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Build Your Business Online has posted a new item, 'The Ultimate Guide to Selling With Webinars'

Lately I’ve been implementing webinars as an active strategy in my business.

Yes I know, webinars have been around for years nothing new here. Absolutely, I couldn’t agree with you more.

However webinar is just a marketing or content delivery channel, nothing more. And even though the makers of webinar software is trying to market their systems as the biggest revolution in business since someone invented toilet paper, they are just tools that should be embedded in some kind of business process.

This blog post is both about doing the actual webinar, using the toolset, but also how you embed it into your business from lead generation to the actual sale.

The Business Model Introduction…

Now this is just A business model, not necessarily THE business model. This is something that has been working well for me.

You are of course welcome to rip the whole thing and implement it in your business, but you can also just grab the bits and pieces that you feel will be working for you in your market.

The initial list of things to do in this business model might look overwhelming, however the good thing is that it can be put on evergreen.

Evergreen means that while you might do live webinars, there is nothing holding you back from just putting a pre-recorded webinar into the model and then have a complete hands off and automated business, that will continue to drive sales.

Actually this is my next step as I figure out what is resonating best with my audience. It would be a poor decision to use a pre-recorded webinar that did not convert well (and save a few hours each month) instead of doing a live webinar where you can continue to fine-tune your message.

The Webinar Definition…

But let’s take a step back and take a look and ask the questions “what is a webinar“. I propose the following webinar definition:

“An online broadcast that can be shared with remote locations using audio and video.”

Notice that I use the word “broadcast”. A webinar is typically a “one-to-many” media meaning that you put your message out, but the audience does not participate in the actual event (like an online conference).

Another point to notice is that I mention “audio and video”. In the “old days” our internet connections would rarely be able to support video and audio, and a lot of marketers used “Tele seminars” where participants had to call in using their phones.

To this day, the big providers of webinar technology have the ability to get the audio through a phone.

But I won’t get too stuck in the definition, chances are that you’ve already been exposed to a webinar in the past and are here because you want to do one.

Business Model Overview

But let me start with an overview of the business model.

These are the individual components in the model and I will go through each of them in details below.

Notice that the model stops after the sales page. How you deliver your product or service is probably specific to your business.

• Red boxes are the external lead generators responsible for getting fresh leads into the system
• Green boxes are the pages in the system for gathering and presenting information
• Blue boxes are the mail sequences that the lead or webinar participant receives and are basically the backbone in the model

External Lead Generation

How to you get participants to your webinar? You just send out a message to your newsletter list of course…

“What is that… No newsletter you say…?!”

Doing a webinar is a great way of validating a business idea, so often you won’t have any existing subscribers.

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Doing a webinar is a great way of validating a market or business idea
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Also you cannot simply continue marketing the same webinar to the same list of people (even though you might get a few new subscribers every now and then).

So truth be told, I’ve used my newsletter list in the past to get participants to webinars and I continue to use it. However I’m also using Facebook Ads that have proven to be a really inexpensive way of getting leads into the the sales funnel.

Now there are multiple ways of using paid advertising to generate leads into any sales funnel.

I’ve tried out Google Adwords in the past, but haven’t been able to get reliable results of my business (not that you cannot use them though, I know several people who have built their entire businesses from traffic generated by Google Adwords).

However with Facebook Ads you can hit a very specific target audience which is what I’m currently doing. I’ll get more into this in a moment.

Economy of Paid Advertising

When you are first starting up, you might not think that paid advertising is for you. Perhaps you’re trying to bootstrap on a tight budget, or perhaps you just want some money before you start spending them.

This is all good, however done right, advertising is not an expense. It’s an investment.

Back in the days before the Internet John Wanamaker said:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”

However today where everything can be tracked, this is no longer true!

These days you can see exactly what is working and quickly find out what is not!

So “investing in advertising” has never been easier!

Having success with paid advertising is really about finding out how much money you make each time you spend $1

My best ads have been giving me leads for less than $0.20!!!!

And when I say lead, that is me getting their email address on my autoresponder list (either because they want to participate in a webinar or they receive some kind of freebie).

Right now I’m getting leads for a webinar I’m doing next week for $0.50 to $1.00.

Now you can start to play with the numbers!

