Today we’re talking about going deeper into your personal study.
I was at a training a number of years ago with my mentor who I’d been studying with for a while. And even at that point, I said to her, “you know, it feels like it’s the same material over and over again. There’s a part of me that just wants the next thing or something new.”
She said something to me that has stuck with me for a long time that I wanted to share with you. She shared an experience with me where her family owned a blackberry farm for a period of time. She said they would do a big harvest in the fall, and after that harvest was done, the “gleaners” would come in. They would come in with their baskets and they would go underneath the blackberry bushes and pick all of the berries that the big pickers missed. She said I was always shocked at how much fruit that those gleaners were able to get.
She looked at that and she said “I want to be a gleaner. I want to be somebody who goes deep into the study, deep into the material.” With transformational principles, there’s a lot of people that go wide; they go from teacher to teacher to teacher, subject to subject to subject, and and they basically stay on the surface of the information. It was that moment where she’d made the decision to go deep inside her study, and really glean everything there is to glean from these transformational principles.
That was a powerful moment for me, because in that moment I wanted to go wide. I wanted to study something for a little bit, and something else for a little bit, and so on. I made a decision in that moment that I wanted to be a gleaner. I wanted to go deep, so I am able to embody the physics and the science of transformation. So that I can experience that in my own life, and I can bring it to you in your life.
The definition of gleaning is to collect information bit by bit, and to really get it from various sources. And I believe that when we start to look at transformational principles, I like to say truth is truth is truth. When you make the decision to be a lifelong learner, you’ll hear things from different sources and different people. By collecting that information and really living into that information, not just knowing about it, but embodying it over months and years.
Next month I will go to my 13th coach training. I stay in that study, and I keep going back, because I want to really get everything there is to get from it.
My encouragement to you, and I hope you’re reading this and making some decisions, is to first of all be a lifelong learner. Make that advanced decision that you’re going to be somebody who’s going to commit themselves to being a lifelong learner. Learning doesn’t stop once we’re done school.
Secondly, decide if you are you going to be somebody who goes wide and gets lots of different information (and that’s okay!), or are you somebody who wants to really go deep in understanding transformational principles.
I often have people that come into my coaching programs, and they’ll spend three or six months working with me, and then they’ll go “I got it, I’m done!” And then I have people who I’ve worked with for over three, five, six, seven years who have made that decision to go deep. When they do that, their life reflects that they’ve made some decisions about how they want to show up in their lives.
Transformation really is a lifelong journey. It’s not something that we do for a short period of time, we experience results and we’re done.
How do you put this into practice?
Here’s the mindset and strategy. The mindset is to commit to being a lifelong learner and really getting curious about different factors in your life. The strategy piece is to look at your calendar and ask if it reflects that decision? We’re going into September – it’s back to school season. What’s on your calendar that reflects you being that lifelong learner? Are you taking some courses? Are you learning something new? Are you in a study? The strategy is make sure that you’ve got some things on your calendar that reflect the mindset of being a lifelong learner.
That’s really when we become masters of our own life.
Stacey
