When old strategies stop working

Sometimes life says: "that doesn't work anymore"

This post is sponsored by my new book Conscious Accomplishment. Here’s what others are saying:

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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.

Pg. 319, Conscious Accomplishment

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