10% is probably low set on a $100 product but you get the idea!

You can also use the following formula:
Profit = number of leads * conversion % * product price – (lead acquisition cost * number of leads)

In this example I’m only counting the people who buy on the actual webinar. However there is also a group of people who might not have seen the webinar, or just needs a bit more persuasion.

If you remember the model overview, also the email sequence is redirecting people to the sales page, so more about this later.

Getting Cheap Leads through Facebook

Let me just start out by showing you a Facebook Ads campaign I’m currently doing for a webinar

I’m sorry but the currency is in Danish Kroner (DKK). If you want it in USD, you can divide the amounts by aprox. 5.50.

So right now I’m paying anywhere from $0.13 to $1.35 per lead and averaging at $0.95 per lead.

Now I could just suspend the more expensive ads and focus on going with the ones that work, however $1.35 is a perfectly acceptable price for lead (although the highest I’ve currently paid in any of my campaigns).

But how do you get leads at this price using Facebook Ads?

The following is my formula for doing exactly this:

1. Find FB groups of people who are interested in the topic, or find the most active users from competitors pages
   (I have some secret ninja tools for helping me with this that I unfortunately cannot share here)
2. Create “Custom Audiences” from the users extracted found in the research.
   I’m doing this using the Power Editor (that only works in Google Chrome). I’m typically importing a list of Facebook UserIDs, however you can also import a list of email addresses. If you only have a small list of users you can continue to do a “Lookalike Audience”, however the less “lookalike” you create it, the less targeted and the more you can expect to pay for your conversions
3. Create a couple of ads targeting the custom audiences
   I typically create at least one ad per custom audience so I know what audiences are working well with certain messages. Only do the “Promoted Post” since this is a big ad getting into the news stream of your target audience. I wouldn’t bother with doing ads in the right hand side (the small ones)
4. Pay per impressions (CPM)
   The more targeted your audience is the better click through rate you will get. So the best way to get really low cost conversion is not to bid on clicks but on impressions.
5. Other stuff
   When you create the campaign you probably want to tell FB to optimize for conversions. This will require you to place a so called “pixel” on your opt in “Thank you page”. It’s just a piece of code that you need to add, and this will make it possible for Facebook to track your conversions.

That is basically it. The is no secret other than creating the most targeted audience you can get and paying for impressions!

Well, there is one more thing. You need an opt in page that converts like crazy, so let’s move on to exactly this.

Creating the pages

As you can see from the model overview you really only need five different pages.

Depending on your webinar system, these pages are created for you. However as I will mention later, it’s not always a good idea to use the standard pages.

• Landing page
  This is where you direct all your traffic. This is one of the most important pages (if not the most important one) as this is going to get people into your funnel. If people visit your website but do not leave their email address, then you wasted that traffic and will most likely not get that person back to your site. While the sales page is also important, you can always continue to market to a person as long as they are subscribed, so even if they do not buy at the first visit, you can still continue to work the lead.

  If you’re up for it, this page is a candidate for split testing. However this is a little beyond the scope of this post

• Thank you page
  A simple page that people will see after they have opted in. This is where you install the Facebook tracking pixel. I typically also let people download an ebook or similar on this page so they do not have to wait until the webinar before they receive something of value from me.
• Webinar event page
  The page where your webinar event will run. This page will typically have some kind of commenting system so people can interact with you during the call. If you are using some kind of webinar system this page is most likely done for you.
• Webinar replay page
  This is where you can send people to that wasn’t able to attend the live event. For instance I just got a cancellation from someone signing up asking me if a replay would be made available. His excuse? He had tickets for a Metallica concert on the same day (well that will teach me to schedule a webinar on the same day as a Metallica concert ;)).
• Sales page
  This is the page where people can order your product or service. If you done a good job at selling in your webinar, this does not have to be a complex page. Your selling should really be done on the webinar, so you don’t need a long sales letter.

  The sales page is also a candidate for split testing.

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You just need 5 simple pages in your webinar setup
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Choosing the Right Webinar Software

Now there are a ton of different players in the webinar software field, however Google has disrupted the whole market by offering Google Hangouts on Air for free.

This is basically the same technology that is powering Google Hangouts where you do conferences with your friends.

