The Spiral Path

Ever had the impression of going in circles? Ever felt like you’ve been there before and now you’re heading towards the same destination? Ever experienced deja-vu sensations? Memories form the past which are surprisingly real? I certainly did.

Up until recently I faced those situations with frustration. Every time I was on a familiar life situation, a place where I’ve been before in almost identical circumstances, I was somehow sad. What am I doing here? Why I have to go through this again? Why can’t I just skip this part and move on? There were some life situations in my past in which I simply got bored, that’s how often I was stuck there.

Over And Over Again

It took some time and a lot of circling to understand that going around and around is something normal. Is not the expected behavior from you, but it’s normal. Going in circles means you have to face the same problem over and over again until you learn how to manage it. It’s like a riddle: if you don’t know the answer now, you can move on, but somehow, sometimes, your path will bring you back again to that riddle until you find the answer. And that answer will unlock your door to the next level.

As surprisingly as it may seem, you chose your riddles. You chose which life situations to confront and what you should do in order to solve them. But you forgot that. Or, to be more precise, you pushed those decisions back into your subconscious mind, in order to avoid… hurt. Yes, you are unconsciously hiding those challenges from your conscious mind, because your reflex answer will be to run away, to avoid, to escape. Most likely, you’ve been so hurt in the past and now you try to escape that trap.

Going in circles is not bad or good in itself. You can safely go in circles for your entire life. As a matter of fact, most of the people are going in circles for their entire life. They establish some patterns and then they remain stuck in them until they die. They go to a job, they pretend they’re loving their husbands and wives, they pretend they’re caring for their kids and then they’re starting over again.

Nothing spectacular happens if you go in circles. You can stay there for the rest of your life, avoiding the hurt and facing the same life situations until you die. One of my buddhist friends will interfere at this point and would say: “Well, the problem is that dying is not the solution. You’re not solving much by dying, because you’ll soon have to start fresh again. And you’ll take it from where you left.”

I’m not a buddhist but I do agree with that perspective.

Breaking The Circle

I really don’t know why I chose all the challenges in my life. Some challenges seems normal, like being financially independent, having a family or keeping a fulfilling social life, while others are strange, like learning so many different things, from astrology to business or productivity . But what I do know, is that I really have to solve my challenges. There’s no other way around.

Some challenges get solved with passion, some are solved by boredom, while others are solved by so called external-circumstances (according to the law of attraction there are no external circumstances, though). Somehow, they get solved.

I remember I was attracted by esoteric disciplines long ago, when I was young. At that time it was just curiosity and entertainment. But as I grew older, I started to meet those esoteric disciplines more and more in my environment. At some point, I decided it’s time to really study it, so I studied astrology for almost 2 years.

The same was with business. When I was younger, I always had this dream of being financially independent and running my own business. For several years I only dreamed about it while going to a job I didn’t like, but I was confronted with so many entrepreneurship situations that I couldn’t resist and started my own business.

Those two challenges were solved by passion, but there are other which are solved by boredom. One of them would be: keeping a healthy life. I always loved to exercise and when I was a teenager I played professional basket-ball. But as I grew older, I slowly started to gain weight and stopped exercising because I was too busy… I remember there were times in which I associated my extra weight with being successful. That was strange. So, at some point, I become so bored to look in the mirror at a person who wasn’t me, that I started to exercise almost every day and even started a raw food diet for more than 7 months.

Did I tried to avoid any of those challenges? Hell, yes!  I did all I could to avoid them but all I did was in fact circling around and coming back until I decided it’s time for an upfront confrontation. Are those the only challenges in my life? Hell, no! In fact, the unsolved challenges in my life are far more complicated and itchy than keeping a healthy lifestyle or running a business.

Now I know that every time I’m facing a familiar life situation I have to go through it. I have to confront it until it gets solved. In theory that sounds nice, but in practice is not always as simple as it seems. The bottom line is that every challenge must be solved…

But what happens after? What happens with the challenges after I solve them? Are they disappearing? All those problems are simply flying away after you clear them? You run out of riddles? Well… nope. You get to the next level.

