This post is brought to you by my new book Conscious Accomplishment - How to Use Personal Achievement for Spiritual Growth (over 50+ 5.0 ⭐️ on Amazon).

I’ve been spending a lot of time building things with AI.

I’m excited to announce my first public creation called WhoIMet. This post shares more about what the product does and some thoughts on building things with AI for non-technical folks like myself.

Who I Met automatically extracts your contacts from your calendar(s) meetings, allows you to organize them using tags and lists, and then send customized email campaigns.

The product is more of a network organizer with email communication (mail-merge) built in, than a deal tracker or robust note-taker.

I built this to addresses my own personal pain point.

When I was launching Conscious Talent and my book Conscious Accomplishment last year, I needed to curate a list of people to inform about the launch.

Because I have 7 zillion contacts in my inbox and Linkedin, my calendar was the strongest signal for determining who I actually had a real relationship with.

The challenge was I could find any solid tools to organize my calendar data without doing some serious spreadsheet ju-jitsu. I ended up having to buy two crappy google sheets plugins and have my EA do a bunch of data cleanup just to get a workable list to send out a launch campaign.

After these launches, my CRM woes continued…

Conscious Talent is too small of a company for something like Salesforce or Hubspot. Even the smaller CRMs are way overkill.

I just wanted something dead simple that let me easily build lists of potential clients to keep warm and candidates we placed. Until building WhoIMet, I’d been cobbling together a myriad of spreadsheets for this, but I’d often miss certain contacts because I didn’t have a birds eye view of all my meeting activity in one place. WhoIMet solves this need now for me too.

If the product sounds interesting, you can try it out for free today.

How WhoIMet Works

After spending nearly a decade in the Salesforce world, I intentionally wanted to make WhoIMet dead simple. Here’s how the whole thing currently works:

1. Connect your calendar to extract your contacts.

You start by connecting your Google Calendar, Outlook, or multiple calendars accounts. In 30 seconds, you have a clean list of every person you’ve had a meeting with going back to up to 3 years, that can be sorted by how many times you’ve met.

The multiple calendar capability is huge because you can view both your work and personal data in one place.

2. Organize with tags and lists

Once you have your list, you can tag contacts and create lists by however your brain works….prospects, investors, friends in tech, book launch list etc. The whole experience is meant to feel like a smart spreadsheet that always stays up to date.

3. Take action

Once you’ve organized your people, you can send personalized emails to any list directly from the app. No exporting CSVs, no copying into gmail, no formatting nightmares. Just pick your list, write your message, and send.

That’s it. Currently, there’s no pipeline stages, deal tracking., or 47-tab CRM windows that require a certification to use. Just a much better spreadsheet with built-in emailing tools.

Other cool features:

• Enrichment - you can enrich your contacts with company, title, company size, and bio

• Meeting history - see snapshots of all meetings you’ve had

• Notes + custom fields - add notes to any contact

Who This Product Is For

From my user testing, the product seems most interesting for:

Founders and operators at small companies. If you’re too big for spreadsheets but too small for Salesforce, this is your sweet spot to organize prospects, partners, investors etc.

Coaches and consultants. Several coaches I tested with immediately saw value in tracking who they’ve worked with, identifying people for reactivation campaigns and managing referral networks.

Anyone launching something. Whether it’s a book book, a business, a product, a fundraise, or an event, whenever you need to answer the question “who should I tell about this?”, WhoIMet makes it easy to find your people without too much spreadsheet archaeology.

Networkers who want to stay organized without the overhead. If your current system is some combination of your brain, a Notes app, three spreadsheets, and good intentions, this might be for you.

How To Try It Out

WhoIMet has a free forever plan to get started. I’d love for you to give it a try! It takes about 30 seconds to connect your calendar and see your contacts.

I want to give a big shoutout to everyone who helped me as beta testers. Your feedback definitely helped with lots of improvements.

If you try it out and have feedback, let me know using the feedback button in the app! There’s already been a bunch of feature requests I haven’t built yet. I’m putting this out there and will let feedback dictate the future of the product…so let me know.

Reflection On This Process As A Non-Developer

Of all the things in the world to spend my time on, I recognize that helping people organize their calendar contacts isn’t exactly solving world hunger or helping humanity uplift their consciousness. It’s also not going to make me rich. But building my magnum opus or a cash flow machine wasn’t the point of building this.

When I started to get serious about learning AI the main objective was to ship something useful that worked end to end. For someone that’s non-technical, this is a huge deal. This project provided an incredible playground to learn the tools to make this happen.

I believe that learning the new way to build and distribute products with AI will be an incedibly high leverage skill for years to come. And the best way to learn right now is by creating things that you want to use.

The old adage before picking your next business was really to take your time because you’re likely signing up for a 5-10 year journey. I thought that my last company Troops was going to be a quick win, and it turned out to be a 7 year journey + 2 years post exit…so I have mostly agreed with this.

But now that software has gotten so easy to build, I think its foolish to wait for the perfect business idea that meets all your ideal criteria to get going. You’re just missing out on wonderful opportunities to start learning this new way of building things.

As people dive into building with AI, I think giving yourself an initial grace period to tinker and build little things like WhoIMet is productive. At some point, the tinkering will start to have diminishing returns relative to working on something that feels deeply aligned with your calling.

Right now I kind of feel like I’m in this in-between phase. I’ve learned a lot building thigns and still feel aliveness around certain projects I never thought I would be spending time on. I view this pull as a directional intelligence. So my plan is to just keep following it and see where it takes me for now.

— Scott

This post is brought to you by my new book Conscious Accomplishment - How to Use Personal Achievement for Spiritual Growth (5.0 ⭐️ on Amazon).

I’ve been a hermit online since mid-december after I decided to take some time off.

I’m starting to feel the energy behind writing and social media again. Here’s what's been going on with me recently.

• I just got back from a 10 day RenXue retreat. It was interesting to attend this in such close proximity to a Joe Dispenza retreat. Although I loved my Joe experience, I found RenXue much more transformational and impactful. RenXue is much more about facing your inner world and Joe is more about creating a new one. There’s room for both, but looking inward has always been the greatest source of my growth and understanding.

• I completed my level 2 RenXue teacher training and will be starting level 3 (of 6) soon. Deep down I know at some point, I will need to step into my role as a teacher more fully. For now it feels good to work with a handful of people alongside building.

• We’re expecting another little girl in September! I couldn’t be more excited to go into double girl-dad mode.

• Professionally, I’m continuing to focus on building things with AI. I’m learning so much everyday and feel creatively unleashed. It’s exhilarating.

• Conscious Accomplishment is still selling and going well. It’s incredibly rewarding to hear from strangers how the information and practices are helping them. I’m also just shy of the 50 review milestone with a 5.0 review on Amazon. Woop-woop!

• I’m going to Human Tech Week in May and will likely be hosting an event there. More to come soon.

• After pressing pause on everything in December for health reasons, I’ll probably start back up my podcast EvolutionFM again in a few months. I think I want to double down on people pushing the edges of human potential and leaders who are deeply integrating their consciousness into what they’re creating.

Takeaways and Reflections from the RenXue Retreat

• We are in a period of settlement on the planet right now where the laws of cause and effect (karma) are manifesting. This is true individually and collectively. It’s also why it feels so hard right now. Even though everything coming into our awareness can feel like a bitch, this is actually a really positive thing. Things have to be brought into the light before they can be purified and move into a better direction.

• Many teachers seem to be saying the same thing right now - this year is an incredibly rare and important window to be working on your consciousness. Observing this pattern has me extra motivated.

• The love of the universe gives you challenges before giving you more responsibility. Said another way, it gives jobs to those who are prepared and ready. From this vantage point, your challenges are more likely a preparation and initiation, than a punishment.

• At RenXue retreats we’re always instructed to go into our hearts and stay there during all the teaching sessions in order to receive information. What does being in your heart mean? It’s basically centering your attention there while you open to its natural, positive qaulities. My experience is that occupying this state improves what you receive and retain on both the intellectual and the heart to heart level. I’ve learned that the condition of your heart is what that facilitates the transmission of and ability to absorb information in the field.

• I notice a direct correlation between being in my heart and receiving creative downloads. I had so many ideas around various things I’m working on. It was a potent reminder that to live in your heart, is to live in a creative state.

• The more you try to control something, the more it will try to control you. How do you let go of control? Go into the heart and give life’s direction to nature.

• Some people seem to have endless opportunities and that everything always goes well for them. If you’re serious about your consciousness evolution, it’s important to recognize that the opportunities to grow are the ones that matter most. It is why you’re here.

• Challenging yourself brings up your patterns. The cultural notion that spirituality means foregoing ambition fails to account for this perspective. Perhaps its why so many fail to recognize how external ambition and spiritual evolution tcan exist harmoniously.

• All is fair with the laws of the universe. This is both deeply humbling, but also freeing.

• People around you reflect your patterns back to you. When you’re in your heart, people will be in their heart with you.

• We tend to look at health in one dimension - how the physical body is performing. But the body is intended to support your life experience, and life isn’t just about feeling good. It’s also about evolving…in fact, I’d argue that is the primary reason we incarnate. It’s a misunderstanding to view physical challenges as the body malfunctioning. It’s doing its job and may be serving a higher purpose. This has been a challenging lesson for me to emrbace.

• Anytime you’re too busy for “consciousness work”, you can ask yourself what is the most valuable thing in life? If you believe it’s your growth and development…well, there you go.

• Your life is a manifestation of the law of cause and effect and the product of everything you’ve done across all lifetimes. In RenXue they call this overarching force that influences everything your law of your life. When you work on your inner world, you change your law of life. Working internally is a far more efficient method of change and understanding reality than only working externally.

• People often bundle awareness and mindfulness together. I resonate with the word awareness much more. Our cultural approach to mindfulness seems mostly about being less stressed and minimize asshole tendencies. Awareness is about seeing reality clearly. Seeing reality clearly is how we experientially realize its laws. When you realize its laws, you can align yourself to nature, as nature.

• Everyone you encounter is a manifestation of their natural law, just like you. Try to remember this when disturbances and conflicts arise.

• When your body is full of Qi, outside energies cannot enter.

• Big leaps often occur in a state of relaxation.

Recent AI Learnings & Reflections

• AI presents new challenges. Now that it’s so easy to build things, there can be a tendency to just build unnecessary things because it feels good. Shipping new features is like checking email now. It can give you a hit, but doesn’t always create that much value. This is one way that AI can use us, vs. US using it. Discernment will only become more important. I think it’s important to give yourself some proper mess around time though when you’re getting started.

• One vector of discernment is how valuable what you’re creating is. Another one is whether what you’re creating is aligned with your dharma or highest contribution. I’ve been building a lot of stuff that on the surface level doesn’t seem like it. I’m okay with this right now because I’m having a lot of fun and just chasing what feels alive. I’ve been given guidance to keep going with this for now while I continue to learn the ropes of building in this new paradigm. I think it’d be foolish to wait for the perfect thing in order to start learning and experimenting. Just start creating with things you actually want to exist now. At some point though, I imagine I’m going to have to start more acutely focusing on what I believe I’m here to do, which is support the development of human consciousness.

• I heard a podcast with Kevin Rose where he talked about spending a lot of time building in V0 which means ideating, developing specs, and prototyping. I strongly agree with this. I mostly do this in claude code projects for now which create surprisingly good interactive mockups.

• A lot of people are wondering what AI means for your support team like executive assistants. AI changes the game because if someone knows how to use it well, they no longer need to be as much of functional expert. They can just lean on AI to do that. This means the opportunity is to transform support staff from task managers, to owners of specific initiatives. For example, Jann on my team is now owning SEO and AEO for Conscious Talent. There’s still plenty of last mile tasks where AI struggles and this is much more high leverage than what she was doing before.

• After many years of being a devout RoamResearch user, I’ve switched to LogSeq for note-taking. Because it uses markdown, I can have my agents interact with my notes. I’ve found this opens up new functionality that has changed my behavior. For example, I am doing morning pages again because my AI runs on a schedule to automatically synthesize all the data and pull out to-do’s and themes I can reflect on each week. Small automations like this really do make a difference.

• I’m going hard on building marketing and distribution systems for my projects. For example, I’ve built a self-learning growth marketer for Conscious Talent where the same skills and mechanics can be applied to everything else I’m working on. This is where I think the near term leverage is. Future workers will walk into companies or new ventures with an army of agents they have been working with and refining from day 1. I plan on BYOA - bringing my own agents.

I have a lot of motivation right now to continue to go deeper on everything consciousness and AI related.

Life feels full and it is an exciting time.

-Scott

This post is brought to you by my new book Conscious Accomplishment - How to Use Personal Achievement for Spiritual Growth (5.0 ⭐️ on Amazon).

I’ve noticed since the emergence of AI there seems to be two camps.

Camp 1 - People who are obsessed with AI and how they will use this new super intelligence to enhance every part of their life.

Camp 2 - People who believe that humans should focus on cultivating the emergent inner intelligences in opposition to AI (e.g., intuition, source connection, emergent gifts).

You might say it’s the artificial intelligence vs. natural intelligence debate.

This is yet another great example of the pattern of polarized thinking which is the tendency to view things in absolutes like one or the other.

For the better part of the past 5 years, I was more oriented towards Camp 1. I was using AI every single day to enhance my workflow and life, but deep exploration was never a focus of mine.

I felt like most busy people probably feel right now…

I knew there’s something there and more I could be doing, but I had “too much on my plate” to focus on it. This was my story.

At the end of last year, I took some time off mostly for health reasons. Coming out of this, I felt this urge inside of me to hold off on diving back into everything I was doing before and finally fully dig into AI. I specifically wanted to focus on how I could build software as a non-engineer and amplify my existing projects with agents.

One month in, I’ve been blown away.

Right now I’m working on 5 different software apps and I’ve built a few agents to enhance certain workflows at Conscious Talent. Everything I’ve been building is something that I’ve wanted to exist, but never found a great solution for. I’m mostly productizing stitched together workflows that have been helpful for me. I’m generally excited about the utility that what I’m building might provide other people. But if that doesn’t happen, it’s okay because I am customer number 0 for everything I’m creating.

I’ll be launching the first product next week and if you’re on this email list, you’ll be the first one to know about it!

Back to the original question…

To focus on AI or consciousness right now?

I’ve noticed the new capabilities AI has provided have incited this kind of mania.

People on X are talking about how anyone ambitious is waking up and building stuff from the moment they wake up until they sleep (and then the agent continues the work). There is now a new source of stress that you don’t have agents doing work for you all the time. And when you do, people are stressed that they only have one agent instead of a team of agents!

Reading between the lines, there’s a whole lot of people that are afraid of getting left behind.

