Understanding Agreements
Agreements Are a Shift in Chemistry
Max Freedom Long introduced me to the concept of agreement in his book, The Secret Science Behind Miracles, where he says, “For miracles to happen it takes two people to agree.” In my life, when I’ve been around great champions in athletics, there are certain coaches that walk on the field or walk into the stadium, and that’s it; the players are totally transformed. What I’ve seen is how coaching is biology. A good coach, just showing up creates a shift in an athlete’s chemistry. When that happens it is obvious the coach and athlete are in agreement about the readiness and capability of the athlete.
The Importance of Being in Agreement
The other day I walked into a police precinct. My daughter misplaced her wallet. It was one of those situations where I approached the police officer from behind a big bulletproof two-way screen. I leaned over, and before I said anything, I knew I had an agreement with him. What was my agreement? My agreement was that somehow we were connected. There was a moment of trust, and I leaned over to the mike, and I said, my daughter’s named Alicia, I said, “Lt. Glenn Brooks and Alicia, Undercover Narks, we’re here reporting in.” He smiled at me. I looked at Alicia, and I said, “If you don’t have an agreement and you do certain things, you could have a really bad response.” Yet this guy smiled and we had fun.
Invisible Agreements
The invisible part of agreement is you often will catch a lot if you pay attention in any given environment to what the agreements are. I’ll give you an example. One time I called a world innovator named Roger Callahan. He is a clinical psychologist and an expert in Thought Field Therapy. I called him on a Monday and introduced myself, “Hello, this is Glenn Brooks.” He barely gave me the time of day. So I called him the next Monday, but this time when I introduced myself I said, “Hello, this is Glenn Brooks from Vibrant Living radio and TV.” And the result of the next call, as soon as I mentioned Vibrant Living radio and TV in some way it changed the level of agreement, and he me all of his materials to me overnight and in some way it was a sad thing for me.
Agreement is a concept I have people play with, because a lot of times I see people have agreements that are disconnecting them with what is possible in their lives. As an example, an agreement some people have with themselves might be that they are not athletic, or the agreement could be they can make only so much money, a limited amount; the agreement could be that if they give a business venture or a new practice a year and a half to work and it doesn’t fly, they’re out of there, which happens to a lot of entrepreneurs. I think understanding what agreements you have is part of becoming aware of the cycles you have.
Agreement is a very interesting deal. Every so often, I go through meltdowns around it. I call it paradigm conflict, or paradigm loss. I feel like certain people, it’s hard for them to even see where there’s an agreement, or that in a sense they’ve been blocked around an agreement.
People Let You Know What Their Agreements Are
A lot of times if you watch someone, they are going to let you know what their agreements are. As an example, I had a client, this was three years ago, and I owed the client $10,000. It was an event I was putting together with him. He said to me at one passage that I was going to go see him, and he says, “I trust you. When you’re in the United States, you’ll give it to me.” I tell you, it was such a touching agreement when he said that to me. I think I was high for a month. This was a person that I really revered, and we didn’t know each other too well when he said that to me. So that agreement let me know another level of depth that we have.
Sometimes agreements are incredibly up front. Sometimes we have no idea that we’re in an agreement or that an agreement is happening. Beliefs are related to agreements, but also I think agreements are the kind of thing where you can say to someone, “I agree to you. I agree with you that you and I are going to go on this marathon together, and we are going to live in this quality of agreement.” Sometimes agreements, when we are getting around certain people, you get into their agreement sphere, where they experience life more abundantly. That’s their agreement. You get around them, and you get a catch of that.
Being In Agreement
My Agreement with Dr. Baum
Sometimes I don’t even recognize I’m in an agreement. Many years ago, when I first met the naturopath, Dr. Baum, I introduced his work to a professor, a man named Zeke. When Zeke and I would go to Dr. Baum, we had such different experiences because when I would go to his office, he’d want to share, he had a very interesting history, Dr. Baum. Like his wife was on the quarter before the quarter went to the eagle. If you flipped the quarter, it was a picture of her, Doris Baum. So the first time I went to see him at his office, he threw me the quarter.
