This has been the longest week of my life.
Every day, I set out to make a video. And every day, I "failed" to do so. So within just a few days, I felt absolutely miserable.
It took longer than I expected to work through the fears, doubts, and limiting beliefs that were in my way. Although each was permanently banished within an hour or less, there were a whole lot more of them than I thought there'd be!
There were all sorts of beliefs I battled, ranging from the idea that I need to "work for a living" and "life is a burden" to a bizarre fear of fear itself, to worries about how the video would be received or how I'd be perceived by the people watching it.
I deleted each and every one from my brain, but when the dust cleared, something unusual happened...
I had no ambition left!
You see, it turned out that my major source of drive and ambition was the need to "work for a living"... specifically, a need to work to impress other people. In the process of getting rid of the things that were holding me back, I also deleted the same thing that was driving me forward.
And so, for the latter part of last week, and part of this week, I drifted, not really sure what, if anything, I wanted to do with my life.
It was kind of surreal, because I was both serenely peaceful and mildly disturbed at the same time. I didn't do much, but it wasn't bothering me, either. Eventually, I realized that my real problem was not having had a clear set of personal values to begin with. But, the good thing about that is that it let me start with a clean slate, and determine...
Exactly what I want from life!
Luckily, my new set of values lines up reasonably well with the projects I already had going -- like writing this book -- so from the outside, my life isn't changing much. On the inside, though, it's a major change, that's already influenced my exercise habits, among other things. (For one thing, I like to work out a lot more intensely than I did before!)
Anyway, I got myself back "together" today, and am really excited by how much actual progress I made on the video this afternoon and evening. After some visualization and a few practice runs, I recorded several takes of the first 3 minutes of the new training video, and did the necessary titling and editing for it. I'll probably also shoot at least some of the rest tonight.
This is after two weeks of previous struggling with "script rewrites", although only a few versions were actually written out in full. Some versions I tried to shoot ad-lib, without a script, and others I wrote out in full or in part, before shooting a minute or two and realizing...
It wasn't going to work!
It's not that the subject matter was really that hard: what's been hardest is just finding the real me, underneath the instinctive, knee-jerk, precious and pretentious mannerisms that I kept putting up as a defense. I was either too formal, or too fakely informal. I explained too much (or too little), or tried too hard to be convincing.
All of this went away like magic, though, once I got myself in order, because now I'm crystal clear about what I want to say, who I'm saying it to, and why I'm saying it.
Meanwhile, my wife, who had given me a "thumbs down" review on virtually everything I've ever put on video to date, actually likes the segment I did today, so I'm definitely looking forward to finishing it, and sharing it with you tomorrow.