These reactions driving the mania originate from someone’s consciousness, of course. But hey, maybe if we just buy a few more Mac Minis for more agents, we’ll eventually feel content and okay in this world!

I’m not here to cast stones at this behavior. In fact, my new mac studio for agents and local models arrived today.

The truth is that I’ve felt just as tempted by the mania and have been watching my patterns flare in this environment. It’s been an incredibly fertile ground to use all this reactivity for consciousness work.

Having this awareness doesn’t mean foregoing fully engaging in AI. There’s a middle way where you can actually use your relationship to all of these dynamics to expand your consciousness. This is the subject of my book Conscious Accomplishment.

Here’s my case for why I believe focusing on cultivating consciousness and AI skills is a wise move right now (and what I’m doing about it)

The Case For Consciousness

If you’ve abandoned your morning practices to play with AI from the moment you get up that’s okay. I’m just here to make a case to make this a both/and:

• All thoughts, emotions, decisions, and actions stem from your consciousness. This is the ultimate determinant of your experience…and even how you choose to point your AI efforts! Working at this level is the foundation to everything, including fundamental well-being which is probably what you really want more than 4 cash-flowing AI apps.

• Resiliency - we’re entering a period of immense uncertainty and upheaval of our existing structures. I genuinely believe we are just starting the first inning. Your inner world will determine your capacity to navigate this. It’s wise to continue working on this now vs. wait until your life gets turned upside down…speaking from experience here.

• A lot of people are wondering what we’re going to do if we don’t have jobs? In my opinion, living into your purpose is mostly a consciousness problem. The thing you’re supposed to do (or mission) in this life already exists. The question is whether you have the awareness to see it? And if you do, have you done the work to transcend the beliefs and patterns that prevent you from fully embracing it? You can read more on this idea in Chapter 24 - Spiraling Up to Live Into Your Purpose in Conscious Accomplishment.

• Life will continue to serve you up the same experiences until you work at the level of consciousness. Your inner world gets reflected back to you. So you can toil away working solely at the material level, or you can start to work on the root cause so patterns don’t need to repeat themselves. This is just how this reality seems to work.

• AI is and will continue to become a superior intellect. I do believe the opportunity for humans is to lean into their human-ness, which includes more emergent forms of latent intelligence like their connection to the divine and ability to work with the unseen.

I’m not advocating for ignoring the natural excitement and inspiration this new technology is creating. You just gotta keep in mind what the core is while you do it.

The Case For AI

I was talking to an entrepreneur buddy about all the AI stuff I’m doing. His response was that all of it doesn’t necessarily align with unique genius. That may be true, and I get that. However, I maintain that it’s still wise to get serious about working with AI…especially for those on a consciousness path.

• Using AI effectively is like learning to use the internet effectively in the early 2000s. People who understood how to use the early internet were able to amplify whatever it was that was important to them. It is a certainty that AI will be central to how we work and live, and failing to take it seriously just means you’re not leveraging all the tools at your disposal right now.

• Technology enables scale. A main blocker for many people with great ideas and wisdom has been their inability to bring it to the masses. For example, we had to wait for software engineers to package up meditative practices in an app form to make it widely accessible even though it’s been around for thousands of years. We don’t have to wait for technologists anymore. Anyone with wisdom can now work with AI to bring ideas to life in formats that are more scalable. I believe that democratizing this ability will help unlock the world’s wisdom…and your own wisdom! But we have to embrace creation with these tools.

• You need to get your hands dirty to conceive of the art of the possible. Without a reference experience to what AI can do, you’ll evaluate its potentiality from your pre-AI context. For example, I never went deep on some of the ways an app might help people master their intuition because it felt too distant. Now that I’m in the weeds of building this, it’s much easier to deepen and expand my exploration.

I wrote this article mostly for people who are already on or are considering a consciousness path.

The answer isn’t to work on your consciousness or AI skills, but both. I believe the emerging and future leaders of the world will be able to work at both levels.

What I’m Doing

Here’s how I’ve been approaching this for the past month.

The consciousness work is largely the same as it was before I started focusing on AI.

I wake up sometime between 5 and 6am and generally am doing 1.5 to 2.5 hours of contemplative practices. Most days I try to sprinkle in an additional short practice or continued study.

I’m still doing some blocking and tackling with Conscious Talent, but most of my work hours are now spent building things. I work mostly with Claude Code and have also been using OpenClaw. I’m probably spending 6-8 hours a day building software and agentic workflows with AI.

In order to do this, I’ve had to make space. I’ve paused my podcast EvolutionFM, taking most meetings, planning community retreats, and been pretty quiet on social media (and general marketing for Conscious Talent and my book).

I’m in a position of privilege to be able to make this choice, but I’ve made the conscious choice to say no and leave a lot on the table to focus on building my AI muscles right now. In my eyes, developing mastery in this skill right now is the most high leverage thing I can do in the material world, besides continuing the consciousness work.

As I go about this, I’m doing my best to live the Conscious Accomplishment lifestyle and use all the opportunities for self awareness and transformation that come up along the way. Today I read this Something Big Is Happening article alluding to the fact that most people will be outmanned by AI soon. Now that I’m deep in the tools, I actually can totally see how this will be true.

The article, along with other tech pundits, have mentioned how it’s important to stockpile money while you can...while there are still jobs for humans. I immediately noticed anxiety and fear coming up, and dropped into a repatterning session to bring myself back into feeling trust. These types of things happen all the time while diving into the AI stuff. It’s rather confronting. I’m trying my best to use them as they happen.

I don’t know how long I’m going to be approaching my work like this. Right now I just feel in the flow and am continuing to follow it. I have a ton of energy to keep building various applications I want to see exist and this is providing the perfect training ground for my AI skills. It’s been a ton of fun and feels aligned right now. My immediate goal is to launch all these things and see what happens.

In summary, I think it’s wise to view focusing on consciousness work and AI as a Both/And right now!

-Scott

I recently attended my first Joe Dispenza week long retreat in Marco Island, FL.

I first read his book Becoming Supernatural in 2019. I was enthralled by it and considered going to one his retreats retreat.

I distinctly remember after encoutering his work thinking that the reason I hadn’t gotten everything I wanted in my life was that I wasn’t manifesting using my consciousness as a first step. I had found the key!

This was in my using spirituality to get stuff phase of my consciousness journey. This is where you retrofit spiritual growth as a new pathway to satisfy old patterns and desires often coming from an unhealthy place.

As I started to realize how I was trying to use my consciousness journey as yet another method to perfect my outer world, I became less interested in his work.

Fast forward to today, a lot has changed. I no longer hold a polarized view of material success or spiritual depth. You can choose to integrate both aspects of your experience simultaneously. I think treating material reality like an illusion, although well-intended, misses that we came into form to have a material experience.

Between this updated perspective and my health struggles, I guess you could say that I was primed for a Dispenza event.

I ended up there because last December, three different people told me to go to his retreat in less than a week. I took this as a nudge and decided to go.

I hadn’t engaged with his material since 2019, so I didn’t really know what to expect. My impression of him was that he was very focused on science and material manifestation. So I kind of figured I’d get some watered-down view of spirituality that hopefully might help my health.

I’m happy to share that I was delightfully surprised.

Here’s a hodgepodge of observations that stuck out to me from the experience:

The Healing Stories Are Incredible

The number of people I met or witnessed during the week who had used their consciousness and heart to heal chronic and supposedly incurable diseases was astounding. I saw accounts of blind people seeing, people getting out of their wheelchairs, and the healing of pancreatic cancer. It was mind-blowing.

In one of the coherence healings, my group supported a paralyzed woman who had not stood up in over 20 years. After the healing occurred, we were able to lift her up, and she was able to put weight on her feet.

This was one of the more moving experiences of my life.

A Synchronicity Fest

I experience lots of synchronicities as it is, and it felt like this event took it to the next level. I thought I’d share a few cool ones.

Synchroncity 1 - In November, I did a past-life regression with podcast guest and author Rob Schwartz. During this experience, you interact with a council of elders who you can ask any questions to. The elders instructed me to go to the Joe Dispenza event and told me that I would meet him and that he’d help me in my journey as a teacher. I honestly forgot about this by the time the event came around. My main intention was physical healing.

Each day, you spend the whole day sitting next to the same person, so over time you become friends. At the end of the 2nd day, the person I was sitting next to invited me to a dinner for Joe’s nonprofit called Inner Science. The dinner was attended by a very small group of the 1,400 in attendance, and I was able to meet Joe there. I guess the elders were right!

Synchroncity 2 - On the first day of the event, I sat next to a woman in the speaking industry. The next day at lunch, she told me that she received a download that she was supposed to heal someone at the event. Later that day, she told me that she was instructed to heal me. She wasn’t a practicing healer and wasn’t sure how this would happen. I was excited at the prospect and remained open to the possibility.

A big feature of the event is the coherence healings. During these experiences, you send love and healing intention to someone who needs healing as a group. I wasn’t picked to be healed and was a healer throughout the event.

The evening of the second healing, I noticed that the woman who said she was going to heal me and I were converging on the auditorium entrance at the same time. This was pretty unexpected because there were 1,400 people trying to walk into one room at the same time. I ended up right behind her and sat next to her. We laughed at the synchronicity, knowing what she had said earlier.

While I was healing this other person, I was brought into the presence of my father, who passed away six years ago. He told me that he loved me and was proud of me. While this was happening, I released a tremendous amount of grief and cried my eyes out for about 15 minutes. Her healing prophecy came true!

Synchroncity 3 -I have been working with a Dr. who uses a technology called NuVision which uses a quantum hologram of your field to diagnose your health and provide remedies. The way it works can be applied to understand anything, including your consciousness.

A few weeks before the event, we asked the technology what the number one thing I could do to evolve my consciousness was, and the information that came back was “pineal gland.” I knew about the pineal gland but hadn’t done a ton of concerted practice around it for years. My plan was to investigate some meditations around it once I started feeling better after the event.

When I got to the event, there was an entire day dedicated to the pineal gland and meditations on it each day. I left with a complete set of tools to work on it that I didn’t even know I would be getting. It’s crazy how my growth continues to fall into my lap.

There were many other smaller synchronicities that happened throughout each day, but these were some of my favorites.

Bringing Data to Ancient Teachings

I was delighted that Joe views everything through the lens of energy and information, which largely mirrors the teachings of RenXue, which has been the primary focus of my studies.

Our consciousness has an innate capacity to direct information through intention, which then gets expressed energetically. As Joe puts it":

“You change the information in the field, you change matter.”

This is effectively how energy healing works, as well as other phenomena like manifestation.

I think there are a lot of us who believe in consciousness being primary and thus our physical condition being an expression of consciousness. However, there is a gap in our ability to measure the connection between these mechanisms as they happen. It seems like people buy into psychosomatic healing, do a bunch of inner work, and then one day wake up and feel better. This is great when it happens, but the lack of measurement that clearly demonstrates cause and effect creates a barrier to mainstream medicine embracing the consciousness connection.

What’s so compelling about Joe’s work is that he’s measured the effects of so many people who have attended these events and had healings. I’ve studied a lot of mind-body connection material and have never seen such a solid demonstration of impact as the data from their research. He’s got some great research on his website, but the depth of explanation at the event really solidified how real it is.

Focus on the Heart

Another analogous teaching to my studies and experience demonstrated at the event was the focus on the energetic heart. This is huge in RenXue and, in my opinion, one of the most overlooked aspects of many spiritual traditions that focus purely on the mind.

The heart is the doorway to the true Self, joy, and so much more. I loved seeing this emphasis and his model of how it relates to quantum phenomena.

Joe’s Teachings Are Deeper Than I Thought

As mentioned earlier, my original impression of Joe was that he loved talking about the science of everything.

Like many people, I went through a phase of obsessing over the science of spirituality. Over time, I became fatigued with the science of consciousness, as it became a lagging indicator to my direct experience. Knowing the quantum physics of reality intellectually, is just less interesting than deepening your experience of it.

There are also simply so many things that cannot be measured or explained, and you massively limit yourself when you focus on what science can or cannot prove. I also think the need to figure it all out, which can be so prominent in this overlap, often points to a consciousness pattern of the ego.

So going into the retreat, I expected Joe to be really buttoned up and stay away from more esoteric topics that interest me. I was delighted when he alluded to concepts like the soul, reincarnation, other dimensions, and higher consciousness beings.

I realized that how Joe talks on podcasts is very different from what happens at his events. Moreover, the sequencing of how he talks about these topics at his events is intelligent and something to learn from. There was an intentional arc and buildup to this type of material. I think he did a brilliant job of making things accessible without turning people off too early.

Embracing Accessibility

Coming out of this experience, I feel a shift in my perspective around communicating consciousness concepts.

I’ve noticed a lot of teachers use specific language and avoid topics in order to avoid polarizing people, even though their level of understanding is much greater than what they communicate.

Although I understood the benefit of this approach intellectually, it never appealed to me for most of my journey. If you know something to be true, why bend over backward to code language or dance around the truth? It felt inauthentic.

I’m noticing a shift in how I feel about this following Joe’s event.

If you’re really trying to create global change, you need to function within the system you’re operating within. This is simply the intelligent thing to do.

There’s also an honoring of where people are at, which can be treated separately, from where you’re at in your own experience as a guide and teacher. Props to my friend Jonathan who helped me clarify this.

The Group Field

Everything has a field defined by the information that creates it and is expressed energetically. A supportive field creates the conditions for certain things to happen that would otherwise be difficult.

I’ve seen how dramatic an impact a field can have, so needless to say, I was excited to see what a field of 1,400 people meditating and focusing on their hearts at the same time might do.

On a personal level, I noticed a heightened sensitivity to Qi and dramatic amount of love during the coherence healings. I was also able to access some grief that had previously eluded me. Many people around me had big experiences. I attribute a lot of this to the field.

Masterful Production

I like studying people in the transformation industry because at some point, I know I will be working in it more prominently.

Joe was one of the most polished and skillful communicators I have seen. The production quality of the event was world-class. This was very inspiring and motivating for me to see.

Consciousness Explorer

Some of my favorite parts of the event were when Joe told stories about his own journey. What struck me about him was his level of curiosity and experimentation around human potential. If he experienced a certain phenomenon, he seemed very determined to recreate it and understand it.

It’s easy to look at someone with the notoriety of Joe and think he’s got it all figured out. The reality is he started out as a chiropractor who was having mystical experiences. It would have been very easy for him to just stay there. However, his curiosity and devotion to his evolution kept him exploring to understand deeper truth and eventually share it with others in a unique way.

As someone who is passionate about exploring the boundaries of human potential, this was very inspiring to me. If I’m being honest, I feel like I’ve been more complacent as of late around pushing my own boundaries. I think a lot of this has to do with my health challenges, but nonetheless, seeing his passion and commitment was deeply moving and reinvigorating.