Part of our agreement, part of this whole thing about agreement is to be in recognition of it. It’s part of what happens before we say a word. Zeke said to me, “Why do you think I’m not having a good experience with Dr. Baum?” I actually didn’t know why it was. There were all the things that you would think would be the right agreement, and I think for me, I was just fascinated, I think I had an agreement with Dr. Baum that I wanted to know his sacred history. I wanted to know him at another level. I think an agreement is something that we come into with people. It’s something I think we can become more conscious of. I don’t think it needs to always stay random. With some people, I actually sit back and let them let me know what their agreements are. I pay attention to them. I pay attention by their actions and how they touch things, how they operate.
Choosing Your Agreements
Aging Is a Habit of Degeneration
Shawn Romano, joining me on my radio show, talked about how she won the open division in her fitness class at forty-three, and she ran the all-As division, and she said that when she trained, she saw herself as being able. That was her presupposition. She trained from the perspective to not just win her division, but for the respect of the summoning that she has this capacity.
When I got together with Deepak Chopra, the first twenty times we worked together, he said to me one time, “The reason that people grow old, age, and die, is that other people grow old, age, and die. The environment we are in, and I’m not talking about the natural, beautiful aging where we depart. What we call aging is not aging; it is a habit of degeneration.
I said that to Shawn, she was in the Olympics, and she said that the coaches initially in the whole athletic world, people degenerate very quickly, and they degenerate because a lot of competition puts a tremendous amount of cortisol and stress hormones in our body. She said that when she first stared competing twenty years ago, she actually started to age quicker. It wasn’t until she had a different approach to moving with awareness, that she had a different experience with her body. It was a very summoning thing, and it was a very powerful meeting. I felt that meeting Shawn expanded my life and expanded my world, and gave me the experience that I have another person to play with. There’s something about sharing something with someone.
Being in a Family of Agreements
When I saw my first picture of Paul Bragg, and I saw how he looked at how he looked in his body at eighty, I immediately thought, I want to be like that. That was how I saw that, because I loved my grandfather to pieces, but the thing was that he was so degenerated by the time he was in his early sixties, I used to spend time with him because I loved being around him, but he could barely stay awake. So when I saw Bragg, it was like something in my biology flipped on and said, I want to be around someone who treasures life that way. I brought all his books to school with me. It wasn’t just the information, it was like, I want to be in a family of agreements where even if we don’t make it to 150, let’s explore the possibilities of being more alive each day. Because what’s the point if we get a lot of money and then we’re all degenerated together.
So I realized it with agreements, you’ve got to pay attention. What are you agreeing to? I had a guy come to see me once, and for him it was so simple. He hated being inside all day. I said, “Okay, tomorrow, we’re going to set it up so you call your boss, and we’re going to get you to be an outside sales agent.” The guy experienced happiness.
Living with Awareness
Paul Bragg said to me, hang around ten people who want to live one twentieth of his life. I never thought of it that way. How many people do you know, it’s not to live one twentieth or not, but if you live your life, if you have some investment, if you build in certain generational practices for things that amplify you, you’re conscious of it. It makes the game a little more conscious. It’s not to say we won’t pass away in the next moment, but at least it’s something with more awareness. So I think the opportunity of agreements and becoming aware of them gives us an opportunity to become conscious.
Resisting Agreements
Resistance to Agreements
Resistance comes up with agreements. Join a dojo, join a health club, and they’ll tell you an amazing number of people drop out. That is one way you can see how agreement is a big deal.
Decoding Agreements
I feel around agreements certain things that speak to some people, like certificates, money. What I realize in life, no matter how many adults I get around, is a lot of times these things that have so much fun and exuberance when you discover them are very hidden. They are not up front. You’ve got to develop an ability to decode. It’s like in the publishing world. A friend of mine was telling me that his girlfriend was an acquisitions editor, what I call a rejections editor. This is one of the people at a book publishing house that determines whether a book is published or not.
He said to me he read the book his girlfriend was about reject. He said she never read the things she rejected. He said he actually read the book, and that book went onto become a bestseller. He was saying how random it was. I see it as being very similar to how the whole game works.
