arriving” and “moving from already being arrived, now.”
This is not an invitation to passivity. It’s actually more demanding, at least at first, because it requires us to contact and live from our most alive, free and true Self.
It means starting your day by connecting -- deeply, genuinely -- to who you already are at your core.
Not who you’ll be when you’ve earned it. Who you are now, at your deepest level.
Many people don’t know what that is, so they take action in the external to find out.
I’m saying turn within first and find the feeling of being completely on-side with yourself, and then take action.
It’s a feeling, a state of being that is calm, grounded, and peaceful.
Words I come back to are integrity, solidity, expansion, flow, freedom, and fun.
Not as affirmations plastered on a wall, but as a real internal experience I actually tune myself to, like I would tune an instrument before playing.
When you take action from that place, you’re not pushing against yourself.
You’re emanating from yourself. The difference is massive!
That’s the shift. Your energy, your presence, your state -- that’s your real service and gift in the world. Everything else follows from that.
The hardest part is how easy it is to forget this. The external world pulls our attention constantly, and suddenly it’s the reference point again, rather than this internal state.
So this has to be a practice. A daily return. Forget and remember. Forget and remember.
But if you can build that muscle, coming back to who you actually are before you do anything, your actions and results change entirely. This is what I’ve found.
Give it a try today. Sit down, close your eyes, and connect to the state you’d most want to live from. Let it become real inside you before you do anything else. Then take action from there.
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