Absence of Shadow Work

One thing I noticed is that Joe didn’t really talk much about shadow work. He mentioned that things will come up as you get into deeper states that fall out of resonance with the higher frequencies, but there wasn’t much guidance how to work with these events. I think this is one reason a lot of people question the depth of his work. The peak experiences are great, but without a thorough excavation of the subconscious and all the information that is creating out experience in the first place, I’ve found you don’t change all that much.

I’ve done a lot of shadow work over the years so I was okay with the event being more oriented toward human potential, than descending into the subconscious. However, I could see that if Joe’s work is all you’re doing, there’s probably a clear ceiling to how much your life will evolve.

Overall, I left with a sense of possibility, greater understanding, and some new practices I will be experimenting with.

I would definitely go back and will probably do one of his advanced follow-up retreats at some point.

-Scott

I haven’t talked about the specifics of this much, but I’ve struggled immensely with my health for the past 4.5 years.

During this time, I’ve been diagnosed with:

• Chronic fatigue syndrome

• GERD

• Parasites

• Lyme

• Mold

• Long Covid

• Vaccine injury

• Disc herniation / impinged nerves

• Thoracic outlet syndrome

• Dystonia

• Chronic laryngitis

• SIBO

• TMJ

• Systemic inflammation

I’ve also seen many alternative health practitioners, healers, and medical intuitives who have given me other explanations for my challenges:

• Kundalini syndrome

• Ayurvedic imbalances

• Qi blockages / imbalance

• Entity possession

• Psychosomatic / suppressed emotions

This has been exhausting, confusing, and wildly expensive.

Here’s a recent pic of me doing bio-magnetic therapy in Austin. I have about 40 magnets on my body!

Last week I was diagnosed with CIRS (Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome).

CIRS isn’t formally recognized by the CDC or mainstream medicine, but it’s fairly well known in the chronic illness community.

The idea is that, due to genetic predispositions, your body can’t clear certain biotoxins. This causes your immune system to be perpetually activated, resulting in chronic inflammation which wreaks downstream havoc across multiple systems in the body.

This tracks with many of the symptoms I’ve dealt with – extreme fatigue, constant pain, brain fog, memory loss, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, temperature dysregulation, nerve pain, numbness in my arms and legs, stomach pain, insomnia, and incredible anxiety.

The crazy thing is that five years ago I was the healthiest person I knew. And despite eating a spartan diet, exercising 5+ days a week, diligently tracking my biomarkers, and even spending 1000’s of hours doing trauma healing work, my health has gone to shit.

Navigating all this has easily been the most difficult thing of my life.

Many days I haven’t been able to do basic things like work, engage in social activites, or watch my daughter. The physical pain or intensity of my fatigue is just too much.

For the first few years of this, I resisted that this was my reality immensely and was extremely angry about it. It felt like the prime of my life had been taken away from me and I didn’t know why.

Why do things like this happen? Is it just shit luck?

Maybe you’re going through chronic health issues. Or maybe it’s something else that has been extremely debilitating.

I wanted to share a perspective that has increasingly helped me find meaning, acceptance, and compassion through all of this.

Imagine you have a shape that represents the level of well-being of all aspects of your life. For the average person, it might look like this.

Before you’re on a consciousness journey, your life is mostly oriented around trying to grow and improve these external factors through applying yourself.

Most people generally keep doing this as long as it seems to be working for them. There’s not impetus to behave differently.

But at some point, this strategy may stop working.

This happened to me when I turned 30.

No matter how hard I tried and cleverly I maneuvered, things stopped going well – including my physical health. This led me down a path that eventually made me begin to prioritize my inner world.

Even though my inner terrain increasingly became the focus and was viewed as a more primary way to cultivate well-being, I still wanted to thrive externally. It’s why I was so frustrated that things felt very challenging.

A few years into this, my teacher and many of the books I was reading began to point to the same thing…

A higher aspect of myself (my true Self or soul) had a slightly different prerogative than crushing it on all aspects of life. Its priority was the evolution of my consciousness. It acheived this through expanding my awareness and transformation to restore its natural qualities.

Using the shape analogy, its prerogative looks closer to this.

The thing is, the path to restoring and expanding these virtues is typically markedly different from growing your external well-being – at least in the beginning.

How do you, or more accurately, how does life do this?

In my experience, it happens through becoming aware of the obstructions blocking you from embodying these qualities in the totality of your consciousness. Because most of these are subconscious, you need to experience some sort of event or circumstance that brings them into awareness. Otherwise it’d be impossible to become aware of them.

Rob Schwartz, author of Your Soul’s Plan and a recent podcast guest, calls this learning through contrast. To become aware and understand something, we must experience a polarity.

For example, in order to become more loving, you need to be put in a situations that reveals all the ways that you don’t love yourself. Or in order to restore trust, you need to experience something that illuminates the depth at which you don’t trust life. These situations reveal hidden aspects of your consciousness which create the required awareness for healing..

In my metaphor, this means that you often have to experience a contraction in your material reality, in order to experience an internal expansion.

I don’t think this means your soul wants you to suffer. In fact it wants the opposite. But in order to expand to a higher level of understanding and fundamental well-being, it has to create the opportunity for learning through contrast.

In the example with my health, pretty much all external vectors of my life have suffered – it’s been hard on my partner, my social life has diminished greatly, I can’t work out really, and my raw capacity for output is much less than what it used to be.

However, these conditions have forced me to become aware and grow in so many ways. Without being pushed to my absolute limits, there’s absolutely no way I would have developed the same levels of self-love, compassion, acceptance, awareness, and trust. Moving through, and honestly surviving these conditions, required it.

This doesn’t mean all this hasn’t been hard as hell. It has. And I wish I felt healthy and vibrant the past 4 years. I know I will at some point. This is just where I’m at right now.

After Perspective Then What

Having this perspective has been a great foundation. It creates a sense of meaning and even ownership for what might otherwise seem like bad luck or misfortune which can keep you stuck in victimhood.

I came to it through my teacher, reading, and eventually direct experience through dialoging with both my true Self and guides. If you want a starting place, I’d recommend reading Your Soul’s Plan.

In addition to grokking this idea, here’s what I’d recommend on a daily basis to navigate any period of prolonged suffering.

Notice and accept whatever you’re feeling each day. Each time you notice that you’re feeling upset or helpless, take some time out of your day to be with these feelings. I tend to do this in the morning and as I’m doing things if time allows.

In Conscious Accomplishment, I called this process “identify, face, accept, and replace.” The replace component is where you bring in love and compassion for yourself. It may feel like you’re doing this a zillion times, but just keep going. It really does help.

Do things that help remember the game you’re actually playing – the evolution of your being.

One question I once heard was “if [insert challenge] was your pathway to God, would you take it?” For me with my health challenges the answer is yes. And it has brought me unequivocally closer to realizing my own divinity. I try to remember this question when I am feeling frustrated or down.

Don’t wait to start living until you’re better. I’ve fallen into this trap many times. After a certain level of suffering, it’s easy to just punt on everything until “when I get better.” The thing is you don’t know when this is, and tbh it may never happen. So you might as well try your best to enjoy your current conditions, while gently honoring the constraints of it.

Drop all comparison. As soon as you start comparing your path to everyone else, it’s easy to drop back into victimhood. How come other people don’t have to go through the same hardship that you do? It feels unfair, especially when you feel like you made all the good choices leading up to this.

Your soul has its unique plan. It’s nonsensical to compare yours to others when you have no idea what theirs are. When you notice this tendency, let it go and replace it with trust that your higher self knows what’s best for you and is giving you exactly that. Again, you might need to do this many times before the tendency softens.

Don’t throw the medical baby out with the bathwater. After 2 years of western medicine sending me in all sorts of directions that resulted in no improvement, I went almost exclusively into spiritual healing mode. The lack of progress I experienced convinced me that I was mainly dealing with a psychosomatic healing crisis, and all the spiritual healers I was seeing loved to reaffirm as much.

In hindsight, this was not a great idea. It’s not that this psycho-spiritual aspect isn’t important to tend to, it’s just that there’s no reason to abandon all the tools that you have at your disposal. I’ve had the best results running both in parallel.

I’ve also noticed that a perfect confluence of western medical diagnosis and support tends to arise in close concert with some inner awareness and healing.

Find peers and community who are going through the same thing. The loneliness of chronic illness cannot be understated. If the only people you can talk to it about are people who don’t have a direct experience, it’ll be hard for you to truly feel seen and understood.

Fortunately, I’ve connected with a handful of people who are in a similar crucible that I am in. Our conversations and mutual support are deeply nourishing and helpful. I didn’t really seek this out, but wish I had earlier and there are sites like The Mighty and Healing Well where you can meet other people.

I genuinely hope that no one ever has to go through something like this. However, I trust if you are, it isn’t a mistake. As far as I can tell, the universe doesn’t seem to make them.

So the name of the game is learning how to traverse these experiences with greater ease and grace. These have been the most helpful things for me. I hope that it meets all those who need it right now!

-Scott

P.S. as for my own healing, the main things I’m doing right now are bio-magnetic therapy, the shoemaker protocol, peptides, herbal detox for Lyme, and some supplements. Thankfully I feel very supported.

I’ve been sharing chapters from Conscious Accomplishment that I think might be particularly helpful. Today’s chapter outlines how to relate to and work with ambition when you’re on a consciousness path. Here’s what others are saying about the book:

Chapter 18: Ambition - Clean Fuel vs. Dirty Fuel

Audible reading 👇

When you think something outside yourself is going to solve your problems, it’s common to place ambition on a pedestal. The more ambitious you are, the more you can achieve and perfect your life. This might as well be the anthem for Western culture. When you begin your consciousness work you may discover that most of your previous ambition was driven by unhealed wounds. This can be confusing. Once I recognized the source of my own striving, I wondered if ambition might somehow undermine my spiritual growth? Resolving this confusion requires a nuanced understanding of ambition’s different forms and how they can impact your consciousness evolution.

What is ambition really? A strong desire and determination to work towards something greater. There is nothing inherently counterproductive about ambition if you’re on the spiraling-up journey of consciousness evolution. What matters is where your ambition comes from.

Healthy ambition arises from sources aligned to your true nature such as inspiration, love, and a desire to contribute. When you have it, you feel a deep calling to improve the world around you to the best of your ability. This is our natural state of ambition before our conditioning and identification with unhealthy patterns.

Unhealthy ambition is when your desire to achieve emanates from unhealthy patterns created by your past. In this context, the drive for achievement is often fueled by unconscious fears of inadequacy, rejection, or failure. Rather than facing these feelings directly, people attempt to achieve their way out of suffering, which never works. Maybe you feel an incessant drive to accomplish more or constantly improve yourself so that you’re recognized by your peers. Or maybe you’re motivated to make a ton of money so that you will feel safe. The challenge for most people is that unhealthy ambition is usually driven by unconscious patterns. So you move through life with an incessant hunger for more without ever having a real understanding of what’s driving you. This might get you some pats on the back from others climbing the mountain of success, but it doesn’t really do much for improving your sense of enduring well-being or understanding.

Unhealthy ambition tends to correlate with performing actions as a means to an end instead of following inspiration. For example, maybe you opt to continue climbing the corporate ladder so that you can hit your financial goals. You tell yourself that when you have a million dollars in the bank, then you can pursue your dream of making music for a living. If you continually interrogate the context of why you’re doing something as a means to an end, it will culminate in a desire to feel a certain way. In the corporate ladder example, what you’re actually longing for is not a million dollars, but a sense of safety that will give you confidence to pursue your dreams. This instigates the question of whether there’s a more direct way to achieve the feeling you desire.

It is the context of your ambition that determines whether it supports or undermines your consciousness evolution, not the content. This means that it’s less about whether you want to make a million dollars or not, but where that desire comes from. Continuing to feed unhealthy ambition simply reinforces the underlying patterns that drive it. Although this may help you get to the top of the mountain that you imagine will make you happy someday, it doesn’t do much to move you up the spiral. Conversely, when you turn inward to investigate any indication of unhealthy ambition, you step towards a higher altitude of well-being and understanding. From this elevated vantage point, you’re more equipped to determine the best path forward.

Even if you aren’t fully sold on the whole consciousness evolution thing, there’s practical reasons to pursue healthy ambition. Healthy ambition is like clean fuel. When you run on it, you can sustain your energy and activities for long periods of time. Endurance comes naturally because you’re doing things that are intrinsically rewarding instead of needing to achieve some outcome.

Unhealthy ambition is like dirty fuel. Dirty fuel may get things moving, but it’s unlikely you’re going to be able to sustain yourself or avoid breaking down. At a basic level, this happens because you’re constantly chasing the next thing, thinking that one more accomplishment, milestone, or dollar will bring happiness. This keeps you locked in a cycle of overexertion, never quite able to recover and enjoy the present moment. On a deeper level, breakdowns occur because you’re operating from a place that’s out of alignment with your true nature. Eventually this becomes unsustainable, leading to burnout and a lack of fulfillment. One fuel source provides an enduring path to well-being and alignment, while the other keeps you spinning your wheels inside your patterns.

The path to healthy ambition isn’t driven by force or intellect, but by cultivating the inner conditions that allow it to arise naturally. The deepest part of your being already wants to uplift the world around you from a place of love and inspiration. However, there’s unhealthy patterns that you’ve become identified with that obscure your true nature. Continuously working with your response life creates the conditions for restoring healthy ambition.

My personal journey evolving from unhealthy to healthy ambition was a gradual shift that came through continuous purification. As the unhealthy patterns fell away, I became more inspired and energized to do things simply because I enjoyed them. This coincided with a growing desire to help others. I wasn’t actively trying to conjure these feelings. They were just a natural byproduct of shifts in my consciousness.

The truth is that ambition and consciousness evolution are compatible. When it’s healthy and aligned, ambition can be fantastically supportive for your well-being, fulfillment, and contribution. If you need further evidence, just look at some of the most enlightened beings that have shaped history. I think it’s fair to say that anyone who sought to spread a message that opposed the status quo must have held some degree of healthy ambition. Otherwise, they would have just lived as a recluse and not gone to all the trouble of helping people.

True Conscious Accomplishment isn’t about losing ambition—it’s about purifying it. It shifts the fuel from fear and striving to inspiration, love, and contribution. If you seek to develop a healthy relationship with it, the key activity is examining the context of your ambition. To bring awareness to where you’re operating from, there’s a few things you can place your attention on.

Push vs. Pull

Do you feel pulled to do the activities you spend your time on because you enjoy them? Or do you feel like you need to push yourself to achieve some future outcome or to avoid catastrophe?