I’m meeting right now with one of the administrators to see if they can do something around college scholarships. They feel it’s a horrible game. There are so many kids who receive rejection letters. They send these letters back, and I see these kids apply to these schools, and they send them back horrible little letters, “At this time we thank you for applying,” and there’s no soul. There’s no honor in the game. There’s no honor that what’s actually the back and forth experience, and I see a lot of needless suffering in that. So sometimes when I see that, I think, let’s see if we can set up another way of informing people that there’s another way. Rejection is such a horrible thing to go through, no matter what it’s for.
Bad Agreements
Being in Bad Agreements
What I often see with people in terms of creative expression is that they play the game subservient to others. A lot of times, I had no idea I was making bad agreements, or what was happening.
I think a lot of people that I talk to are in a bad agreement with their dentist. What I mean by that is, if you’re in agreement, and this can be for a lot of practitioners, I guess not just dentists, though I hear about it more extensively, the agreement is that you go. They are practitioners of dentistry, and you feel a piece of work is done that is not satisfying, and my recent joke to people is that you’ve got to be able to learn how to bill your professionals. You should bill them back, because it’s a mutual practice; it’s not a one-way practice. So a bad agreement to me is, you go to someone, you’re dissatisfied, and you still pay them. That wouldn’t be a conscious agreement; a conscious agreement is like you’re practicing, I’m going to pay you based on the results and the satisfaction I experience, and so I think bad agreements are when we give away, and we are not conscious of the agreement.
Bad Agreements About Money
There’s a beautiful book called The Seven Laws of Money, by Michael Phillips. He has a whole rap about money, and how what’s relevant about money these days is that the people that give to you like to forward your mission. He was saying a bad agreement about money is like people give you money because there’s guilt attached to it. Like a friend of mine is in that kind of relation. He has an unlimited source of money, but it’s like he feels reduced any time he takes it; it’s not clean. It’s like they give it to him in the back room and he goes to Thanksgiving dinners, and they give him a boxful of money, but it’s a bad agreement. They don’t feel satisfied with the direction he’s moving in, and he feels bad about it. It’s not an agreement where they say, “We’re giving you this money to forward you, and please fail ahead a little bit, keep us posted.” I think a bad agreement is probably not an agreement that has some awareness, or some mutual investment, or some open communication; it’s an agreement where there is an amount of resignation, there is an amount of dysfunction.
People have a lot of stuck-ness and a lot of disconnect around money. Money is the thing that you’ll find the most breakdown in our conscience, because we’ve projected this special relationship on it that makes it unusual. When people get beyond it, they really play and have a sense of mission. So when I think of the most powerful relationships, I often think about people’s ability to realize that once we get into agreement, you’ve got to become conscious and resourceful to negotiate agreements. We have to inhabit them to become more alive.
Degree Trauma
Degree trauma is the endless quest for more validation out that comes in the form of educational degrees. For some validation only comes from their next PhD. I met a guy who has three PhDs. He said, “I’ve got three PhDs, and I still don’t know how to relax. I still don’t know how to breathe. I think I’m going to go for a fourth, because I don’t know what else is going to help.” When he said that to me, I had one of those illuminating moments. Validation doesn’t come from a whole bunch of degrees. If you don’t recognize the academic game for what it is, you could use a lot of psychic energy and be an unemployed pre-PhD person.
My Father’s Agreements
One of the agreements with my family was that, “It’s going to be really hard and gruesome, but you have to do it every day. That’s right – work.” My father had lost his job, and he was self-employed, and he went from suffering to extreme suffering. I remember there was one day my father came home, and I was unloading some whole grains, which he thought was pretty strange. He was wearing a raincoat, and he looked out at me, and I remember he was really white. He said to me, “Glenn, you may not like it, and you can avoid it, but one thing is you’ll have to work.” I can feel my body saying, “Oh my God. I have to work.”
Phil Laut, my friend, who wrote, Money Is My Friend, says, “It’s not as if your parents say to you, ‘Hey, look, it’s going to be really torturous out there; you’ll lose a lot of oxygen.’ They don’t usually say it to you, but look at how they are in their bodies.” As a kid, the closest I came was my grandfather, but how many times do your parents say to you, maybe you’ve had some blessed parents or relatives, but how many times does somebody say to you, “Look, here’s some money, go fail at a few things, and report back. Fail ahead.”