I’ve chosen to purchase the Easy Webinar Plugin. It’s a system and a WordPress plugin that enables me to run webinars directly from my WordPress site using Google Hangouts on Air.

It’s just a one off price and that’s it. This is considerable cheaper than paying for something like GoToWebinar (that quickly becomes quite expensive).

However if you want the full story about Easy Webinar and Google Hangouts on Air check this in depth post I wrote recently as it covers the technical setup.

Now the good thing about Easy Webinar Plugin is that it creates all the pages I just discussed.

However recently I’ve started using LeadPages for the landing page and adding the participants to my autoresponder (I’m currently using GetResponse).

This goes a bit against how Easy Webinar was meant to be used, and I can no longer track people who are signed up in Easy Webinar.

But on the plus side, I get access to some crazy converting webinar landing page templates.

This is just one of my landing pages in LeadPages. It’s currently converting 46% of the visitors into subscribers (signups for the webinar).

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Holy smoke Batman. 46% conversion rate!!!
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And I’m no professional copywriter!!!

I actually ran a split test between a page I did myself (a clean and “nice” looking page) and a landing page from LeadPages (on another campaign though). However I ended the test after three days when my own page only converted 5% and the LeadPages version converted 43%.

This is a SUPER IMPORTANT point!!!

You need to know your numbers. If you just stick up a page and send traffic to it, you should know how many of them stick around!

When it comes to people asking questions on the webinar, the different webinar systems typically support different methods.

After a couple of trial and errors, I’ve chosen to add the free livefyre comment component. It looks great and is easy to use (and did I mention it’s free ;)).

If you’re using Easy Webinar, you simply just add the code you get from Livefyre when you setup up the webinar.

Email Sequences

The last part of the puzzle it the email sequences.

Now I’m still optimizing my emails, however I want to give you an idea about how you can structure your emails.

I’m using a seven email setup

All the emails can be batched scheduled and you can use the same emails for each webinar (unless you want to split test or optimize something).

Emails before the event

1. At the time of opt in
   A confirmation that they are now registered for the webinar. I typically already add a link to the webinar in this email, so people signing up just before the actual even will also get the link.
   Tell them again what they signed up for and why.
2. 24 hours before the event
   And “excited email” telling people that there is only a day until the event. You can also add how many have registered. This will give some social proof but also give some scarcity if you only got a fixed amount of seats in the actual event
3. 1 hour before the event
   This is where you tell people get to the webinar in good time. You might add some scarcity about there are more people signed up than seats (of course only if this is true)
4. When the event is starting
   Tell people that you are waiting for them and the webinar is starting.

Emails after the event

1. Webinar replay 1 day after event
   One good thing about using Google Hangouts on Air is that it records the event automatically. So it’s super easy to send out a link to the recording of the webinar.
2. Q&A 2 days after event
   A good excuse for contacting your webinar participants is to send out an email with questions and answers. These could be questions you got from participants, but it could also just be questions you think might hold people back from buying your product or service
3. Offer expiring 3 days after event
   Time limited offers work really well. So one way of leveraging this is to send out an email telling the participants that the offer you made during the webinar is about to expire. In this example the webinar special offer would only be valid for 72 hours after the webinar

I currently setup the email sequences using my autoresponder, however Easy Webinar can also do these email sequences without any other software.

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You just need these 7 emails in your webinar setup
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Webinar Structure

Are you still reading? Awesome!

Your webinar will typically be a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation that you present from.

But how do you structure a webinar where you plan on selling your product or service?

Well you can use the following plan:

1. Welcome
   Just a brief introduction
2. Hook
   Tell them that you will give them someone of value in the end of the webinar to keep people listening all the way through. You might also mention your product early on!
3. Your story
   Who are you and what’s your story?
4. Before
   What did your life/situation look like before you discovered whatever it is you’re talking about?
5. After
   And how does your life look like now? How did it help you?
6. Training
   Deliver the training of the webinar. Remember to focus both story telling and concrete numbers/facts in order to cater for different people in your audience.
7. Build value
   In what way is your product unique?
8. Reveal the price
9. Bonuses
   Increase the value of your product or service with bonuses
10. Discount
    Give them an offer they cannot refuse
11. Risk reversal
    Give them a money back guarantee
12. Urgency
    Offer only valid for a limited time period, like 72 hours
13. Scarcity
    What will they loose if they do not act? (or limited number of products)
14. Objections
    If there are any objections you did not already cover
15. Recap pricing
    Let them hear it again
16. Fast action bonus
    Create massive urgency
17. Last warning
    What will happen if they do not buy today

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A 17 step outline for profitable webinars
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Whew, you made it through…

I’m excited that you made it this far.