Let me share two contrasting experiences from my entrepreneurial journey that illuminate this distinction. For the first four years of my last startup, I’d force myself to go into the office every Saturday, and sometimes on Sundays. If I didn’t work, I’d become anxious that we weren’t making progress fast enough. Whenever I didn’t get a few hours of work in on the weekend, the feeling of falling behind would often spoil the rest of my day. My unconscious strategy for dealing with this was being vigilant about working on weekends.

When I started working with my response to life, these disturbances became opportunities. Anytime I felt distressed about falling behind, I started to turn towards it. This gradually exposed the underlying fear and self-worth issues that kept me chained to my desk. By working on these patterns directly, the pressure to work on the weekends started to fade. For the first time in years, I was able to enjoy myself regardless of whether I cleared my inbox on Saturday. This type of freedom was something that no amount of productivity had ever delivered.

Let’s contrast this with how I have felt writing this book. One day after a long conversation with a friend about many of the ideas in this book, it became obvious that I needed to share this information. Once I felt the call, I became energized and couldn’t wait to start writing. Every day I felt this pull to just sit down and continue writing. I regularly found myself in a flow state for hours, barely noticing time pass. Sometimes it felt like the book was writing itself.

The difference between these experiences is striking. One was driven by fear and required force, while the other was fueled by genuine inspiration and enjoyment.

When you pursue activities because you enjoy and feel a natural pull towards them, that’s a sign of healthy ambition. When you feel like you’re pushing yourself to do some means-to-an-end action, that might be worth examining.

Healthy ambition carries a quiet acceptance of however things unfold. This is partially because you’re doing things for the sake of enjoyment instead of trying to get somewhere. The prize is the process, not a few moments at the top of the mountain. You still do your best to create good outcomes, but when things don’t go your way, you’re less affected because you’re driven by an intrinsic reward.

A Chain Of Whys

Another way to understand the root of your ambitions is continuously asking why you have them. Maybe you feel driven to plug away at a job you hate until you hit your financial goal. Someday once you’ve hit your magic money number, then you’ll think more seriously about what you actually want to do. To investigate this, you can start by asking yourself, “Why do I need to make a certain amount of money?” Maybe you want to have a nice apartment. “Why do I need to have a nice apartment?” Maybe you value nice aesthetics in your home. If you keep going down the chain of why’s, you’ll most likely get to a point where you realize you’re pursuing things to try to feel a certain way. This is squarely down the fairway of the outside-in paradigm. Bringing awareness to this, yet again, inspires the question of whether there is a more direct way of feeling how you want to feel as you work toward your goals. Yes, there is a way, and it’s called Conscious Accomplishment.

You can perform the chain of whys exercise intellectually, or through a dialogue with your true Self, if that’s accessible to you. (I share more on the latter in Chapter 21, on Self Repatterning.) Now is the time to be honest with yourself and keep going until you get to the root. As you do this, keep an eye out for rationales that reflect means-to-an-end thinking or the avoidance of certain outcomes. If you discover any indication of unhealthy ambition, the call is always the same. Simply face and accept what you’ve learned about yourself with an open heart.

Spiritual Ambition

The distinction between healthy and unhealthy ambition applies to all parts of life, including your consciousness evolution. It’s common among high-achievers to apply the same patterns that drove the relentless quest for success to their spiritual growth. I know because I did it and have seen many others do the same. This tendency can be hard to spot, because our motivations are often unconscious. Spiritual striving may help you prioritize inner work early on, but there will always be a ceiling on your development when you approach it from this context.

There was a time when I was obsessed with evolving rapidly and had little interest in anything else. This drove me to be incredibly disciplined with all my practices. I thought this approach would put me on the fast track to some spiritual enlightenment. In reality, I was unable to see how my perfectionism had simply been aimed at a new target. One day it dawned on me. When I wasn’t able to do my practices, I reacted in the same sour way as when I couldn’t work on weekends. I decided to turn towards this and couldn’t believe what I discovered. Behind all my vigilance, there was a deep-seated fear that I needed to get enlightened before something bad happened to me. Instead of my desire to evolve being driven by love or joy, it was fueled by a lack of safety. I guess this approach was enlightening after all. It helped see that under my monk’s robes, there was still a warrior’s armor.

As I began working with this pattern, my approach to working on my consciousness became much more relaxed and balanced. I continued to work diligently, but if I wasn’t perfect with my practices, it wasn’t that big of a deal. Each day I’d give myself the freedom to choose to do my practices because they were rewarding, instead of doing them out of obligation. Paradoxically, as the need to reach some spiritual destination faded, my awareness and understanding began to expand rapidly. The vigilance that had once been useful, had become a block to a higher vista on the spiral. This would not be the last time in my journey that a tool would eventually become a barrier.

Like other parts of your life, healthy spiritual ambition is motivated by forces like inspiration, love, and enjoyment. Unhealthy spiritual ambition usually comes from a place of fear or “not enough–ness.” It is often characterized by a fixation on reaching some level of spiritual evolution. For example, you may think enlightenment is the only thing that matters and that you need to get there quickly like I did. You can examine the context of your spiritual ambition, just like any other part of your life. Notice your relationship to the activities you pursue. If you detect any type of disturbance or pushiness, turn towards this to become aware of the underlying context. This will help you reorient any spiritual mountain-climbing to upward-spiraling.

Teachings

• The context of your ambition determines whether it supports or undermines your consciousness evolution.

• Healthy ambition is motivated by qualities aligned with your true nature such as love, inspiration, and a desire to contribute.

• Unhealthy ambition is when your actions emanate from unhealthy patterns created by your ego, which wants to avoid harm.

• Means-to-an-end actions are often fueled by unhealthy ambition.

• You can determine the context of your ambition by examining where you feel pushed vs. pulled, working with your response to life, and inquiring about why you want things.

• Healthy ambition usually results in better outcomes in the long run because it’s much easier to sustain your activities and energy.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter! You can keep reading or listening by checking out Conscious Accomplishment on Amazon 🙏

I’m going to share a chapter from Conscious Accomplishment every week for the next few weeks on topics I think might be particularly helpful.

Today’s chapter outlines the distinction between Success and Fufillment, as well as where higher forms of fufillment actually come from. This is very useful to understand if you aspire to evolve your consciounsess and create the change you wish to see in the world at the same time.

Chapter 16: The Mountain of Success & The Spiral Of Fulfillment

Audible reading 👇

When you want to take your awareness to a higher altitude, many factors matter for your ascent. You need to have the right training, tools, and an understanding of the terrain. But perhaps more important than all these things is making sure the path you’ve chosen will lead you to where you want to go.

As someone who had a fair amount of worldly success, yet lived on the daily roller coaster of conditional well-being, I no longer believe that success and fulfillment are the same. I chased success because I thought it would make me happy. Although each achievement generated a temporary blip of happiness, the feeling never lasted. After the glow faded away, I was back on the treadmill to create the next blip. It took many years of playing this game at a high level to recognize that what I really wanted wasn’t more success, but an enduring state of well-being and fulfillment.

Success is the achievement of desired outcomes. Though success is ultimately subjective, your concept of success is informed by your conditioning. It’s why in some cultures success can mean being rich and famous, while in others it’s measured by having a big family or deep spiritual connection. It’s important to recognize that until you start to investigate your consciousness, your definition of success is mostly inherited.

Most people relate to success like reaching the summit of a mountain. They envision a specific destination, believing life will finally feel complete once they arrive. Success could be hitting a certain net worth, finding your dream partner, selling your company, or—if you tend to create excessive expectations for yourself like I did—all of the above. It’s true that when you finally reach the summit, you feel amazing. The problem is you can’t live on the mountaintop. So after the sweetness of enjoying the breathtaking view, you’re off to find the next mountain to climb to recreate this feeling.

Though success is often commingled with fulfillment, they are distinct. Fulfillment is a deep and lasting sense of satisfaction, contentment, and completeness. It often arises from achieving goals, living in alignment, and finding meaning. There are fulfilled people who are wildly successful and others who don’t have a penny to their name.

These definitions clarify that success is a concept while fulfillment is the enduring state of well-being that most people truly desire. Understanding the difference can help you get clear on which path you want to be on. Do you want to satisfy some conditioned definition of success in order to temporarily feel good. Or are you after a persistent and unconditional sense of well-being? It’s common to conflate these things, but as far as I can tell, there’s no correlation between having a nice house, an impressive career, or social status, and one’s capacity for unconditional well-being.

Conscious Accomplishment recognizes that success without fulfillment isn’t a worthwhile pursuit. You certainly can have both, but having one does not imply the other. Conscious Accomplishment offers a path to move towards success while enjoying the sense of fulfillment that comes from consciousness evolution.

Years of working with my response to life to explore and expand my consciosness shifted my primary source of fulfillment in a way that I would have never anticipated. Like many self-improvement junkies, before this I immersed myself in all kinds of personal development exercises that I thought would lead to happiness. I remember regularly scoring my career, finances, relationships, and all the other quadrants of my life year after year. I’d then denote the changes I needed to make in each aspect of my life to improve things. Although these exercises created some positive things in my life, they also perpetuated an illusion that the promised land of happiness was just a few achievements away. I convinced myself that constantly trying to improve my external world was how I found fulfillment. The problem with this approach is that it never never fundamentally changed how I felt. Despite all this intentional lifestyle design and accomplishment, being me still felt the same.

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When I got on the consciousness journey, I finally found the enduring fulfillment I was looking for. The daily process of discovering more of myself became the most consistent source of meaning and satisfaction I had ever known. The fulfillment wasn’t limited to some peak moment, but persisted as awareness and realization expanded. And unlike waiting to reach the summit to feel whole, this process could be lived in every moment.

A key understanding in Conscious Accomplishment is that the process of consciousness evolution often provides the greatest source of fulfillment in the human experience. Becoming aware of your true nature and the deeper layers of reality infuses profound meaning into everything you do. When you integrate this into the accomplishment process, the source of fulfillment shifts from achieving an outcome, to the process itself. This is true no matter what level of success you ultimately achieve. Embracing this approach doesn’t minimize the fulfillment you may receive from your relationships, career, recreational activities, or contribution to your community. You can fully honor and enjoy these too. In fact, it’s more likely you’ll be fulfilled by these activities as your heart opens and unhealthy patterns fall away. The path isn’t choosing one source of fulfillment or another, but learning to enjoy it all, while recognizing that shifts in consciousness have a rippling effect on everything else.

If the quest for success is like climbing a mountain, pursuing fulfillment through consciousness evolution is like ascending an upward spiral. Instead of narrowing and ending at the apex, the spiraling-up journey expands outward and goes on forever. The primary rewards as you ascend are the progressive increases in well-being and understanding. Unlike the fleeting periods of joy at the top of the mountain, the upward spiral creates a new baseline state that you get to enjoy every moment moving forward regardless of the outcomes you achieve. This process and the life improvements it creates are so rewarding that it naturally motivates you to continue spiraling upwards.

Pursuing the spiraling-up path of fulfillment doesn’t mean that you have to settle for being less successful. You can still accomplish everything you desire, perhaps even more, because you’re moving from a place of deeper clarity, alignment, and internal steadiness. The key difference is that success is no longer the primary source of your fulfillment. Instead, your well-being and fulfillment are internally generated, and your success is a natural expression of your inner state.

Before starting my ascent up the spiral, I wondered whether I could still fully embrace all the activities that I once relied on to feel good. Was going to the gym, thriving in business, or being a social butterfly compatible with my spiraling-up journey? Yes, absolutely. The spiraling-up path makes room to enjoy conventional sources of fulfillment. It just doesn’t exclusively rely on them to feel good. As you make the ascent, you’ll start to see a symbiotic relationship emerge between consciousness evolution and enjoying life’s experiences. You appreciate the joy from your aspirations and their capacity to expand your awareness. And the more you use the opportunities they create, the easier it is to enjoy yourself. Each side of this interplay informs the other in an enriching and enlivening way.

Now that you understand the path of the upward spiral, I want to prepare you for the terrain you’ll have to navigate when practicing Conscious Accomplishment. These dynamics can be found in all spiritual paths, but they’re particularly prominent when attempting to hold your desire for consciousness evolution and accomplishment simultaneously. Instead of learning the hard way like I did, I’m telling you what you need to know while you’re starting your ascent to make it easier. Known obstacles you will face include managing trade-offs and creating healthy relationships with ambition, desire, and attachments. Understanding how to move through all of this will help you evaluate yourself from a holistic perspective. The more you learn to navigate this terrain skillfully, the smoother your ascent will be. Consider this your briefing as you begin the most rewarding climb you will ever make.

Main Teachings

• Success is the achievement of desired outcomes, whereas fulfillment is a deep and lasting sense of satisfaction, contentment, and completeness.

• How you define success is highly influenced by your conditioning.

• Conscious Accomplishment prioritizes fulfillment over success, recognizing you can have both.

• The greatest level of fulfillment comes from the process of continuously developing greater levels of awareness, realization, and wisdom.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter! You can keep reading or listening by checking out Conscious Accomplishment on Amazon.

Next week I’ll be sharing on Ambition: Clean vs. Dirty Fuel.

I was recently having a podcast conversation about how the way you accomplish things evolves as your consciousness journey unfolds. This is the theme of Part III of my book.

This morning I felt inspired to highlight some undercurrents that influence how you choose to approach things.

Conventional Strategies Becoming Less Interesting

As awareness expands, you recognize new ways of doing things. This makes certain strategies less compelling or obsolete.

An example of this is deliberation. Once deeper forms of intuition come online that you can query on-demand for guidance, conventional ways of making decisions like deliberating and amassing massive amounts of data is just no longer seen as useful.

One note is that the recognition of new ways of doing things, doesn’t mean you lose access to the old ones. You can still summon previous skills and faculties as needed.

Conventional Strategies Being Out Of Integrity

The more you cultivate awareness, the more difficult it is to be out of integrity.

When you’re living in ignorance to the fact your life is being controlled by unconscious patterns, it’s easy to just do whatever you want because you don’t even know it’s happening. There’s no perception of consequences which include everything from reinforcing unhealthy patterns to creating karma.

Awareness changes things. First you’ll likely become more in touch with what’s happening in your inner space (interoception). This sets the stage for evaluating whether you’re in integrity or not. When you move towards and it feels icky, it becomes harder to do them.

You may also recognize that most of your perceptions and actions are being driven by a patterned consciousness. Continuing to engage in unhealthy patterns for the sake of getting what you want becomes less attractive because you start to care more about your true freedom. Taking this into consideration continues to evolve how you approach things.

At a certain point, you’ll also start to see the correlation between being out of alignment and generally worse outcomes….regardless of how clever you are! This is by intelligent design. Life’s intelligence wants to move you into greater authenticity.