My Mother’s Agreements
School was a really alien place for me. It wasn’t a positive learning environment. When I was a teenager, I had a special agreement with my mother around high school. My mother’s agreement to me when I was growing up was if I let go of school, I would fail, because that’s what she learned.
The paradox was that she had a tremendous amount of respect and reverence for school and education, but I think it was hard for her to distinguish the two. I think that she really felt that school and how we related to school defined our lives. I felt that within that agreement, she missed being able to step away and let education be bigger. As Mark Twain says, “Don’t let school get in the way of your education.” I think that her agreement with me was that as long as I was in the progression of acquiring a degree and doing certain things academically – and I think this shifted, but early on, I think a good chunk of that relationship for her being around school really had a survival component. The survival component is sometimes an act you could say of love, but not perhaps the higher aspect of it, which has another level of freedom in it.
My mother clearly, like most mothers, I think, wanted me to fulfill things in a way that would bring me more what her picture was of success for me. And the more that I veered away from that, the more that I represented a challenge for her, a challenge for her to go beyond her pictures of what it meant. My experience was that I had these pictures, too. I felt like there was this thing that I had to do to prove something, and it really was other experiences that opened me up to realize that what’s really the case is that for each of us there’s a certain way. There’s a way that when we operate and when we connect, we’re actually different people. We function different, we see different, and a lot of times, the people around us habitually look at us in a way, they don’t see us, they look at us in a way that reinforces us being less capable and powerful than we truly are. I would say that was true in terms of my mother. I think in her reflection now, she probably would see things different, but at the time – and here’s the gift; the gift was that instead of really diving into drugs or alcohol, I think I went into some depression about that, because I didn’t know another way or see another way around that. It also impacted me in terms of work, because I thought if I couldn’t make it in school, then maybe I couldn’t make it in work.
I would say that the gift of my mother was that she was my mother; she provided for me, and through that, like most people, I had to go beyond. Of course, I went through my phase, probably like most of us, where I was rebelling and going a little crazy with it because it wasn’t a satisfying agreement, for one thing, and I didn’t know how to get beyond the agreement. It was an unfoldment of things that allowed that.
Changing Agreements
The Problem with “That’s Impossible”
“That’s impossible,” is a very common mantra. The problem with that mantra is a lot of times people don’t even know they have the mantra. I was on the phone with a company a few weeks ago I had a marketing idea to propose, and the guy said to me, “We never do that.” I always have fun with that line. I said, “Let me talk to the vice president.” Not only did he like the idea, he liked doing what I asked him.
Renegotiating an Agreement
A friend of mine says the most powerful thing about agreements is you can renegotiate the agreement, too. You can renegotiate based on new awareness and new input, and I think part of the honor of relationships is that there is some flexibility and honor that can happen.
Changing an Agreement
I was speaking at an event at a conference center, and a woman told me I couldn’t use the pool, because the pool was in another section of the center; it was the same conference center, but another part of the property. It struck me as really funny. It wasn’t that she told me, “You can’t use the pool;” it was how she said it to me. So of course I went back to the locker room and I went up and I told the manager of this facility that I was speaking next door, and what happened as a result of that is he not only told me I could use the pool, but he treated me like an honored guest. So sometimes there’s a part of me, probably because of the fact that I feel sometimes like an outsider, that there are little moments where I really want to respond when there is something going down.
Changing Agreements without Conflict
Sometimes when I go to traffic court, it’s the funniest thing. I haven’t been in recent years, but every so often, I used to get a speeding ticket. I used to say to myself, it’s always fun going because the first thing you see when you go to court in our country, where we have all these amazing rights, and you’re innocent before being presumed guilty, is that so few people use that. Their agreement is usually that they presume they’re guilty, they seem to go unconscious of their rights, and at a fundamental level it’s kind of fun going to watch what people agree to and how adults, a lot of them college-educated, give away so much power, and don’t see that they can actually deal with power and agreement without conflict.
The Unconscious Currency of Agreements
Tony Robbins was at Harvard University, and we joked once that he went in this room, and the room was filled with PhDs, yet he was giving the lecture as a high school graduate. I think that agreements are an interesting, fascinating currency.
Part of what I see about agreements is you’ll see some people whose level of agreement is that if you drive up in a Porsche, they’ll treat you differently. I often see different levels of how people agree. There is a whole unconscious currency at the place where people agree. To pay attention to that gives you more awareness, gives you more of not just succumbing to letting unconscious agreements run your world.
