I got offered a job at the hat shop in town. I love hats. It’s easy and simple. It reminds me of the job I had at 16, selling shoes at Clarks in the Tyson’s Mall. Which, actually, was quite hard for a 16-year-old. I was the highest seller for 3 months there.

I’m going to focus on my painting today and making some fans. I’m learning the business of the artist. How much time you spend on making vs everything else. I’m not doing that well on either right now. Such is the artist if you ask me.

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You have to give spirit space to work

A lot of the reason I’m doing what I’m doing now is because spirit needs space to work through you. When the mind is going 24/7, the body distracted, the noise of daily life, social media, and the world always on, spirit can’t work through you. You can’t want things to be different and not give the forces of change the opportunity for something new.

And, change actually isn’t one force. It’s not simply active. It’s not all will. There is a time to effort, a time to pause, and a time to surrender. I’m moving in all of those at any one time lately (we have lots of goals), but overall, I’m in some sort of surrender to this stage of my life.

It’s not if I will this thing forward, it’ll become. Change is a triangle, an arrow. It’s the balance of three forces together: active, passive, and neutral. It’s the Trimurti, made of Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma. Brahma, the creating, Vishnu, the preserving, and Shiva, the destroying. The holy trinity has three faces.

It’s why I’m an advocate, at this point in time, for other people to take ‘soul sabbaticals’, or some sort of time where you can just get space for something new to happen. Yes, yes, I’m so privileged and you’re so mad about it. Hit me up, and I bet we can find a really creative way for you to do exactly this.

Most people need to make a BIG change in their lives, too, either because they want to or because the world needs it. You can’t do that when you’re in your normal, typical patterns of stress, pressure, and urgency. If you live in the modern, western world, you’re under stress, pressure, and urgency, CONSTANTLY. Getting out is SCARY. Getting out is necessary for CHANGE.

And, whatever that change may be, I would rather be here for a life that lived, that grew, that saw, that conquered the inner landscape. Change is HARD. If we go through one major inner change of our being in this lifetime, I think you’re doing better than most.

When to effort

It’s funny, my first job was in change management. I’m certified as a Prosci Change Management Practitioner. That basically means that I work as a consultant to help people make both individual and large-scale change. Big companies use this because, again, change is hard. We were doing digital transformations. This meant a company might want to change its software development process, one of the many kinds of digital changes a legacy company goes through. That’s a lot of changing everything from people to process and technology. That affects the way people work, the mindsets they need, the skills they have, and the tools they use. In Prosci, we use a methodology called ADKAR to understand how to make a change at the individual level for things like this. It stands for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement.

ADKAR is a step-by-step model for managing individual change, consisting of:

1. Awareness – of the need for change

2. Desire – to support and participate in the change

3. Knowledge – of how to change

4. Ability – to implement the change

5. Reinforcement – to sustain the change

I’ve never been one for ‘manifesting’. A lot of the modern new-age spiritual community talks A LOT about manifesting. They might even throw big parties focused on sex magic. Maybe it works, but I’m about results. I know how my work in the past, based on the work I do, has yielded results. I am a results-based individual, and if spirituality isn’t getting you results, don’t use it. This is SUPPOSED to get us results, and where it doesn’t, I don’t blame people for running the other direction.

If you ask BIG and SUCCESSFUL entrepreneurs about their relationship to God, they will give you a very deep, very connected answer. There’s no doubt in my mind that leading a life through God teaches us how to make stuff happen. Connecting with the ultimate creator fuels your ability to create. Watch the School of Hard Knocks videos and you’ll see what I mean.

All of this is what’s led me to study The Fourth Way. This has to be not only one of the most fascinating spiritual lineages (if you can call it that) but one that reinforces the stuff I’ve already studied (with no spiritual connection) and one I see people get results with. Results mean that your life gets better.

ADKAR and Fourth Way Parallel Explanation

You could probably make this connection among other spiritual lineages, too. Christianity talks A LOT about the entrepreneur. But I don’t know others like I know this one right now. When we look at it, it’s actually no surprise that esoteric knowledge is embedded in practices we thought had nothing to do with it.

Just something to nibble on,
Valerie