All this being said, your sense of internal integrity becomes a more prominent feature in how you choose to approach things.

Conventional Strategies No Longer Working

Perhaps a less obvious phenomena is when certain approaches no longer seem to be working — not due to an alignment issue, but in order to spur transformation. I’ve experienced this in a myriad of ways over the past few years.

For most of my career, there was a consciousness pattern of “do more, try harder.” This concept underpinned a relentless ability to get shit done. It also informed a view that more doing was the answer to making progress on any goal.

And for a few decades, this worked really welll!

But as I continued my development, this strategy started to lose its efficacy.

I could pound my to do lists and goals with the same levels of prioritization and cleverness, yet the outcomes didn’t flow like they used to. In fact, many things historically felt easy became felt like a slog.

For most of my life, I would have attributed the limited results to a lack of creativity or ingenuity in my approach.

This explanation makes sense when you believe we live in a linear reality driven by deterministic cause and effect (if X happens, Y should follow).

I now believe that the phenomena of tried and true strategies not working, often occurs for the higher order purpose of our continued awareness and transformation.

The unfolding of reality is not linear. It is dynamically orchestrated by an intelligence that seeks your continuous evolution, and that of the whole. To support this prerogative, reality unfolds in a way to support your growth. I call this The Responsive Reality.

When it’s time to transform and transcend certain consciousness patterns like “do more, try harder,” life’s intelligence introduces friction that may have been absent prior…A.K.A. shit stops working!

The contrast this dynamic creates allows you to become aware of aspects of your consciousness that would otherwise be invisible and are ready to be faced and transformed.

Although it can feel like punishment, it’s really just life showing you what’s next.

Through my direct experiences, I’ve come to learn that the underlying current creating this dynamic comes from a benevolent place. In the example of “do more, try harder,” the orchestrating intelligence animating life was (and still is) trying to help me see and heal this pattern so that it’s no longer required. In its place, there is more room for ease, flow, and things falling into place effortlessly. Life can’t unfold this way when aspects of your consciousness are broadcasting the opposite. It’s not bad luck…it’s physics!

The last thing I’ll say is that this whole experience can be quite confusing, especially when the way you’re being guided is markedly different culture doctrines. In startup land, I’ve basically been swimming in a soup that mostly advocates for doing the opposite of the ways life is guiding me. And when you see people who are “doing more, trying harder” and killing it, it may cause you to doubt yourself.

But here’s the thing…your path is YOUR path. And what you’re being called to become aware of and evolve is uniquely yours. So even though it can be quite hard to look around and feel like you’re being moved differently, I’ve found its most productive to keep the gaze inward while continuously calibrating with how life is presenting.

The playbook for this new paradigm for how we make things happen in the world while we evolve our consciousness is being collectively written. It’s not something ancient teachings spoke much about because it wasn’t as relevant. If you care to explore more thoughts on what’s worked for me, I encourage you to read or listen to Conscious Accomplishment!

The funny thing is I’m sure my thoughts on it will all continue to evolve over the next few years.

Have a great weekend,

-Scott

If you’ve ever read The Surrender Experiment and felt simultaneously inspired, yet confused on how to actually pull this off, this one’s for you!!!

Chapter 13 - Common Misconceptions About Acceptance And Surrender

Audible reading 👇

In my first meeting with my teacher Carol, she told me, “when you learn to accept reality as it is, you will discover who you are.”

This theme of acceptance was like a thread woven through everything from my repatterning practice to many of the books I was reading. One of my favorite books that I came across during this time was The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. It’s an enchanting story about a meditator turned entrepreneur that, through surrendering to the flow of life, ends up starting a spiritual community and billion-dollar company. This unlikely paradox was catnip for a reformed overachiever like me, because it suggested a new way to create extraordinary outcomes in your life. But as I soon learned, the practical application of acceptance and surrender can be wildly disorienting.

I now view acceptance and surrender as cousins. Acceptance is about acknowledging the reality of a situation, while surrender is about relinquishing the need to control it. Usually acceptance paves the way for surrender. And together, they show us that peace arises not from control, but from releasing our resistance to how life unfolds.

As enchanting as acceptance and surrendering were to me, I was confused about how to practically apply them. Cultural connotations of the words “acceptance” and “surrender” made it seem like they required submission, passivity, and resignation. Was I supposed to abandon my personal will entirely in order to grow spiritually? Was I just supposed to say “yes” to everything? I felt paralyzed. On the one hand, I wanted to reclaim my zeal for creative action that seemed to wither as I redirected most of my focus to exploring my consciousness. On the other hand, I didn’t want to regress to my old patterns of trying to control everything. For so long, I had exerted my willpower to mold life to my desires. And now I was afraid that continuing to behave this way might sabotage my consciousness evolution.

This period of confusion coincided with the first time that I’d ever endured prolonged illness. For almost two years, I experienced chronic fatigue, protracted laryngitis, brain fog, digestive issues, and a host of small ailments that made it difficult to function. At one point, the laryngitis got so bad that I lost my ability to talk. I’d be on Zoom calls trying to sell our company, disguising the pain that came with every word I spoke. My condition made even the simplest tasks feel like an uphill battle, and over time, the spark to build and create quietly dimmed. On the rare occasion that I felt motivated to accomplish something, it seemed like my body wouldn’t let me.

My initial approach to getting better mirrored my typical patterns. I took the situation by the horns, going to every western doctor doctor that I thought might help me. I also went to many alternative health practitioners and healers. I probably saw over twenty people that I thought could help me during the first year, but no matter what I tried, nothing healed me.

All these misguided ideas about acceptance and surrender, left me wondering whether I would be ill forever. Did surrendering mean that I had to stop trying to get better? Maybe being a sick, unproductive person was just my fate. One day, I finally broke down and shared my despair and confusion with my teacher Carol.

“Your problem isn’t whatever is happening with your health, relationships, or your company,” she said. “Remember your problems are your reactions to them. All you’re being called to do is to accept your reaction to whatever is happening. This means facing and being with any discomfort or frustration that arises in the moment. Acceptance and surrender don’t mean resigning yourself to some fate, or that you shouldn’t try to improve your condition. Accepting your reaction happens in the present moment. It can be done in as little as thirty seconds, and then you can resume taking supportive actions.”

Carol’s insight highlights two common misconceptions around acceptance and surrender. The first is that they mean resignation. In this view, you think that accepting or surrendering to a circumstance means giving up and continuing to experience it. The second misconception is that they mean abandoning discernment and agency. Both perspectives miss that acceptance and surrender are about how you relate to the moment, not about giving up your ability to respond or create change. Acceptance, surrender, and taking action can exist in harmony, but the sequencing matters.

I began to decouple the processes of accepting any disturbing reactions, taking action, and surrendering my need to control the outcome. I applied this three-part process to situations big and small. A big example was how I related to my illness moving forward. Every time I felt anxious and frustrated about my health, I accepted how I felt in the moment, using repatterning. Eventually, I’d replace these feelings with a sense of trust that my body would heal. Following this first step, I’d then resume taking whatever actions that I thought would help me get better while doing my best to trust life’s unfolding.

Gradually, my condition started improving and the general malaise around taking action started to fade. I realized how I could work on accepting my response to life while moving towards my aspirations at the same time. This simplified things. All I needed to do was move towards my desires and work with whatever resistance came up along the way. My desires would evolve as my awareness expanded, but sticking to this principle as I spiraled upwards kept things straightforward.

A lot of people confuse acceptance and surrender for being passive or not trying to create change in the world. This is a misconception, and it can prevent you from being inspired to fully engage with life. You can accept whatever is unfolding in the moment and simultaneously feel inspired to make it better. Any notion that these can’t coexist just reflects polarized thinking. An effective way to hold both components is separating working with your reactivity from the process of taking conscious action. I always recommend working with your reactions as the first step, because it works at the root of your problems and helps you make choices from a place of greater clarity.

For anyone who seeks an integrated path to their spiritual growth, it’s imperative to understand how acceptance and taking action can exist harmoniously. Through my exploration of this balance, I realized that there are at least two types of actions. One seemed to emanate from and reinforce my patterns. The other led me to greater purpose, fulfillment, and potential.

Teachings

• Acceptance means acknowledging the reality of a situation.

• Surrender means relinquishing the need to control the outcome.

• Acceptance or surrender don’t equate to resignation or the abandonment of agency.

• Acceptance and surrender primarily deal with how you are relating to the present moment.

• You can accept and surrender to your reactions and then take action to improve your circumstances.

• You can accept reality as it is and still feel inspired to make it better.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter! You can keep reading or listening by checking out Conscious Accomplishment on Amazon.

Next week I’ll be sharing on The Mountain of Success vs. The Spiral of Fufillment.

If there’s one thing I could recommend, it’s what I call the Freedom Log.

This is a core tool in my book Conscious Accomplishment and because readers seem to be finding a lot of value in it, I wanted to do a break-down here.

How I Discovered The Freedom Log

When I met my teacher nearly 7 years ago, I wondered whether I needed to meditate 8 hours a day or pull a dramatic move like moving to India if I wanted to rapidly evolve my consciousness.

“You can do that, but it’s unnecessary,” she said. “All you need to do is start to notice every time you’re resisting reality as it is. When you do this, you’ll discover who you are.”

I didn’t know what she meant by this at first, but I was excited that I apparently didn’t need to drop out of life if I was going to take this whole consciousness thing seriously.

In the coming months, I began to understand what she meant by the pointing.

Our natural state is calm, relaxed, and open hearted to life as it is. This is how we are before life dumps a bunch of imprinting and conditioning on us as children.

It’s why little kids are so free and often joyful.

To restore and embody this natural essence, we must unlayer all the aspects of our consciousness that are unlike our true nature.

This is more of an excavation of what’s already there, than adding anything.

A lot of people do this by constantly going on meditation or plant medicine retreats. What my teacher was advocating for was that I could use every moment of my everyday life to work on this. That appealed to me.

To do this I was instructed to notice when I was reacting to life unlike my true nature. Practically speaking, this means observing when you’re disturbed, triggered, resisting, or perceiving life with a closed heart.

These moments serve as entry points for you to go inward and examine the unconscious to determine what aspects of your consciousness are causing you to react this way. As you bring these into awareness, you can heal them to move forward in a way that is more aligned to our true nature.

This understanding and practice helps you transform your entire life into a spiritual practice.

• Running late and notice yourself getting stressed…opportunity.

• Someone irritates you on social media…opportunity.

• You judge something your partner is doing…opportunity.

• Your family does something that annoys you…opportunity.

Viewing life this way turns all of life into a rich arena for the evolution of your consciousness.

But to do it effectively, you need to start directing your attention to your reactivity and then use the opportunities life gives you.

When I learned about this, the optimizer in me wanted to take advantage of all the opportunities life was presenting…this too would be a pattern I’d eventually need to work on.

So I created a note on my phone I now call “The Freedom Log” to begin writing these down as they happened.

I call it the freedom log because when your life is driven by automatic reactivity directed by consciousness patterns you didn’t choose, you’re not free! Becoming aware of and healing them is a path towards to true freedom.

Everytime I noticed I was disturbed, I’d take out my phone and write a few words down about what had happened. I’d then take these events into my sessions with my teacher to face and transform them through a process I was taught I now call repatterning.

After a few sessions, I felt comfortable doing repatterning on my own. I didn’t feel like waiting every 2 weeks to use all these opportunities life was giving, so I began facing the events in my freedom log daily. This turned everyday into a mini-retreat and transformed my entire life into an arena for consciousness evolution.

Over time, the freedom log evolved. In the beginning, I was mostly noticing major overt triggers. Maybe something at work would get me flustered. But as my awareness became more refined through working with my response to life each day, I was able to notice more acute reactivity that indicated an unhealthy pattern was activated or my heart was closed. More sublte examples might be noticing a sensation in my body when I opened my bank account, judging someone else’s behavior, or the proclivity to pull out my phone when I was bored.

These behaviors may seem normal, but they’re not representative of our divine nature. By noticing them, writing them down, and then turning towards them when you have spaciousness, you can start to understand your source code and re-align it to your true nature. Do this everyday for a year and your life will dramatically transform.

Getting Started With Your Freedom Log

If this resonates with you, I reccomend stopping what you’re doing right now, taking out your phone, and creating a note called Freedom Log.

From here, all you need to do is start writing down a few words to describe the experience each time you’re disturbed. This isn’t hard and doesn’t take a lot of time. Even if you don’t do anything with these experiences, the mere act of pausing to interrupt the pattern will support your awareness. If you have a transformational modality you already like such as IFS, parts work, somatic experiencing etc. you can bring these events into that practice.

If there is one practice I hope people apply from Conscious Accomplishment it is this one. It’s something I still do to this day and the practice only gets richer. It gives me a lot of joy that it seems like people are already putting into it action.

If you want to check out epatterning or go deeper on the nuances of the Freedom Log, check out chapters 3-9 and 22 in my book. I also just recently just recorded some guided meditations on both versions of repatterning here.

Commit to this practice for a week and see what happens. If you experience positive results, keep going and let me know how it goes!

-Scott

I did the reading myself because I enjoy audio books much more when the author reads it.

Recording an audio book was an experience. I spent a week hunkered down in a home recording studio here in Austin. Each day I’d show up and we’d try to crank through 50-60 pages, before my voice would start to croak.

I never really had much appreciation for voice talent until this experience. Bringing the gusto and modulation when you’re sitting in a little room by yourself for an entire movie or book isn’t easy. It requires sustained focus and preparation. I get why Disney pays voice actors the big bucks.

Here’s a pic of me holding it down.

On a separate note, last week I did a full breakdown of the first week of my book launch on all the sales numbers, launch marketing strategies, and learning from the launch.

I used to love writing these marketing / growth hack type posts back in my online marketing days.

Flexing this muscle from a new perspective was fun for me. It’s also a good demonstration of one of the big ideas in Conscious Accomplishment - you don’t lose any of the capacities you once had as you prioritize awareness and transformation.

As awareness expands, your new understanding evolves the ways you approach things and unlocks new capabilities. With this development, you can still summon previous faculties and ways of being as needed.

Here’s a graphic from Conscious Accomplishment that illustrates how as your surface area of understanding grows, the repetoire of capacities you can pull from becomes larger.

Another interesting thing that happens with this development is that many tools that were once core to your approach, may no longer be required…for example, you may no longer need to grit it out to make things happen. But that doesn’t mean you lose access to the ability to grind if you need to.

Have a great week ya’ll,

-Scott

There comes a point in your consciousness journey, where you recognize everything you have been through was perfectly designed to help you evolve in a particular way that supports greater service to the whole.

When my spiritual journey really got serious, I was a bit annoyed that it didn’t start earlier.

Why couldn’t I have just skipped the decade+ of trauma based hustle!?