Hopefully you now have an idea for how you can implement webinars as part of your business.

Anything I missed? Let me know in the comments!

If you enjoyed the post, I would really appreciate if you liked or shared it on your favorite social network. It’s only 10 seconds of your time. Thanks!

You may view the latest post at http://retiremyass.com/ultimate-guide-selling-webinars/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Your Business Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Your Business Online has posted a new item, 'The Benefits of Cruelty'

As I continued to ponder the ideas I shared in my last post, I gave more thought to the idea of the potential hidden benefits of cruelty.

When I used to do a lot of shoplifting in my late teens, aside from the self-destructive nature of those pursuits, there were some benefits as well. It was a way to face my fears. I built a lot of courage during that time. I stretched beyond my comfort zone.

Years later I found more productive (and legal) ways to achieve those same benefits, such as getting into public speaking. Over a period of years, I built up from doing short 7-minute speeches to doing 3-day workshops. Speaking gives me a similar high like shoplifting did, but I don’t have to worry about getting arrested for it… at least not presently.

Shoplifting wasn’t something I just got sucked into. I chose to do it. Eventually it became something of an addiction, but in the beginning it was a choice. By contrast the acts of cruelty I undertook in my past were usually unconscious. They largely resulted from unquestioned habits installed during early childhood.

That said, I’ve still been asking myself, What’s the benefit of cruelty? If it’s such a popular engagement for humanity, surely there must be some benefit to it. Otherwise why would people perform such acts?

I suppose for some it could convey a sense of power or dominance. Maybe I could access those feelings at one time, but I generally don’t feel that way towards acts of cruelty today. They don’t seem strong or powerful to me. If I were to deliberately do something cruel today, I expect that it would make me feel weaker, not stronger.

Belongingness

As I reflected upon this question further, however, I realized that there is a very real benefit to cruelty. That benefit is a greater sense of belongingness. In a group that condones some acts of cruelty, to participate in such acts can give one a sense of being part of the collective.

An unintended side effect of my sometimes obsessive commitment to personal growth is that it can create a feeling of distance between myself and the rest of society. The more I move away from social norms, the more there’s the potential to feel like a social outcast… or to be treated like one by others.

One way I compensate for this is by spending more time with like-minded people. This is one reason I love speaking and doing workshops — it provides more opportunities to connect with people with similar values.

The truth is that most of the areas in which I may be different from others don’t seem to negatively affect my sense of belongingness. Not having a job, not being religious, being in an open relationship — these rarely cause me any real trouble in relating to other people.

Compassion

There is one area which seems to cause me more trouble than any other — my sense of compassion. It would seem that being more compassionate should make it easier to connect with others. But in my experience, it often serves to create more distance, at least in a society that doesn’t normally place such a high value on values like compassion and caring. We may idealize such qualities, but in our day-to-day interpersonal interactions, compassion can actually be a social liability.

Suppose I’m with a group of friends, and everyone is eating animal products, while I eat something else (or nothing at all) because my moral compass tells me that turning animals into consumables is wrong. Perhaps a few of them even celebrate their choices, like proclaiming the tastiness of barbecued flesh… while my perceptions are quite different from theirs. I find it more difficult in these moments to experience a sense of harmony with such friends.

Occasionally when someone has invited me to lunch or dinner, I’ve redirected to suggest other ways of connecting that don’t involve food. How about if we go for a walk instead? I might say. That makes it easier for me to focus on what we have in common instead of highlighting our differences.

Being a Social Outcast

Another way this difference in compassion gets highlighted is when I’m around other men who have views towards women that are very different from mine. I don’t like it when men talk about women as objects or targets, when they rate a woman’s value based on her looks, when they act as if the only reason to connect with a woman is to get her into bed. If I challenge these attitudes and suggest alternatives, then I become a target of ridicule for such men, which has happened on more than one occasion. There are countless threads on other people’s forums, especially in the seduction community, where such men criticize and condemn me, basically for not being enough like them. They’ll sometimes post pictures of women I’ve connected with and criticize whatever they can about them too. To them, women are objects to be manipulated, and anyone who suggests otherwise is not only wrong, but also a perceived enemy to some degree.