When I went to high school, I always thought I was really either stupid or that the path that was happening in high school was like, I couldn’t agree. What they were proposing was very unappealing. It wasn’t until I apprenticed a self-made millionaire for a while, who was a very unusual man, and he showed me there was another level of agreement around money, and it took me years and years, because he was such an unusual person, to understand how he lived his life and where he came from. It took me a while to catch how he lived. These weren’t things he could teach; you had to be around to catch them. I realized that the agreement in high school was for the most part a progression. The more degrees you have, the better. The more information you have, the better. In some sense, what I experienced happening was that there was a disconnection for me. At a certain point in my life, I really walked out of that agreement system.
Changing the Game by Changing Your Agreements
I find agreements to be something to play with to see that they are even operating when you are around someone. I see that that is a good thing to be aware of. I talked to a dentist yesterday. This guy’s in Toronto. He’s suffering being a dentist. He hates being a dentist. And yet the day I’m talking to him, yesterday, he told me he loves being a dentist. So I say to him, “How did you change your agreement?” And he goes, “Glenn, I’m glad you asked. One is, most of my life as a dentist I agreed that I would be in the office eight hours a day, and I would see people between, depending on the procedure, a half hour to an hour and a half. And my staff would be there. And people always get late, they always have resistances, and it’s really tough, because a lot of it is you’ve got to deal with people’s anxiety and stress about what I’m doing.”
So he was joking, he said he was going to kill himself being a dentist, and we were having this game changing conversation, and he said, “You know, I decided to change the game and change those agreements.” I said, “Well what did you do?” He said, “Well, what I did was instead of seeing eight people a day, I see one person a day, and I book that appointment for seven and a half hours.” That’s a pretty major agreement. He said, “I book a spot for seven and a half hours, and me and the staff, we bring in board games. We bring in these little swivel massage units. We bring in our favorite DVDs.”
Now get this – are you ready for the second thing about this agreement? You notice that when you go to a professional and you’re late, you know how you feel? Well, guess what? You can’t be late to his office. You’re booked for seven and a half hours. You own it. There is not stress on him, because they are there for you. Another thing is that if you want to get up and get a massage during your seven and a half hours, you do. There’s no agreement you have to sit in the chair. And this guy told me, the first year he did this, he said he almost felt like he was getting facials. He said he couldn’t believe how much tension he has wrapped up in that agreement that he thought was rock solid. All his associates had that agreement, the agreement that they had to be there and if they’re late they’re going to get penalized, and all this stuff that goes with that life draining way of living. And he didn’t even know he was in it.
So he said he stepped out of that agreement, changed the game. So get this. The second part of it was, by the way, I feel funny saying this, but he’s quadrupled his income, but he said the funny thing is about it is that he loves who he deals with now. He deals with people who are terrified of dentists. He deals with people who don’t want to feel time pressured. He’s changed so many agreements. An agreement is kind of like, usually when you really get into agreement exploration, you start to say, whoa, what’s going on? And usually, I find it in groups. I find it in groups, like someone will say to someone else, have you ever thought of trying this? And it never occurred to them. They were so busy trying to tap this one source and were straining so hard, they didn’t consider stepping out and changing the game.
Accepting Agreement Paradoxes
Paradoxes
I always knew there was a portion of people that would run for the hills when they saw me. The strange thing is there were another group of people who seemed to travel across the country to see me. I have always experienced these paradoxes. Paradoxes are some of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen with people. The paradox is that you can be really off in one area, you can be really bad in one area, and the other area, you can be really good. It’s the idea of the paradox or holding both these myths.
I’d have so much energy, and then because they couldn’t see the paradox, they would just think, I’m a failure. They would make a decision from that. Often that decision colors how they walk and move. This is the kind of stuff I was buried in.
Running for the Hills
People running for the hills, people disliking you, people not relating to your work, it’s probably one source of frustration and isolation. I think the saddest part of when people run for the hills is if it’s people who at one point you trusted. I know that being a game changer, a lot of times it’s hard for people to go past what’s normal for them. So if you represent something that’s unusual, that is distinctive, that is different, in their agreement system and their thought system, you are outside their world. You’re not credible. A lot of times, if people don’t experience something credible, they either blow you off, they stay away from you, they don’t even tell you no, they do something worse than that, where they treat you in a vague way. They don’t really make you significant.