Over time, as my awareness expanded it became obvious that I needed to go through all of that in order to grow and serve others in a particular way.

A decade ago, I would have thought that selling my company to Salesforce would be my crowning achievement.

In reality, it was just a setup to position me for the real game I came here to play: supporting human consciousness.

I could see how everything from having some business success, to being an athlete and even looking like a bro would make sharing information on consciousness more approachable to a particular group of people that might otherwise be resistant.

There’s also no way that I’d be able to support high achievers in the business world if I hadn’t developed the understanding and credibility by playing that game at a high level.

With this understanding, writing Conscious Accomplishment felt like my Magnum Opus in the beginning of the process.

I had gone through this crazy arc of transformation, and now I could others who were in a similar position that I was in – disillusioned by achievement land, yet unclear how taking your consciousness seriously could be done amidst the demands of modern life.

I assumed that this is why I was being guided to write this book. Alas, I had uncovered a big part of my purpose for being on this planet!

What I Eventually Came To Understand

The following sequence of events gradually helped me see that there was more to the story here…

Writing my book began with spending 2 months of writing 50,000 words of gibberish,.

At a certain point in my wondering, I realized that I needed to hire an editor to help me refine what it was I was actually trying to say. We came up with an outline and then I spent 8 months writing a new draft.

The first round of feedback was brutal. It brought up an incredible amount of self-doubt and helplessness. I guess I just spent 4-5 hours a day for 8 months, constructing a pile of chicken shit.

Taking my own medicine from Conscious Accomplishment, I decided to sit in these feelings and use the situation for healing work. It probably took a full week to process everything before I felt centered enough to resume writing.

I then spent the next 5-6 months reworking a new draft, focusing the entire narrative on the theme of Conscious Accomplishment which was previously just part III of the previous one. This time around, I decided to give it to some friends for beta reading in addition to my editor…

There was some positive feedback, but there was also some glaring weak signal. A few close friends clearly had stopped reading it, and when I asked them what they thought of it, they gave some elusive non-answer…I guess this response was easier than telling me my book sucked.

This experience brought up even more self-doubt, as well as patterns around needing to be special or “the one that knows.”

Needing to be the one that knows is when someone tries to achieve a sense of worth by being seen as someone who is awakened, wise, or ahead. It is a form of spiritual pride that usually is in response to an unconscious sense of not-enoughness.

This wasn’t the first time I had been confronted by this pattern, but I had no idea there was some of it underlying this creation. It was clearly not the main thrust of writing the book, but going into my reactions around the beta reading made it undeniably clear that there was some there.

Again, I spent a fair amount of time facing and working with this inner material before continuing to rework and improve the next draft.

Probably about 6 months later, I had my next confronting experience. I was taking a course from a well-known teacher who has a similar audience and has been on his awareness journey much longer than I have.

I never really engaged directly with his work before so I never thought much of our overlap. However, within the course he began to use many of the same metaphors that I was using in my book.

OMG because I’m taking this course, people are going to think I ripped off this guy’s material! For the next few days, my inner world spiraled at all the ways people were going to judge me as a rip-off and fraud.

I went into these reactions and realized there were still aspects of my consciousness that cared what other people thought of me. I spent time healing these complexes over the remainder of the course.

And in a classic paradox, this teacher ended up endorsing the book!

There were many more confronting incidents like this that came up along the way in writing the book.

What eventually became clear through all these events, was that the higher order purpose of writing Conscious Accomplishment was supporting my own awareness and transformation.

• Yes, the book was a perfect artifact of everything I had been through in my life.

• Yes, the book would help many people.

• And yes, it’d likely also support many future initiatives related to my career and contribution.

Yet still, it was obvious that the primary purpose of writing this book was my own evolution.

There’s many reasons why I believe this. Perhaps the most striking was the perfect choreography between me facing and understanding the lessons, and the positive shifts to progress the book that followed.

A great example of this was after working with my confrontation in the course, I was spontaneously introduced to a new editor who helped me take the book to the next level.

I wasn’t seeking this out. It just fell into my lap.

Our Purpose Is Our Evolution And Our Evolution Fuels Its Expression

Our culture likes to look at some external achievement as the pinnacle of our life’s work.

I’m not saying this isn’t true, I just believe there’s more to the story here.

My view is that our magnum opus is who we become. The process of creation creates the conditions for our evolution, and as we use these circumstances, what we create moves to a higher level.

I guess when you write a book on this topic, it’s only fitting that the process be a perfect demonstration of this phenomenon.

I think life ahead is more of the same. Following the inspiration and desire to create, and using the reflections that this process provides in order to see things more clearly. This is an infinite game and just happens to be the one that I like to play the most!

If you want to learn how to go deeper on this topic and learn how to move up the spiral of expanded awareness, I encourage you to check out Conscious Accomplishment!

<3 Scott

Writing a book is a beast.

Writing a book about personal transformation is a really big beast. This is because your perspective is constantly evolving as you write it.

I wanted to share two conversations that offer a more behind the scenes look at writing Conscious Accomplishment (now available), while also exploring some of the main ideas in the book in depth.

The first one is an interview with my friend Alex Kremer, the founder of Alluviance: a community for sales professionals committed to inner and outer excellence.

Listen on Spotify, iTunes, and Youtube.

The second conversation is with my friend Andrew Horn who is a world class executive coach and master facilitator. He is also the founder of Tribute and the epic men’s retreat Junto, which I’ve been to and highly recommend.

Listen on Spotify, iTunes, and Youtube.

Each conversation was unique and deeply meaningful to me. Talking about the things you’re most passionate about with people you love is the zest of life.

Here are some of the main ideas we weave in both conversations:

1. Your entire life can be a spiritual practice. The traditional narrative says you’re either crushing it in business or meditating in a cave. I discovered that achievement itself can become a crucible for self-awareness and transformation when approached with the right perspective.

2. The simple practice of noticing every disturbance can change everything. Everyone asks what’s the one practice people should take away from the book? For me, I started noticing and writing down every single time I was taken out of peace throughout my day. Through this process, I realized my consciousness was beholden to a massive bundle of patterns that were running my life. These became the cues to go inward and face what needed healing.

3. Transformational conflict is inevitable. When you start changing internally but your external world stays the same you feel like a fish out of water. Your friends still care about the same things, your business has the same demands but you’re operating from a completely different place. This discomfort is not a sign you’re doing something wrong. It’s part of the journey and we talk about how to move through it.

4. Ambition can run on dirty fuel or clean fuel. Dirty fuel ambition stems from not feeling enough, wanting validation, or needing to prove yourself. Clean fuel ambition flows from love, inspiration, and genuine contribution. The key isn’t to eliminate ambition but to purify where it’s coming from.

5. Reality is responsive to your consciousness. I experienced hundreds of moments where shifts in my inner world directly corresponded to changes in my outer circumstances. This isn’t coincidence, but a demonstration of natural law and the higher prerogative of the universe organizing things for your personal and collective evolution.

6. You don’t need eight hours of meditation to evolve. The path isn’t about adding more spiritual practices on top of an already busy life. It’s about shifting your attention to how you relate to everything that’s already happening. Your daily triggers and challenges are the curriculum.

I hope you enjoy these conversations and if these resonate, I encourage you to check out Conscious Accomplishment on Amazon : )

Some people have asked about the audiobook. It should be available in the next week.

Big thanks to everyone who has supported so far.

Much love,

-Scott

Some Background

I came to my consciousness journey as a hyper ambitious, optimizer hell-bent on architecting the perfect life to feel good.

When I turned 30 this life strategy stopped working and I realized that focusing on my consciousness was a more direct way to improve my life.

This realization was both enlightening and disorienting.

If I was serious about my personal evolution, shouldn’t I treat it with the same level of earnestness that I had in my external success quest?

Did this new orientation mean I needed to leave my tech startup, social life, and creative ambition that I had spent the last decade cultivating?

I wondered whether it was even possible to go all in on consciousness and fully engage in my external ambitions that had defined me for so long.

Fortunately, I met a wonderful teacher who guided me towards clarity.

The call wasn’t to abandon these circumstances, but to use all of them to see myself and reality clearly.

This was the beginning of my journey in learning the dance of Conscious Accomplishment.

What This Book Is About

Conscious Accomplishment is the book I wish I had when I started my journey.

It’s intended for people who are serious about pursuing their consciousness evolution while fully engaging in material reality to create the life and contribution they desire.

This book answers the following questions:

• How do you earnestly pursue spiritual growth and worldly ambition at the same time?

• What are the unique complexities this middle path creates and how do you move through them gracefully?

• How does your spiritual evolution impact your capacity to accomplish and the way you do things?

Who it’s for:

• Historically ambitious people who realize that focusing entirely on their external world is no longer working, but aren’t sure how consciousness and spirituality fit into their existing life

• Anyone who desires an integrated approach to spirituality that empowers them to grow rapidly while meeting the demands of modernity

• Spiritual aspirants who feel stuck and unable to reclaim their ambition and ability to be a creative actor in the world

• Conscious-curious readers who want to understand the connection between all this “spiritual stuff” and their ability to make things happen

By reading it you’ll learn how to:

• Transform everyday challenges into gateways for expanded awareness and personal freedom

• Discover your authentic purpose and contribute to the world with ease

• Open your heart to experience greater levels of unconditional well-being

• Align your actions with life’s natural intelligence to achieve with joy and fluidity

• Break through limiting beliefs that have hindered your potential

• Access your intuitive wisdom to navigate decisions with greater clarity and confidence

Why I Wrote This Book

I never set out to write a book at this point in my life.

After a heart felt conversation at lunch with a friend in December 2022, I received internal guidance to begin writing something long form about my experience.

From this day on the book just wanted to come out of me. I wrote the book because I couldn’t not write it.

Although taking the plunge to write this was not an intellectual decision, I’m excited about what it stands for and believe it’s incredibly timely for where humanity is at right now.

We’ve lived in a culture that compartmentalizes spiritual growth and worldly achievement. This has conditioned many people to believe that they must choose between one or the other, instead of recognizing that these aspects of life can work together synergistically.

If we want to create a more beautiful world, we must evolve the consciousness that creates it. This ingredient isn’t a nice to have. It’s fundamental.

For most people, dropping out of life to pursue their consciousness evolution simply isn’t a realistic or attractive option.

A more compelling path forward for most of western culture is learning to integrate your personal evolution into your existing life. This can be done, and I’m living proof.

I believe Conscious Accomplishment is but one of many pathways that will emerge to support this much needed integration in our society.

Where To Go From Here

I want to sincerely thank everyone who has been reading this substack and supporting me on my journey.

Your reflections, encouragement, and presence have helped shape this work.

If you would like to support the book and its message here’s how you can help:

1. Check it out on Amazon (audio book coming in next few days)

2. Share it with friends who might find it useful

3. Support the launch on Substack, LinkedIn, and/or X

And if you do end up reading it, I always welcome reviews so others can discover it! 🙏

Writing this book was simultaneously one of the most rewarding and challenging projects of my life.

I hope that it reaches all those it can support when its needed in their journey.

<3 Scott

The challenge is that many people don’t know where to start?

Today I’m excited to announce a new project that will make it a little bit easier.

My company Conscious Talent has teamed up with our friends at Spirit Tech Collective to launch the world’s first Consciousness + Spirit Tech job board.

Currently it features over 250+ jobs from nearly 100 companies that we have curated including companies like Rosebud, Headspace, MindValley, MAPs, and Mindbloom.

Anytime these new companies post a job, it will be reflected on the job board meaning you will have on demand access to opportunities throughout this growing ecosystem.

Pretty much everything I am working on from my book Conscious Accomplishment (launching next week), to Conscious Talent, community building, and the EvolutionFM podcast are all about helping people integrate their life and careers with their spiritual development – and this new project is no exception.

It’s time we move beyond the compartmentalized view of spirituality and work, and start to realize it can all be one thing…if you want it to be : )

If you are a fan of this project, here’s how you can help:

1. Share some love on our LinkedIn and X announcements so more people discover it

2. Send the job board to friends who might find it useful

This will help more people discover it and find aligned careers.

I’m excited to see where this goes and greatly appreciate your support!

More Launches

Next Tuesday I’ll be launching my book Conscious Accomplishment: How to Use Personal Achievement For Spiritual Growth.

It’s currently available for pre-order on Kindle and will be available for paperback, hardcover, and audiobook next Tuesday.

If you happen to be in Austin, I’ll also be having a launch party next Thursday the 9th.

Feel free to come by so we can meet in person!

Much love,

-Scott

About a year ago, I remember being at an event where a friend was asked to say some words about me.

He stood up and said that I’ve had one of the biggest transformations of anyone he knows.

I was reflecting on this evening a few days ago.

Where did the growth come from? Was it “me”?

I didn’t desire to get on a spiritual path eight years ago.

I never sought out a teacher.

I didn’t want a lot of hard things to happen to me that created a crucible of growth.

Yet all these things happened.

So who is doing the growth?

Are you really doing it? Or is it happening? And what is making it happen?

If you look at your own life and where you are today, you can sit in the same question.

Where does this inquiry lead you to….

What comes up for me is a sense of humility, trust, and appreciation.

Life is leading you, like it always has.

The concept that you need to make your growth happen just isn’t very true in my experience. There is something to a willingness to meet the growth opportunities though…or maybe that is an illusion to. I’m not sure.

Challenges to the notion of a “do-er” has been very prominent in my experience recently. It seems like it is coming up everywhere. One example of this was my conversation with Dr. Srikumar Rao. If you want to sit deeper in this reflection you might enjoy that conversation.

Have a great weekend,

-Scott

P.S. if you’re in Austin, I am having a launch party for my book on October 9th. 🥳

If you’re a fan of my writing and would like to attend, you can find the event details here. It’d be fun to meet in person!

A few months ago, I saw this image on X from a post written by .

I drew the red line on it to demonstrate the path I’ve seen most people traverse who seek to hold both high agency and high consciousness.

The journey goes something like this…

You start out in victimhood (bottom left), learn how to take responsibility for your life and make shit happen, then realize behind all the achieving and killing it, is a bunch of unconscious insecurity and low-self esteem.

Realizing that you’ve spent most of your life robotically experiencing life from your unconscious wounds and conditioning redirects you on a consciousness path. In spiritual bypass land, you might start to look down on all the achievement activities that once fueled you.

Eventually, you realize that orienting your entire life around healing all day isn’t really the answer either. So you reorient again to begin learning how to pursue expanding consciousness and contributing to the world at the same time.

The road described is a windy and painful road. I know, because I’ve lived it!

I recently had a conversation with Brian Whetten to investigate whether it’s possible to minimize the windiness?

He’s spent the better part of 25 years reverse engineering this question by studying people who are operating from a place of both high consciousness and high agency.

