There are seven ways to create, and the one you live in decides what is available to you.
Last week, I led a room of founders and CEOs through a guided experience to access the internal state where the next level gets created from, and some of you were in that room with me. At the end, I shared this map with the room. I call them the 7 Stages of Success.
When something stops moving, most people reach for one of two answers. Work harder, or get smarter about it. Both are on this map, and they are only two of the seven. Where are you mainly creating from?
One. Repetition.
This is the first stage that those who are serious about sustainable success do not get to skip. The chef who won Culinary Class Wars, a wild hit cooking show on Netflix, said he made the same simple marinated dish ten thousand times, when nobody was watching, not to show off, but to fine-tune the taste. The only way to get more out of it is more hours. What you gain here, though, is mastery, and the mastery becomes the foundation.
Two. Effort.
You push, the pushing works, and it breaks through walls that repetition alone would never have touched. The engine is you, though, so over time the cost shows up in the quality of your sleep, the length of your patience, and your relationships with the people around you. This is also where most people build everything they have, and almost everything you are proud of was made right here.
Three. Strategy.
Leverage, systems, positioning, the intelligent use of the energy and time at hand. Most excellent operators live here. Mindset enters at this stage and contributes, so the two working together create great achievement.
All of it is foreseeable. Strategy and mindset work with what you can already see, which is why you can optimize everything. This stage takes you as far as logical intelligence can go, and that is a long way.
Four. Purpose.
This is the stage where the 'why' matters more than the mechanics. The strength to go on requires meaning, and you can move other people to believe in what you stand for, the vision you have for your company. To pull a team together you have to be the one who can hold the energy for other people, and that requires a different capacity in addition to the first three stages.
Five. Knowing.
This is the starting stage I take my clients to, and beyond. Experiential knowing is fundamental to expanding your intelligence beyond logic. When you make decisions here, you are not really making them. You "know," and the answer comes, so you can simply follow. Your own ambition, own direction, even preferences sometimes have to be out the door first, and then there is room for the knowing to be revealed.
Six. The ecstasy of creation.
Those of us who are serious about success usually do suffering extremely well, and we think joy is always something we have to wait for. Choosing your own joy is playing offense, and it needs to be a decision.
This stage goes to the reason we are here at all. We came into a body, into a physical dimension where things can be touched, tasted, and seen, and you can experience your own creation. The freedom of creation, and the feeling of being supported all throughout, is the whole purpose of the curriculum.
In this stage, the building happens because building is a pleasure, unhooked from the outcome and from anyone else's idea of what you were supposed to make. You are in the body and connected at the same time, living without limit, and the work turns into exploring the creation rather than proving anything inside it.
Seven. Being.
Lighter than all of it, and the joy stops being something you are having, because you have become it. Here your being is the service. The years, the knowledge, the development, the understanding, and everything you accumulated becomes what you carry, and it transmits. People who interact with you are moved by something when they are ready, and no convincing is needed. You say much less, and more happens.
None of these stages need to run in a straight line.
You can be in full effort and feel the joy of it, or run strategy all morning and be entirely in the being while you do it, and everyone has tasted the higher stages, usually in the best hours of their best years. So the question is not which stage you have touched. It is where you spend most of your hours, because that is the one you are creating from, and it is worth noticing. Once you have access to all seven, you can be in all of them at once, or combine whichever ones the work in front of you calls for.
The conviction, dream, and consciousness of the leader is the ceiling of the business, so how far your own state has come determines how far the company grows. People are energetic beings, so they agree with what you are carrying and not only with what you say when they gather under the mission. That last part is also the good news, because it means the fastest way to raise everything around you is to raise your own state.
Almost every client I work with finds me wanting to operate in the higher stages. They have tasted it somewhere along the line, or they feel the constraints of where they are enough to know the higher stages exist.
Look back at your last week and see which of the seven you spent the most time in. That one is where you have been creating from. Your next breakthrough comes when you begin operating from the stage above it, and that is available to you now.
Today is a solar eclipse, and the closing day of the Lion's Gate portal.
It is the beginning of the newness. So sit in the place of solitude for a bit, and clarify what you want to create next. If you want me to lead you, here is the guided experience to your internal world, to begin unlocking the three stages that have been out of reach. I have shared accessing the three brains (head, heart, and body) before, and this is an exercise using all of them. 20 minutes of uninterrupted time, eyes closed, and I will lead you through every step. (If you were in the room with me, go in for a second time and cement what you created.)
Open The Vault: A Guided Experience
I would love to hear your experience. Reply and let me know what you find.
Eugene