Initially, I took this personally, and then when I started doing forums, a lot of people felt this way who were doing innovative work. If you started studying people who experienced this throughout history, it is absolutely amazing, whether it is acting or politics, some of the most influential people had so many other professionals say, as experts, that they should not be in the field, or that they had no capacity for the field. So in terms of the human spirit, one of my friends and I used to joke that what other people think of us is none of our business. And in theory, that’s a great thing. What other people think of us is none of our business. But the challenge is that sometimes what would happen was I would hear that intellectually in myself, and I would still take it hard.
What’s interesting is that some people’s belief system in their agreement system, the only way they could listen to you is that you have to be something that their system could related to. A lot of times how people experience you has nothing to do with you; it has this projection quality. But I think for a lot of people who wanted to make an etch in the world and go past and go beyond, and etch their work in the world, it’s really challenging. For some people, it’s emotionally and psychologically brutal, and maybe even spiritually brutal, to feel insignificant. So I think the wisdom there is to have recognition that people’s comments on you, their opinions, are really nothing to do with you. There’s a book called The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, and he says, “Don’t take anything personally.” People projecting is often their own monster land. I think it’s an awareness.
Joseph Campbell said that every part of your day, there should be a part of your day when you go beyond what other people think of you, who are the people you owe money to, or who owe you money, and you really should have a part of your day that’s a sacred journey, a sacred connection. So what I’ll say is that if you’ve grown up in a way where you’ve been a rebel, or you’ve done things differently, that’s just going to be the response by some, and it’s interesting to explore that. In some ways, it could be your greatest asset. It’s something for me that is something to discover from.
What People Think of You Has Nothing to Do With You
I did a series called Medicine Man, about how sacred medicine could save your life. And I said to Cloudpiler, “Were sacred medicine men your elders? Were you around some of the people that were medicine men?” And he said, No, the first time I had experienced sacred medicine, is my wife had a malignant skin growth, and we went to see this surgeon and the oncologist, and I was sitting in the room, and I think the surgeon spoke first, and the surgeon looked at my wife, and he said to her, we need to cut that skin growth, and we’re going to cut this, and went on to say everything they were going to do to her, and then he went on to say that she had a 30% chance of living. So the moment that he finished, the oncologist stood up, grabbed the guy’s belt buckle, and physically threw him out of the room. He said, “It’s not going to go down like that.” He goes, “I want to request that you guys take a few breaths, and just release what you just heard. We’re going to play it a different way.” And Cloudpiler told him that when his wife heard that, it wasn’t just like my experience of Bragg, they heard it at a level where they got a spirit mission, in the same way you they have in a sweat lodge. When that doctor said, “It’s going to be different for your wife,” they looked at each other, and they knew they were over the worst part of it. She in fact had a very minor surgery, and that was eighteen years ago. His first experience with sacred medicine was going over the dead feedback from a person who probably violated and cursed many people.
So I think that part of it is the ability to see what is happening, to be able to sense what people’s feedback is, and to realize that a lot of what people’s feedback has nothing to do with you. They’re feedback is from the realm of themselves and their disconnection; it’s not from the realm that they’ve had a rich experience of life.
In the Rhinoceros Success series, Scott Alexander has everybody who hates his book on his book. It has all of the worst quotations you can imagine from people who hate his book instead of quotations that praise the work. On the first page he says, “Life is kind of like this. In a given day, there’s a lot of people that go out to work, they go to their stalls, they get bossed around by someone else, and they have a lot of hate going on. Don’t expect that their feedback is going to raise you into rhinohood.” Rhinos lay around in the mud all week, they have a lot of freedom, and they might work a couple days a week. Don’t expect that cows, who work every day, are going to be the most enthusiastic about you gaining freedom.
It was kind of a simplistic thing, but on another level, it’s good to know the meaning. Here’s the other thing, people are never defined by their scripts of misinformation. Anybody can come alive in the intelligence of the moment, no matter what their education, or where they’re coming from, so it goes beyond so much. Listen to people that you feel have a live, live life council that touches you and moves you, and you can catch a breeze from.