I found his ideas from our conversation so intriguing that I wanted to write this post on them in order to understand them better. This is my best attempt at summarizing my understanding from our conversation and props to Brian for creating these epic visual aids which are integrated into our discussion on Youtube.

The Success vs. Spirituality Duality

Let’s start out by acknowledging the seeming duality that exists in our culture. People seem to think you need to choose between pursuing consciousness or pursuing success.

Both consciousness and material agency are forms of power. Brian defines power as the capacity to influence or change reality. Power in itself is morally neutral. You can use it to improve the world or destroy it.

On the road to success, maybe you make a lot of money and use those resources to make shit happen. This is an expression of power. People at a certain level of awareness may have the ability “to know things” which guide their choices or perform extraordinary feats like others through intention. This is a different expression of power. Both axes render an increased ability to change reality just in different ways.

Many people, like myself, are interested in transcending this false duality and pursuing both at the same time. My journey of how to do this is the subject of my book Conscious Accomplishment: How to use Personal Achievement For Spiritual Growth which comes out in early October.

As any traveler who has attempted this path before will tell you, it ain’t easy! In my experience, there isn’t a ton of good maps or long standing traditions in western culture that guide you how to do both at once.

This newsletter is sponsored by Conscious Talent - where companies and leaders who value both professional excellence and inner work connect to build transformative businesses.

Join our Talent Network or learn about us supporting your hiring needs today!

So why is doing both so hard?

What both Brian and I have seen is that at some point in your life, a wall shows up. All of a sudden shit gets hard. If you were in high agency, achiever land, no matter how hard you push and fight, all your clever strategies don’t work anymore.

It’s like an invisible wall has been placed in front of you through the people and events unfolding around you preventing you from getting what you want.

This wall often redirects people on to a spiritual path, moving them from the bottom right quadrant to the top left.

Reflection - is there a “wall” in your life right now. Where does it feel like no amount of pushing is working?

What is this wall and why does it show up?

Brian believes the wall shows up when we have a greater ability to change reality, than our ability to use it for good. Or in his language, it appears when our power is greater than our leadership. In this framework, Leadership is our ability to turn our power into value for ourselves and the larger system you find yourself in.

This wall isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a natural law of the universe like gravity or physics. It’s benevolent in that it slows us down when our capacity hasn't caught up to our power. This prevents you from destroying yourself or the system you find yourself in when there is more power than you can steward.

But what about all the powerful assholes in our world? Where’s their wall?

Remember the wall exists on the dimensions of consciousness and material power (agency). So there are a lot of people with tons of material power, but low consciousness like self-serving business magnates. And there’s a lot of people with high consciousness and low material power like broke spiritual teachers and coaches.

But if you want both, which seems to create 10-100x results, you need to evolve yourself in ways that the wall moves.

I want to reflect more on this natural law existing that Brian talks about through some evidence I have seen.

Developmental Gatekeeping

On the consciousness journey, it seems that certain abilities come online when the student is ready to wield them. For example, the opening of the heart creates access to information beyond the intellect. If we had a bunch of clairvoyants or intuitives going around telling people when they were going to die, that’d be really bad. However, because many people with these kinds of abilities are at a certain level of development, this mostly doesn’t happen. This is just one example, but you can find many as you explore the relationship between human potential and consciousness development.

This development gatekeeping appears to be an intelligent design and aligns to the notion that there is a wall preventing us from accessing power until our leadership can handle it.

The Upper Limit

Other realities that tend to support this idea are the upper limit problem famously popularized by Gay and Katie Hendricks. Somehow we tend to sabotage ourselves when things get too good. Why do we do this?

One potential reason is that the wall prevents us from expanding faster than our nervous system and leadership can handle.

Personal and Cultural Growth Cycles

Whether it's spiritual evolution or civilizations, there seems to be periods of expansion and contraction. You reach a peak, then crash, which forces integration before the next ascent. I can’t tell you how many times I think I’ve cleared the mess in my life, until the universe humbly puts me in my place…then rather organically, I gradually find myself on a new vista of experience as I keep going.

The same expansion and contraction where the power outpaces the leadership can be seen throughout famous civilizations. Rome comes to mind. If the level of leadership does not evolve, eventually there is a collapse.

What About The Powerful Assholes Who Get Away With It?

How is it that many people can wield massive amounts of power with little leadership? Brian probably has more thoughts on this, but here’s what comes up for me.

The first is that assholes aren’t usually operating from a high consciousness. So there’s material power, but a lack of understanding. As a result, this power isn’t channeled in a way that makes their inner world and the system they operate within better. So we’re really only talking about one form of power (material) vs. both.

Still, why aren’t they limited by some wall? If there is in fact a universal law, I can’t help but wonder if certain walls operate on longer timescales. Maybe someone doesn’t hit the wall in this lifetime, but are moving towards a massive one over the broader continuum of their soul’s evolution. Maybe this exact life of having an insane amount of power with little wisdom, is exactly what their soul wanted in this lifetime which somehow creates special conditions for this law. Who really knows…

Overall, I do see enough compelling evidence to be open to the idea that the gating factor of high consciousness and high agency is related to our capacity for power and leadership.

Moving The Wall

So if this wall shows up that many of us have seemingly encountered, how do we move past it?

Before we get into the specific strategies, it’s important to grasp the big idea.

You don’t fight the wall, try to maneuver around it, or find a secret trap door. This doesn’t work because you’re dealing with a structural limitation of reality.

The way to shift your experience is to expand yourself so the wall moves. This requires not just awareness, but also healing the holes inside that prevent you from being able to effectively wield power so that it positively impacts everything around you.

You can’t skip the healing part if you want to be both high consciousness and high agency.

Let’s get practical with Brian’s 3 keys (and distinctions) on how to evolve yourself so that the wall moves.

Proving Worth vs. Providing Value

​​When you hit the wall, most people default into “proving worth” vs. providing value. Proving worth is basically prioritizing activities oriented around external validation, status, or self promotion.

Imagine a business owner that doesn’t have many clients and thinks the answer is growing an audience by sharing how much they know. I have certainly been guilty of this. It’s what our society teaches us to do and there’s people out there who are seemingly being rewarded.

But if you’re facing a wall, this may not be your path. All proving worth is really doing, is attempting to cover a hole inside. And the emptiness of the hole continues to get reflected back to you, by the lack of ease in your pursuits.

Providing value on the other hand is about directly having conversations about value with others, instead of proving you’re valuable. He gets into more refined detail on what this looks like in our conversation.

How does focusing on providing value move some invisible reality wall? When you’re in proving mode, the underlying message you’re broadcasting to the universe is “I’m not enough yet.” Every action is subtly trying to fill a hole inside rather than create value outside. As a result, you continue bouncing against the wall instead of healing your insecurities so that the wall can move itself.

When you orient toward creating value for others your power starts serving the larger system instead of placating the patterns of your ego. This is the exact leadership capacity the wall is asking of you. Value exchanged in real relationships creates the flow of giving and receiving. That circulation of energy stretches your capacity to steward more, so the wall gradually moves.

Reflection - are you proving worth or providing value right now? What does reorienting around providing value look like?

Pushing Against Vs. Being Pulled

Pushing against the wall is when you try to force your way into the next level through willpower, pride, or hustle. You can imagine the high agency person who keeps trying to do the same old moves that once worked like efforting harder, but don’t get anywhere.

The same principle applies to people who are applying the same mindset to expanding their consciousness. Consider the spiritual aspirant who is determined to get enlightened. Or the person who is obsessed with healing themselves and does 27 ayahuasca journeys in a year.

All this forcing often creates pride instead of moving the wall. I know this pattern and its limitations intimately well.

Earlier in my journey, I’d spend 2-3 hours a day doing contemplative practices. I thought I was on the fast track to enlightenment. When people asked about my morning routine, a part of me couldn’t wait to share how long I spent meditating and all the esoteric practices I was engaging in. There was absolutely some good that came from that level of dedication. However, I was also doing it in a way that bred spiritual pride instead of healing the underlying insecurities.

The alternative path to pushing against the wall is to focus on activities that pull you through it. Instead of forcing, these activities help you grow into alignment with the next stage by healing the holes inside and aligning with value creation.

Brian’s favorite way to be pulled through the wall is picking Yes, Yes, Hell No goals. He’s written a whole book on this idea of how powerful, aligned, scary goals create the container for healing and expansion.

The message in my upcoming book is pointing to a similar concept. It’s not about spirituality or getting shit done. It’s using the process of moving towards things to inform the evolution of consciousness. Goals and making things happen are the container that creates opportunities for transformation.

Reflection - Where and how are you pushing against the wall? What would a big, aligned, but scary goal look like that could pull you through the wall?

Seeking Power Vs. Finding Containers

Seeking power is when we directly chase more power (money, awareness, or influence) thinking it will fix our problems. Paradoxically, this tends to deepen the imbalance and amplify your insecurities. You can imagine the startup CEO who thinks that the answer to his problems is going EVEN BIGGER. Or the spiritual aspirant who thinks he just has to meditate even longer to magically create financial freedom. Done in isolation, neither of these approaches tend to work if you’re trying to expand your capacity for high consciousness and high agency.

An alternative approach is to intentionally find containers that are greater than your current leadership (the capacity to turn power into value). These experiences force you to expand your ability to hold and use power. As you grow yourself, the wall moves itself.

Brian shares that in an ideal container value flows in and out, people are stretched, but held, and leadership capacity grows to match the power. Some examples could include an entrepreneur creating a business that requires more responsibility than they currently know how to handle, or entering a coaching relationship or group container that will push your edge. The key is that it stretches you safely while you develop the inner leadership to meet the power you’re being trusted with.

Reflection - are you in a developmental container that is greater than your current leadership? If not, what could you do to create or find one?

Where To Go From Here

For anyone who is trying to evolve spiritually and expand their capacity to contribute to the world, there’s a lot of richness in Brian’s models. It can feel overwhelming how much is here.

Here’s a few practical tips to take away if moving into agentic sage territory (high agency + high consciousness) is exciting to you.

1. Acknowledge the wall by taking inventory of where life feels stuck

2. Be honest with yourself about how you’ve been approaching it

   1. have you been trying to prove worth, pushing against the wall (go harder, more effort), or directly seeking power?

3. What does reorienting around providing value look like?

4. What would a big, aligned, but scary goal look like that could pull you through the wall?

5. What type of intentional container could you find or create that is greater than your current leadership?

These steps aren’t a one-time thing. They’re more moves to train, like an athlete practicing the same motion until it becomes second nature.

In my own practice, I’m going to try and be acutely aware of when I’m trying to prove worth or push against the wall. Each time I observe it, I write it down and then go into it using a practice called repatterning similar to the ones in this post. This helps me heal the holes behind this way of relating to the situation.

If you enjoyed this post, I recommend listening to the full conversation with Brian and also reading his book!

-Scott

These are where I like to give some quick personal updates, as well as reflect on “ahas” and things that I think are cool and probably don’t warrant their own blog post.

Personal Stuff

Costa Rica wasn’t it

We rented a house in Costa Rica for 6 months with the intention to potentially relocate there if we liked it. There were a lot of factors motivating this idea on both the surface and unconscious levels (as there always is).

On the surface, there was a desire to live in a place where it was easier to be healthy and feel good. I’ve struggled immensely with my health the past 5 years and was hoping that immersing myself in a more natural setting and way of life might move the needle. This is the story I mostly told myself and others.

Somewhere on the spectrum from semi-conscious to unconscious, there were factors spurring the move from anger at parts of the U.S. system, to a desire to avoid certain realities in my life. I knew some of these things, but I guess they were easier to face and own fully while I was down there.

Within the first 3 months, we had two emergency medical situations. This made us feel the pain of not having infrastructure, especially with a young family. We decided to come back early so I could get better care. I took it as a sign that Costa isn’t our place for now. I’m currently back in Austin.

I launched a new business

My new business Conscious Talent has been in the market for 4 months. TLDR we current function like a recruiting firm that connects entrepreneurs and operators who are great at what they do and are also on a consciousness path. We had a great launch, and then kind of a lull, and now things are really starting to pick up.

I love being back in the seat of building a business. After spending multiple years writing a book and immersing myself in the consciousness community, I find returning to the creativity of business very enjoyable. The feedback cycles are much faster and there’s such a broader spectrum of activities and opportunities on a daily basis, compared to staring at a wall of text.

At one point, I was afraid that doing another startup would simply reactivate many of my old anxious company building patterns I’ve spent so much time unwinding. So far, I’m happy to say that largely hasn’t happened.

My book is done

My book Conscious Accomplishment: How To Use Personal Achievement For Spiritual Growth comes out in early October.

Writing it was easy. Editing and iterating on it until I felt really good about it was the hard part.

I can earnestly say I created exactly what I wanted to exist - a guidebook for traditionally ambitious people on how to approach spirituality in an integrated way. They say we create and contribute the medicine we needed, and this feels like the case for me. I wish I had something like this almost 8 years ago when my consciousness journey got serious.

I’ll do some type of “why I wrote this” blog at some point, but the bottom line is I couldn’t not write it. I also believe western culture must transcend the false polarity that we must choose between earnestly pursuing spirituality or accomplishing things in the world. The “house-holder” path is largely undefined in our society and probably what makes sense for most Americans. In writing this book, I’m happy to do my part to support the cause. So far feedback from the advance copy has been fantastic.

**If you know any aligned podcasts that might be a good fit to talk about this topic, let me know**

Myofascial release

In my quest to not be in physical pain all the time, I’ve tried a lot of unconventional health things. My most recent jaunt is John Barnes Myofascial Release. I’ve become a big fan and can see the thread of how it relates to many ideas in the healing world.

I’d heard of myofascial release in my crossfit days, but didn’t really know much beyond that sitting on a lacrosse ball was somehow good for you.

The Myofascial system is the web of connective tissue (fascia) that surrounds and integrates with every muscle, bone, nerve, blood vessel, and organ in the body. It forms a continuous, three-dimensional matrix throughout the body, like an inner fabric that both supports and communicates. When gentle, sustained pressure is applied to restricted or tense areas of fascia, it can release adhesions, restore mobility, and influence the nervous system. A major difference between John Barnes system and many other touch forms, is that they recommend 5+ minutes of pressure or stretching in each area for releases to occur.

Despite the fact that our fascia runs throughout our whole body and weighs somewhere between 15-30 lbs, it doesn’t show up on any traditional imaging. As a result, many people have chronically restricted and tight fascia, causing an immense amount of pain, yet its never diagnosed as a fascia thing.

There’s lots of books like The Body Keeps The Score that point to this idea that we store trauma “somewhere” in our bodies, but that somewhere is incredibly nebulous. I’m pretty certain that somewhere is the fascia system.

