Steve Pavlina Conscious Growth Workshop – Day Two

The second day of the workshop gave us a better Steve (and a lot less jetlagged Dragos, for what matters 🙂 ). There was a visible difference from the first day when Steve had a rather rigid timeline and just a few interaction oasis. It seemed like the first day acted as a trigger for a much more relaxed, interactive, authentic and cheerful approach. I think I genuinely laughed about 25% of the time. For a workshop dealing with such a heavy topic like conscious growth, 25% of the time laughing is a lot.

So, in the second day we actually started to implement in several areas the theoretical principles we learned in the first day: Truth, Love and Power, and their subsequent combinations: Authority, Oneness, Courage and so on. We practiced those principles on career, money, health and fitness or time and habits.

This time, the workshop started with the last day homework assignment. Which I realized is something I didn’t mention in my first conscious growth workshop update. So, I’m going to do this now: before we left the workshop in the first day, Steve asked us to perform a random act of kindness on somebody. We had all the time to do this, during the night, or in the morning, or whatever. The essential was to to perform a random act of kindness on somebody we didn’t know. The workshop started with some of the people stories about that. Some of them gave big tips to cab drivers while others just gave hugs to other people. But the common vibe was that all the workshop attendants who performed a random act of kindness felt much better than the actual object of their act. Which I guess it was exactly Steve’s point with this exercise.

Making Fun Of Everybody

I won’t go into many details about the second day for several reasons. FIrst of all, I just can’t do it. There was something about charisma, not concepts, about interaction and emotional bonding, about warm communications as opposed to crystal clear, although dry, intellectual constructs or ideas.

And second, I won’t go into the details because the real reason of attending to a live workshop is to connect with that live energy. Having it written couldn’t even remotely describe it. So, my advice is to stay really tuned and register for the next Steve’s live seminar, if you want to grasp a little bit of what I experienced. Sorry, but there simply isn’t another way around this, guys. 🙂

For each section in which we had to apply the principles we had like 20-25 minutes of free speech from Steve, detailing it and putting a lot of personal stories in the mix, and then 10 minutes of written exercises. This time the written exercises were a little bit more complex than in the first day. Maybe that was the reason why near the end of the workshop some of us had a really hard time filling in the pages.

Anyway, after the written exercise one of the attendants was asked to get up on the stage and share his experiences with the rest of us. Those were actually the juicy parts and I think I speak for a big majority of the present people when I’m saying that this was what we were after when we decided to come here in the first place. Genuine interaction, spontaneity, humor and a sense of connection and free energy exchange.

At some point, when the main theme was about skills, I decided to volunteer myself for getting up on stage. To my big surprise, Steve picked me 🙂 . After an initial feeling of alien abduction, caused by an unconscious superposition of my current situation with a rather stupid car ad in which a guy waves a sign asking for aliens to pick him, I woke up on stage. Once there, I decided it’s time to share some of my personal experiences related to skills, essentially why building different skills is beneficial. It was a great thing to be there on stage, talking to a lot of nice people, sharing personal experiences and benefiting from other persons insights on my own problems. It was a really nice and fulfilling experience.

Now, you may wander why I titled this paragraph “Making Fun Of Everybody”. Because we actually did. Another juicy home assignment was to go out during lunch break and start telling strange things (possibly generating rejection) to total strangers. Like asking: “excuse me, do you know what year is?”. And actually look for rejection. One of the key points in the whole seminar was acceptance. And this exercise was supposed to build up on our acceptance strengths, internalizing the possibility to get rejection at some point in our lives.

I think I continuously laughed during the stories after the lunch break. I remember one guy telling us he approached a women and paid her a compliment about her red blouse. Only the woman wear a green blouse. Imagine the conversation he had with that woman. “No ma’m, you have a gorgeous red blouse, that I can tell you”. And another guy was going straight to the heart of a huge casino, with literally hundreds of slot machines and then he was approaching in a very low voice people almost whispering: “can you please point me to the nearest slot machine? It’s very important”. And another guy approaching gamblers at the slot machines and asking them in a rather naive voice: “excuse me, is gambling legal in Vegas?”. But the high point of it was when somebody, in the middle of all these stories, touched a very sensitive detail: “you guys were wearing your name badges when you were doing that? Cause your name is going to be remembered, then”.  :-)))

Now, the second day of the workshop was much more clear and crisp than the first one. I was already set up during the first day in terms of value for time (that would be the value I receive versus the time & money I spend here) but today was way beyond my expectations.

Really. 🙂