As I write this (30th July 2016) I am sitting in Dogtown Coffee in Santa Monica California. We are at the end of our L.A. stay having been here for 9 weeks and are overall coming to the end of our ‘world tour’ (we’ll be back in the UK for the beginning of September - meaning we’ll have been on the road for 10 months).
This journey has been phenomenal on so many levels. We have all learned so much about so many things. We have met incredible people, seen incredible sights and emerged ourselves in different cultures. As a family and as individuals, our guiding paradigms in life have shifted radically.
On this journey I have met and learned from some very cool and adept human beings, most specifically in the areas of life creation/wealth creation/business, personal mastery skills and physical skills/culture (being right here on Muscle Beach has been so cool, as was being 30 seconds walk from Point A Movement Culture Jam-Space in Adelaide).
LA has been insane. Firstly, for the opportunity to spend some serious time with my brilliant friend John P. Morgan. I have known John for about 6 years and up until he left London 2 years ago we used to spend a ton of time exploring and creating ‘paradigms of success’ (for want of a better phrase) together. It’s been so good to get back into that, especially as John has deepened his wisdom and smarts a lot over the last two years.
John has been an awesome contact in other ways, particularly through plugging me into a slice of LA that is vibrant, generative and creative (John belongs to a crazy invite only club for massively high achievers called METal - LOTS of ‘success anthropology’ and modelling opportunities inside of that. Aside from that, he knows a lot of other adepts of various kinds).
Being here in LA has created a massive opportunity for me to crystallise what I have begun calling the Principles of Non-Linear Generative Engagement (a not too catchy but encapsulating label), through the opportunity to spend time with and *model* three particular individuals…
* Mike Weeks - extreme climber, TV Producer, change agent and maverick business man
* Paul Bishop - 30 year veteran LAPD Detective, Novelist, interrogation expert (maestro) and TV Star (Take the Money and Run).
* William Whitecloud - Writer, Wealth/Lifestyle/Business Creator, Movie Producer and author of The Magicians Way and The Last Shaman
Spending time with and modelling these three guys has been a phenomenal in terms of personal shifts and tangible results. My feeling is - and I know I’m still in the thick of it and that might be biasing my view - that the time spent here in LA has been one of the most personally transformative periods of my life (there is a kind of ‘generative culture’ here in LA that is very different from London - I’m not saying it’s perfect, but there is a lot to learn from it in terms of proactivity and personal creation).
Aside from all of that, living just of the ‘Muscle Beaches’ of Venice and Santa Monica has rendered me physically stronger at the age of 42 than I have ever been.
But before we were in the US we were in Australia for 5 Months. I mentioned Point A, the Adelaide movement space. Parkour, Circus, Tricking, Martial Arts and more… all sweetly blended. Everybody jamming and learning from each other. Props must go out to TJ, president of the South Australia Parkour Association for creating Point A and running it as a true gift to the movement community in Adelaide. The only downside about Point A is that it is where I busted the meniscus in my left knee at my LAST SESSION THERE! Unfortunately this has taken me out of Capoeira and my nascent explorations into Parkour until I can get the surgery to fix it (this will have to wait till we get back to the U.K.).
Being in Australia also created the opportunity to spend some high-quality timewith James Tsakalos’ - master modeller and the worlds most rigorous NLP trainer (that is not a hyperbolic claim, but a verifiable fact). James very generously invited me to sit in on his 2016 Master Practitioner training. This gave me the opportunity to sharpen my modelling skills and focus AND immerse myself more fully in his Spiral Somatics JuJu (and some sweet JuJu it is - I’m having him come over to the UK in 2017 to run this). I am incredibly grateful to James for this as I don’t think I’d have juiced nearly so much from my time in LA without the preceding time spent with James and the ‘transmissions’ received.
Beyond all of that we, as a family, have learned a ton about creating a self-financing generative lifestyle ‘on the road’. This includes everything we have learned about creative ‘home education’ (though we prefer ‘world education’ :) ). To begin with, we kept on falling for the trap of trying to emulate the ’schoolroom’ approach, but have now gone way beyond that restrictive paradigm. I’m not going to write about this here, because it is too specialist and deserves at least a blog post of it’s own. I may well also create a post on what we did and what would do differently if we were to do this whole thing again.
So, we will be back in the UK early in September, but we will not be the same and our lives will not be the same. After 5 years of trying to strategically ‘take my business to another level’ and yet not doing so, this journey is doing just that. I have learned things, seen things, and connected with people who have opened up new channels for business and personal development. There was no way this could have happened from the comfort of my offices and training space back in the UK.
We have some really cool creations on the cards for when we get back to the UK, but staying still for too long is not part of the plan. We will be spending significant amounts of time both in Adelaide and West Los Angeles in the future and creating an overall more ‘global’ lifestyle.
My last reflection on this, for now, is on the concept of ‘horizons’ . What we see as possible in life is dictated by our ‘horizons’ - how far we can see. ‘Horizons’ are rarely, if ever, expanded by simply reading about stuff or watching TV/movies/webcasts about stuff - what is important is direct experience - ‘seeing’ for yourself.
Here in L.A. I got some advice from a serial entrepreneur about education - “if you want your kids to have conventional minds, put them in conventional education”. This was from a guy who not only was a successful (globally known) entrepreneur, but also has raised successful entrepreneurs in his own offspring. One of his sons shared his perspective on this - “the most important thing you can do for your kids is provide them with a range of experience”. I think this is true, because only experience broadens the horizons. But a key point here is that this advice does NOT just apply to children, because our developmental years never end.
If you want to expand your range of operation and fulfilling, generative engagement in life, embrace a broader range of experiences. You can never tell where this is going to lead, but when you do it will be clear that each of them has taken you a little bit beyond who you thought you were and what you thought was possible.
Anyhows, I’m signing off for now as I have reached my coffee quotient for the day and the Dogtown staff are probably marking me down as a loiterer! :) If you have any questions regarding any of the above, please do ask via the comments section below.