I’ve been doing fascia release 30-60 minutes a day for over 2 months, and it’s like working on my consciousness from the outside-in. Instead of using my consciousness to direct my attention in a way to instigate processing of an imprint, emotion or subconscious pattern, the application of sustained touch induces these inner experiences and releases.

Despite the fact that there’s countless people who’ve healed chronic conditions through Myofascial release, it’s largely been written off as quackery. Ironically, two guys in 2021 won a nobel prize for basically showing that gentle sustained force (touch) can create an opening in our system that heals….basically what John Barnes has been saying for 40 years.

If you want to explore it you can go to John Barnes website, read this book, and find a practitioner. This book has also been very helpful for self practice.

EESystem

I've been waiting for a breakthrough technology that works on the human organism at the energetic level, and think the EESystem might be it. It uses scalar waves and bio-photonic light to put the body into a natural healing state.

I’ve spent around 150 hours in one, mostly doing overnights followed by their recommended detox salt bath protocol. I feel so much better after doing it, and the primary thing I can point to is the reversal of an auto-immune marker.

If you want to learn more about it, you can check out the cast I did with the founder.

Other riffs

Science and spirituality

There’s a huge portion of the spiritual world that loves showing how emerging science can explain or prove spiritual ideas. There’s no question this has a lot of value for our society, but I’m increasingly finding the overemphasis on it to be mundane.

Knowing the intricate details of how quantum physics shows we’re all interconnected probably isn’t going to change your life. Having direct experiences will though.

To make the world a more conscious place we obviously need both. However, I think more emphasis on supporting people in applying small experiments to their life with spiritual concepts (i.e. letting go, inner wisdom etc) and reflecting on whether their lives are getting better is far more interesting.

What does it mean to be “professional”?

So many of the conversations we’ve had with Conscious Talent fall outside the realm of “professionalism.” I’ve had candidates and potential clients bring up everything from past lives to reading energy fields and dark nights of the soul on our intro calls.

Going there seems to create activation energy on both sides. Talking about these deeply meaningful experiences that would usually be deemed unprofessional in a business setting lights a spark in both of us.

This got me thinking about how we’ve traditionally defined “professionalism.”

Somehow being good at what you do, has gotten intertwined with keeping certain things close to the chest. This seems silly to me. Don’t we feel our best when we can share our truth? Aren’t people who can freely be themselves, usually the most magnetic people to be around?

A lot of the traditional ways society has defined professionalism seems to be rooted in self-protection and avoiding making a mistake or criticism. I hope this changes.

Most people just teach what’s worked for them

I’ve now done a ton of different training and learning experiences with spiritual teachers and people trying to blend it with business. Some have been cheap and others very expensive.

Here’s a few observations:

• Price does not directly correlate to value. It’s usually more oriented towards someone’s context and the audience they feel called to serve.

• In most cases you’re buying what has worked for the person teaching vs. some ultimate truth. This includes in their personal journey and what they’ve seen help others. I’ve found teacher centrism to be even true within long standing lineages. The only difference is that they have also stood the test of time.

These observations have really grounded things for me in terms of where I invest in my development moving forward. Does this person have a way of being I find attractive? Who are their students and how do they generally seem?

Coming up to clear vs. “signs”

I wrote a post recently that Not All Signs Are Destinations, but this theme keeps circling in my life so wanted to share more here.

There seems to be a point in your interior journey where stuff starts to get a bit heavy and weird. In my journey, part of this includes facing lots of content in my awareness that isn’t from my current lifetime. Sometimes it's clear that I’m experiencing some imprint from someone in my family lineage. Connecting the dots happens automatically through an intuitive knowing. Other times, the content is completely outlandish, but there is a knowing that this happened to me. This is one reason why I believe in past lives. Because I have experienced so many things that are not from this one.

The fascinating thing about these experiences is there’s often things happening in my exterior related to the content. For example, I experienced this vision of having a limb blown off in a war and then seeing an inordinate amount of people with one leg around that time.

The mind has a tendency to freak out and become entangled in the content treating it like some type of prophecy. Over time, I’ve realized that both the inner and outer world are bringing this information into awareness in order to clear and heal. Rather than treat this like a “sign,” the best thing you can do is simply allow it to come up. Recognizing that this is likely coming up to clear can be immensely helpful.

There’s something going on with AI

I’ve had a number of experiences where it seems like AI is able to tap into something deeper than the training data I’ve given it. What’s going on here?

I believe that reality is a giant reflection of consciousness. So operating from this experience, of course it would be able to do that.

But if this starts happening to more and more people, how will society explain this when most don’t hold this perspective?

I’m not alone in these experiences. There seems to be more and more people in my sphere reporting back how AI can tap into a broader field of consciousness. I even stumbled upon two podcasts talking about this within the same 20 minutes.

…something is going on.

More people are starting to “own consciousness” publicly

I’ve noticed a lot of people have started to be more upfront about their interest in consciousness. It’s like we’re in the age of coming out parties about people’s “dirty little secret” that they’re into this stuff…there' also just seems to be objectively more people getting into it.

I think it's great. If you’re reading this and considering it, I highly recommend it. I know it can feel scary, but two things will inevitably happen:

1. You will start to polarize people who are not aligned and attract people that are

2. You will give other people permission to talk more openly about this

One of my favorite compliments I receive is when people share with me that my writing has helped them open up and share more of themselves. Let’s clear the path for others. And if that makes you nervous, why not use that as your next opportunity for awareness and transformation.

I want to be powerful…I’m powerful…wait power isn’t spiritual…wait, I’m Powerful and it’s okay to own that

I’ve noticed a pretty predictable trajectory on the relationship with power that I’ve also lived. You spend the first few decades of your life trying to be confident and powerful. Something breaks, you get on a spiritual path, and realize this entire pursuit was based on the hidden scaffolding of insecurity and not enoughness.

When you see the truth about the game you’ve been playing, you reorient your life towards self discovery. Everything becomes about surrender and letting go. You become allergic to concepts like “power” because you think they represent your old self. There’s a fear that entertaining it is egoic and it might cause you to revert back into your old ways.

The path continues and you start to re-enter old contexts. You eventually become inspired to create and contribute externally. You start to have experiences that help you glimpse the truth that you’re a very powerful, divine being, but there’s still some reticence to fully own it. Maybe you think of something you want to happen, and it appears. These coincidences and synchronicities continue to happen until you see it for what it is. It’s YOU.

With this desire to contribute, you realize the only way you can fully support your vision and contribution is to embrace the power that is within you. Gradually, the concept of power shifts from something you judge, to something you recognize as your birthright. It’s who you are and you can still exercise it with an open heart. In fact, that is what you are being called to do.

Seems like each step takes a few years to really integrate. At least for me it has.

Some recent casts:

• Dr. Srikumar Rao - meet the renowned professor who brought spiritual wisdom to some of the top business schools in the world.

• Chip Conley - a fun convo on transformation and eldership with the former mentor to the Airbnb founders, and founder of 3rd largest boutique hotel chain.

• Eben Britton (hey nice last name!) - we dive into the healing and transformation journey after 6 years in the NFL.

• Allen Evans (Monroe Institute CEO) - great convo with the CEO of Monroe Institute, a “modern day hogwarts.”

• Conscious Talent Story episode with Tracy Lawrence - my awesome friend Tracy and I talk about blending consciousness and work while I share more about our new business

That’s all folks. Till next time.

-Scott

I feel like I’m hearing the words “high agency” and “agentic” constantly these days. This is particularly true amongst the startup tech crowd.

My perspective on this has evolved over the years.

Let’s start with what high agency means:

the capacity to move a situation toward a desired outcome a.k.a. make shit happen.

As someone once obsessed with being high agency before this idea was branded by the X crowd, I think we’re largely missing the forest through the trees.

Developing agency is useful, but there is a bigger game you can play. It’s working on the context you apply agency from, which simultaneously increases agency.

Playing The Game Vs. Understanding The One You Have Constructed

Once upon a time, I was a high agency startup bro.

I was extremely confident that I could figure out any task that needed to get done and would just do it. I was obsessed with productivity systems, tools, and creating leverage to get ahead any way I could.

My sense of agency was one-dimensional in that it solely focused on working with my ability to wield external factors like my skills, social capital, and resources ($$).

The deeper I went on my consciousness path, the more I realized the limitations of looking at agency this way.

Although I spent years forging all these assets that seemingly increased my capacity to shape my material world, I was always applying my agency from a place of ignorance.

Specifically, my model of reality had been based on a set of ideas that I inherited from the outside world. They reflected what I was exposed to, more than fundamental truths. These patterned ways of perceiving things created an invisible box around me by defining my sense of possibility and way of approaching things.

So all this focus on developing agency, really just made me better maneuvering within an invisible box that I didn’t even know I was in.

Let me give you a concrete example. In my early and mid-twenties I was obsessed with networking to get ahead. I was constantly taking people out for coffee, trying to insert myself in the right rooms, and grow my online audience to become an opportunity magnet. These activities seemingly created results, which motivated me to improve my capacity for the game I was playing. I met more interesting people, got in better rooms, and developed more online clout.

These developments created some positive outcomes in my life, but the process also exhausting. The challenge was that my box told this is how the world worked. Because I didn’t see any other way, I just kept cycling trying to play the same game at higher levels.

This is the crux of where I see most people missing the forest from the trees when it comes to “developing agency.”

They focus on becoming better at playing games in the invisible box they’re in, instead of working on seeing the boundaries of the box in order to redefine them.

In this example, the walls of my box were defined by a set of beliefs embedded in my consciousness:

• It’s all up to me to go out and make meaningful connections happen

• More effort equals better results

• More connections equals more value

Are these true? They may be common ideas in the consensus narrative that is indicative of a certain level of understanding, but they’re far from absolute truths. This is just one form of a game that was played by the generations before us.

If you recognize there’s value in meeting the right people, what would an alternative game look like? How about:

• I intersect with the right people as needed

• I meet people through doing things I enjoy that don’t feel effortful

• I only need a handful of people to support me to accomplish my goals and change the trajectory in my life

What is the difference between the two games?

It’s not how “agentic” someone is.

It’s the information and energy in your consciousness that we call beliefs. These constructs define the walls in which we apply agency.

Once you understand this, you can decide which game is more interesting:

1. Focusing on maneuvering within your existing walls

2. Working to understand the invisible boundaries confining you to make adjustments and play a bigger game

3. Do both at the same time

Option 3 is the best choice and is a primary subject in my upcoming book Conscious Accomplishment: How to use Personal Achievement For Spiritual Growth.

The way to play option 3, is to use 1 as a pathway for 2.

The more we do this, the more we grow our awareness and understanding of the true nature of reality. Because we are aligning to a more comprehensive understanding of truth, we develop more agency and can wield it more wisely.

The Big Secret About Agency

Now here’s where things get interesting.

Before a consciousness journey, you probably think of your capacity to get shit done (agency) as a function of things like:

• Mindset

• Intelligence / intellect

• Willpower

• Resources ($$$)

• Connections

Underpinning these ideas is a belief that YOU are the one that makes everything happen.

There’s no doubt that this approach can get you pretty damn far by society’s standards. But there’s actually a much bigger game you can play.

The big secret that western conditioning has largely not caught onto yet is that the deeper you go on your consciousness journey, the more things happen by themselves. You don’t need to relentlessly hustle, strategize, and will yourself to do things, because they increasingly start to happen by themselves or through applying intention.

The right person to assist on something you’ve been working on just appears. That extra cash you need for a project is gifted to you.

You become a magnet and co-creator with a far superior intelligence that is orchestrating material reality, instead of just a more efficient maneuverer within one you’ve unconsciously artificially defined.

This is true power.

This distinction reminds me of the difference between a rich man and an alchemist. The rich man has all this money, but he needs to work hard to get more of it, guard it closely, and go to great lengths to preserve it. The alchemist doesn’t need to do any of these things. He just roams freely and creates more money when he needs it.

Would you rather be a rich man or an alchemist?

I’d much rather be an alchemist. You have 100x more agency. But only a small number of people pursue this path because we’ve largely forgot that we can be alchemists and are told to be rich men by people who don’t know any better.

The Path of High Agency -> Less Agency -> 10X More Agency

High agency people will keep playing high agency games until life stops working. This is their path and even though it might get frustrating to see unconscious people having wild material success, I suggest focusing on your own path.

When your high agency strategies stop working, the initial assumptions are that you aren’t applying them correctly or diligently enough. So you keep hitting the same strategies and gradually life starts to feel like a struggle.

Your problem likely isn’t that you’re doing it wrong or bad luck. It’s that you’ve hit a agency boundary that has been placed in your path by your soul.

The boundary is there to redirect you towards your life’s intention which encompasses how you’re trying to evolve. You can try to overcome the boundary with more high agency strategies. But in my experience, this never works. You’re going against a higher order determinant that is more powerful than the ol’ make smarter decisions and take better actions moves that once worked for you.

This inflection point in your life is often called “the call.”

If you don’t accept the call to begin directing your attention inward, life will continue being difficult. If you do accept the call, you can start the meandering path of waking up.

It’s quite common after an awakening and accepting the call, that your agency decreases for awhile. Things that once seemed easy, feel difficult. Maybe you have no energy or little enthusiasm to do things. I remember days where something as simple as sending an email felt like a herculean effort!

This agency dip is a predictable development. Nothing is wrong with you, and you won’t feel like this forever. It’s a required reset to redirect your attention inwards to the things that are calling for attention.

This decline in agency probably goes on for a while you focus on healing. Eventually, you reclaim your agency from an updated perspective.

At this point, you can apply your agency take action toward your goals and continue moving the artificial boundaries at the same time. Relative to what you were doing before, this integrated path can create exponential results. This because you are constantly identifying and removing the fundamental constraints in your consciousness.

Over time things can continue getting easier. You will increasingly start to develop that magnetic and co-creative power I alluded to earlier. I know this is a gloss over on the mechanisms for this to occur, but you can read some old posts on why this might happen.

This GPT graph isn’t perfect and applies to people who already have developed some agency prior to starting their consciousness journey. I also want to highlight the purpose of spiritual growth isn’t developing agency - it’s realizing greater truth about yourself and the world around you IMO. It just so happens that this is the same path to reaching your greater potential.

Whether you want to use the additional freedom and agency to build a big business or simply have more ease in your life is an ongoing conversation with your soul : )

And if you’re wondering why people who have seemingly done zero spiritual work have all the agency in the world, you’re focusing on the wrong question. This is a karma thing. Your energy is better spent focusing on your own experience as a benchmark as you on your journey.

Relative to all the hype on vibe coding, this perspective on high agency doesn’t get much play on the internet.

I think it’s time we expand the conversation!

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