Going In A Spiral

When you break the circle you’re actually going to the next level. You go out of your old world, you climb to a new understanding of life, leaving behind what used to be familiar and safe. You start to explore a fresh world.

But what puzzled me the most, was that in this new world, you’ll face those challenges again. All those riddles you solved are going to appear again, but this time in a totally different light. It’s like going up on a spiral, and then, when you’re exactly on top of the old breaking point, you start seeing that thing again. You’re looking at the old you with a new perspective. You see yourself  from above.

I had so many life changing moments when I reached a genuine breaking point and realized I’m sitting on top of a challenge I solved. I looked at myself and realized I did well. I almost congratulated myself: Dragos, you did a great job, now I can see. But while I was staying on top of that solved riddle, another magical thing started to happen. The riddle started to get new meanings. It was suddenly bigger. It wasn’t mysterious, nor threatening or boring, just bigger. I suddenly had another perspective and realized I have to continue to go on that path.

10 years ago I started my own business. Last year, I felt the need to break free from it and sold it. That was a breaking point: I solved something of the business riddle. Now, after almost a year from selling, I’m starting to meet a business context again. I’m on top of that breaking point. I’m actually looking at myself during all those years and understand what I’ve done and why. I’m on the next level. It seems like doing business is one of the key points of my life, so it keeps coming up, but in different shapes and sizes.

Every breaking point is an arrow which is shaping your spiral. Every breaking point in your circle is a key point in the wireframe of your path. Those are indicators by which you are creating your own Universe. Solving the initial riddle is only the beginning. As you create your own spiral, as you go over and over the breaking points in your life you realize you have so many new things to learn and to experience.

There’s really no end to what you can create in your life.

Reaching Next Level

Personal development is all about growth. Is all about getting over your limits, overcoming crisis and reaching the next level in your life. But sometimes, being so immersed in managing the trip, we lose contact with the scenery. We’re so busy setting goals, applying that productivity technique, igniting that new networking opportunity, that we can’t really say if we did it.

Ever had that feeling? The feeling that says: I don’t know if I really did it? I don’t know if I reached the next level? Well, I had this, many times. There were periods in my life when all I did was working and never assessing. Growing but never acknowledging the growth. Running but never looking if I crossed some finish line. How to tell if I actually reached the next level in my life?

The New You

Personal development is a race in which you compete against yourself. You can’t really see your competitor. In sports (or in other direct competitions) victory is a matter of making the other one lose. Whenever he lose, you win, is that simple. Well, in personal development is not that simple. Your competitor can’t lose, simply because the competitor is another part of you. And you can only win.

This is why knowing if you really reached the next level is quite a delicate question.

First of all, because you can’t always put your fingers on the next level. You don’t always know what it looks like. You feel the need for change, you feel the urge to grow, but don’t have quite a clear image of what does this mean. So you substitute it with a goal. You set a specific goal and expect that once you reached it, you’ll graduate to a next level. Goal setting is the most widely used substitute for next level reaching. But goals are always external, goals are things you project outside you. While the next level is something you experience with all your being, inside.

Once you get out of the normal goal setting metrics, you don’t really have many clues to tell you if you really did it. Of course, you reached your goals, but your goals are not you. You reached a certain milestone in your life, but your own being is not measurable by milestones, you are a continuous human entity.

For some time, I tried to apply a simple mathematical rule to this. I tried to assess my growth in terms of numbers, or money. If I had a significant surge in my revenue, well, that should make for quite a spectacular next level, isn’t it? The problem was I didn’t always felt like I reached the next level. Of course, there was a measurable growth in my finances, but this metric seemed way too small for the big picture.

I tried to apply other metrics, all based on some sort of numbers, with no significant success. It took me a lot of time to realize that the next level is a specific concept in personal development and it needs a specific approach. You can’t use mathematics for that, nor money. Goal setting is ok, milestone checking is ok, but reaching the next level is not a question of goals or metrics. Because you can reach your goals only to see if you need much more., or you can assess a certain milestone only to get ready for the next one.

After a while I realized that the next level is something that cannot be defined. But rather lived. And here’s how I began to live it. (more…)