Making Intentional Agreements
Feeling Expanded from an Agreement
There is a wonderful book on agreements, another book that is way out of print, by this multi-millionaire. He wrote a book called, How to Ask for the Moon and Get It. It’s a really simple book. He gave away millions of dollars to people around the world. What he did in the book was he said, here are the people I gave money to, and why; and here are the people that I didn’t. It was such a cool book because all he did was say, this woman wants a washing machine, and she wrote him this cool letter about why she wanted this washing machine. He wrote back and said, I gave Sheila $5000 for this amazing washing machine system. He said, “I felt I expanded from that agreement.”
Practicing Agreements
Usually we talk about agreements, there’s a whole arena where you’ve got to sense what’s going on in an environment. What’s going on a lot of times is there’s agreements where people are holding their breath. For instance, there was a practice in this one course I was in, we’d get paid a little money and the idea was to give it to someone in the group. We actually practiced doing things we enjoyed so we could have the experience of someone paying us for it. How many people get certified, and they have no idea how to make that connection in the world.
Symbols of Agreement
I’m realizing now that a lot of times people need symbols of agreement. So I started this program fifteen years ago called the Integrity Business Award. I went to a tire store yesterday, and there was a guy named Carl. I’m going to call the local paper, which was the Greenfield Recorder, and I’m going to surprise him. I’m going to give him this certificate called the Integrity Business Award. The Integrity Business Award was an award I came up with when I really felt that people outstandingly serve because their inspiration was to contribute. I was with this guy, Carl, and I felt like I couldn’t have gone away more satisfied. So I left there, and I thought, “I’m going to give this guy an Integrity Business Award.”
Choosing Adventure
I was teaching a course once. This one woman never said anything. It had to be seven weeks into the course – it was a ten-week program. I always come up with fancy words and ways of looking at things. I call this Generational Velocity. It’s kind of like something happens where you have a conversation and through the conversation, we both go to the level of velocity. I’m always playing with funny ways of looking at things. So she didn’t say anything about the program, but on the seventh week, I was explaining this idea of Connected Communication, and how to stay really connected to something that’s powerful without going away. I know this from customer satisfaction people, ninety-nine percent of people go away before the satisfaction. So I was saying that what happens is we conclude, we assume, we avoid, and we block, and what happens is we start to have this staleness or sense of non-vitality in the relationship.
So on the seventh week, she said to me, “What I did this week is the last twenty-five years, my husband used to speed down this big hill. I was in this environment with you and the other people, and I started to talk with my husband about how I felt when he would drive down this certain hill.” So it went from the first level where she communicated to him and he slowed down. The next level of the communication was, going into the tenth week, she said to me, “One of the things I concluded on and stayed away from was adventure.” The challenge of speaking about this is that it’s hidden. So she comes back to him and says, “When you go down that hill and I would get scared, when I’d like to do with you now is have you drive a little faster so I can share this other quality of adventure.” So what she said to me, that was the survival level. The survival level is, “The way you’re driving is really impacting me.” And a lot of people don’t show up for that one, but she communicated it. But the next level was where she said to him, “I would like to share this adventure.”
That’s where you begin to go into vision connecting. That’s where you begin to change an agreement that even though it’s on an outer level, it impacts how we begin to generate, function, and come alive together, if you will, live in a mutual quickening. All of a sudden, we go from no play to a place where we can play. Each moment becomes this alive substance, rather than we’re just doing this again.
When I work with people, I’m also studying their facial expressions and how they’re moving. Unscripted Power is really about coming back inside ourselves where we have that mobility. It’s not that someone else is giving us a posture on the outside, a yoga posture. We have the ability to see that we can actually become new postures and open ourselves. It’s not just wanting to achieve this thing called public speaking, we’re actually becoming aware of this ability to open, and together, really dissolve barriers that we take for granted. For example, a barrier we take for granted is that we hold our breaths around each other, or we avoid what’s really powerful because we’re scared. We start to become aware that there’s this level of survival that we’re working on. When we acknowledge that when we get up in front of a group of people and say, “I’m really terrified now,” and the group can feel it back with you, then you can begin to dissolve, let go of, and transmute, and you can say, “Now that I’ve owned this, here’s what’s next for me.”