Many women, unfortunately, aren’t much better. Some who’ve never met nor talked with me, have written lengthy blog posts analyzing the failure of my marriage, the perversion of my interest in open relationships, or the pure deviance of my love of cuddling. I become a target for whatever past transgressions any man has ever done to them. I wonder who they’re really writing about, since the thoughts, feelings, and intentions they condemn me for aren’t any that I could conceivably recognize as mine. So I remain an outcast among the men who objectify women and among the women who demonize men, and those are some pretty sizable communities.

Another group of people with whom I sense a sometimes glaring disconnect is entrepreneurs. When I do things like removing third-party advertising from my website or uncopyrighting my work, for some reason many people in that community seem to perceive me as a threat. Sometimes they’ll write long posts about how I must have some secret agenda beneath the surface. I happen to like having a website that isn’t full of ads; I think that’s a nicer way of serving my readers. I want people to be able to enjoy my articles for free without unnecessary distractions like pop-up ads. I get more joy from helping people than I do from earning money. This prioritization of my values, however, can create a disconnect with entrepreneurs who are more profit-focused. While I am technically an entrepreneur, I often find it hard to relate to other entrepreneurs because they usually value money a lot more than I do, whereas in their minds I go way too overboard in trying to help people for free, so therefore I must be less savvy or perhaps even a bit wacko. A more generous criticism of me is that I’m too idealistic and not realistic enough. I think that some of them are genuinely bothered by the fact that my business actually works. One entrepreneur actually stood up at one of my workshops, went on about how it doesn’t work to follow your heart in business, and closed with, “So fuck you, Steve Pavlina!” I smiled at her, bowed, and continued with the workshop.

I get invited to speak to groups of entrepreneurs sometimes, and with such groups I often like to speak about finding and following one’s path with a heart in business. That isn’t an easy thing to do, especially when other speakers at the same event may be sharing ways to make more money (sometimes in ways that I consider manipulative), but I feel that I have an important message to share. At some events, I feel that this message falls on deaf ears with most of the people in the room, but when one or two people talk to me privately afterwards and tell me how much they needed to hear what I shared and how much it validated their own thoughts and feelings on the subject, it really lights me up inside and encourages me to continue doing this where I can.

Despite the challenges, I consider myself very lucky to have enjoyed some really wonderful connections with like-minded people. But like me, these people usually dwell on the fringes of society. They too, to at least some degree, are social outcasts, even though many of them seem much happier and more fulfilled than the average person.

I find it so easy to connect with other people who really care about others and who are committed to doing good in the world while minimizing the harm they cause. In their presence I effortlessly relax into oneness. But with most people I meet, it isn’t so easy to connect with such a degree of harmony.

I’ve been wondering whether I should focus even more attention on like-minded people and engage in fewer interactions where a perceived incompatibility is more likely… or if I should seek out ways to feel a sense of belongingness with a much broader range of people. I often flip-flop on my approach here.

Connecting Through Cruelty

Just as thievery is a way to face fears and build courage, cruelty is actually a way to create a sense of belongingness. Since some level of cruelty is extremely common among human beings, it’s easier to belong if one is able to exhibit some cruelty now and then. Eat animals. Objectify women. Bash men. Throw around a few racial slurs. Manipulate people for personal gain. This validates you as one of the gang. If you can embrace cruelty in some fashion, it isn’t difficult to find a social tribe that will welcome you.

Have you ever observed yourself being a bit cruel now and then, perhaps even more than felt good to you, in order to fit in? Did you ever advertise your cruelty to reduce or avoid the risk of becoming a social outcast among your peers?

Being a caring and compassionate man is very important to me, so much so that I’m willing to be a social outcast if I must. However, I’d rather not be such an outcast if I can avoid it. I do desire a greater sense of belongingness. I’m just not willing to sacrifice my compassion to do it.