Realizing Our Agreements
Realizing Our Spontaneous Genius, Intelligence, and Wisdom
We have the ability at any situation to have spontaneous genius, intelligence, and wisdom to recognize what is happening in our agreements. As an example, going back to Unscripted Power, whether you are writing or speaking, a lot of times speakers have certain presuppositions. As an example, mistakes are bad. A lot of times those speakers are in the back of the room; they just have to walk up. I’m sitting in the back of the room. I’ll tell them, “Right now, I just want you to take a breath and see how you can let go. Right now before you speak, I want you to tell the audience how anxious you are.” It’s amazing; a lot of times these are the things speakers push away from so much, and when they allow it to be part of them, part of their aura, part of who they are, it allows them to make the kind of connections that they thought they had to work their behinds off to get, rather than how to be more who they were, so that their expression could come from that, rather than more outside validation.
Think Different, Get Paid Different
A friend of mine called me up. She’s never spoken before. I told her to make a kit, like a speaker’s kit, it’s basically what you send speaker bureaus. She’d never gotten paid before, and the first time she got paid, she got paid $5500 for her first talk. I said, “Let’s look at the agreement. If you’re a professional speaker, and you want to get paid that way, there’s a lot of ways to do that. If you come in too low, they probably won’t think you’re a serious speaker.” So she did that, and she got paid different because she began to think different. To put that into action was such a tricky thing. It’s one thing to be able to think that, and it’s another thing to be able to say, what’s the language, and how do I form an agreement?
All of the sacred books, all of the old books if you read them, including Wallace Wattles, they all say, “Don’t tell a living soul,” because often as soon as you tell people things about your agreements, a lot of times a person cannot give you what they cannot keep themselves.
We Are Not the Target
There is a beautiful book written by Laura Huxley called You Are Not the Target. It was a very powerful book because she says that so much of your experience in life is that you are a target for something. And a lot of times how we interact with people is that underlying assumption that we’re the target of something. It’s like a built in stress response. We look at the news, we look at the papers. I had one guy who was going to kill himself because of the stock market. I think there’s an agreement that we’re the target.
Those were simpler times when that book was written; it’s definitely not any easier now. I think the new agreement, and the ability to use that agreement, in some spaces became much more difficult, but at the same time, that’s when I realized that having relationships where we could explore and really implement these agreements together made them real.
I often say to my groups that there’s an agreement that we have to do and have to be. That’s a big one. It’s an underlying agreement, that we need to do and have to be. I say to people, flip that. So rather than you do and have to be, it’s about being first. You be, you have, you do. Just changing that gives you a very different perception of what’s relevant, and what matters.
Radical Trust
I studied where I fall off the tracks, and where others do, too, and it was always in the realm of isolation, overwhelm, and fear. So I asked, “What eradicates that?” And I realized it was this invisible factor. It was an invisible factor of an ability to listen in a way that brought forth something that was somewhat invisible, and yet it was very powerful. I had many times where I would witness that in other people’s interactions, where a sincere promise and a sincere agreement led to a powerful connection.
The first thing I’ll do when I get in a room and I’m working with people, is I’ll say, “Even the way we approach our chairs, even the way we approach the room, let’s use everything in here to become awake to what we’re actually up to, which is really how to make connections and edge something in so that something’s more real as a resource when we leave here.” It applies to speaking, that from when you stand up to walk to the podium, even your steps, even your posture has a different quality that you can sense and know and connect with. You are more aware of the room, and there are other implications. Just getting up and realizing it’s these little, tiny things. It’s how you sit in your chair, how you take your next breath, and seeing how that relates to your life.
Having that kind of mobility and flexibility is the essence of what my friend, Ron Shapiro, calls Radical Trust. Radical Trust is an ability that we have to go beyond the status quo, to go beyond what we both think is possible, to another level together. It’s what self-esteem truly means. In terms of bringing this to the business world, especially with the people who are wanting to go to more levels, I started Unscripted Power to have an environment where people could experience and practice this listening, and also be able to cultivate not just their businesses, but also to cultivate more of a sense of resiliency, flow, and partnership with other people at a level that it is inspiring.