So just as I learned to discover and re-integrate the benefits of stealing without the drawbacks, I’m now seeking ways to re-integrate the benefits of cruelty — namely a greater sense of belongingness — but without the perceived drawbacks.

I’m not yet sure what this solution will look like. I feel like I’m getting closer to a significant perspective shift though, one which could open up some wonderful new opportunities for me socially.

I think that somehow I’m going to need to get better at connecting with people’s hearts when I communicate with them. If I’m unwilling to connect with people on the basis of shared cruelty, then I have to find something else to share — something that’s powerful enough to override the potential feeling of disconnect due to our differences. Surely there must be something more powerful that we can share other than cruelty.

Cruelty is very expedient. It’s actually a pretty efficient way to connect. If you wish to be accepted into a new group, you can listen attentively and learn their particular language of cruelty and then demonstrate that you can speak that language too. Boom — you’re quickly accepted into the group. I think that’s partly because outside of that group, it may be risky to speak that same language. By taking that risk yourself, you validate the group, and so the group validates you in return.

I don’t find compassion to be quite as expedient. With the right people, compassion is a truly wonderful way to connect. But when people aren’t used to connecting on that basis, it takes time to earn their trust. Some people are still suspicious of genuine, open-hearted invitations, as if there must be a hidden agenda in there somewhere. A lot of people have been hurt or betrayed in the past, and so they don’t even trust what their own intuition is telling them. They get stuck in their heads or in their fears and talk themselves out of otherwise perfectly good connections.

Connecting on the basis of compassion with like-minded people is easy. When I meet a woman who thinks like I do, it’s wonderful. We love to co-create and share that delightful feeling of oneness. It’s perfectly natural to us. But for someone who isn’t used to this language, it may take a while for them to feel comfortable with it, if they can even make that journey at all. They can’t just dive into it and enjoy it. It’s too different from what they’re used to. They may actually find it easier to connect through teasing each other or making sarcastic comments. There are women who truly seem to want to connect with a man who will treat them like an object. Trying to cultivate a loving, heart-centered connection with such a woman doesn’t work so well; it’s not what she wants.

I absolutely love the depth, intimacy, and warmth that comes from connecting with people on the basis of compassion and love, but in my experience it tends to be slow, and not everyone is willing to invest the time to create a foundationally strong connection in this way.

Speed isn’t the most important factor to me. But I do wonder whether I could discover a way to more quickly cultivate a sense of belongingness with more people without having to connect with their cruelty.

Compassion is wonderful on its own, but I don’t feel that it can fully substitute for cruelty’s primary benefits when it comes to creating a sense of belongingness, especially in a group situation.

Humor

I wonder if humor could be a possible key. Humor and cruelty do overlap in some ways, but we can still have either one without the other. What about the subset of humor that involves no cruelty then? Good-natured humor could be a fairly universal way to connect, and humor can be much more expedient than compassion. I think that even sarcasm and teasing can qualify as good-natured, if the intention is to amuse, entertain, connect, and create laughter rather than to inflict harm or to damage someone’s self-esteem… and if the humor is playfully received.

Humor is something I really like about humanity. I love that we have the ability to laugh at ourselves and our circumstances. It would be an interesting path of development to strengthen one’s humor skills as a way of enjoying the benefits of cruelty, but minus the drawbacks of cruelty.

Sharing acts of cruelty is a form of mutual validation. Sharing humor can also be a form of mutual validation.

What’s unsatisfying about the humor route, however, is that it doesn’t resolve my feelings towards cruelty. It can be a way of connecting superficially, but by itself it doesn’t make me want to connect more deeply with a person. I still regard it as a helpful tool, and I use it liberally in my social connections, but more as a way to release tension than as a way to experience real intimacy with someone.

Shared Delusion

One person suggested that connecting on the basis of shared delusion could work. We all delude ourselves to some extent, don’t we? We all deny some aspects of truth. On the surface this approach makes sense since most of the people I know who eat animals seem to be in denial about the cruelty aspects of such behaviors; they usually don’t like to face that part of themselves. So I could relate to them and empathize with them better by noticing how I do the same in some area of my life.

I’ve already explored this to some degree, and it does help, but in practice I find that it only takes me so far.

This can be a difficult concept to apply because much of the time we’re deluding ourselves, we simply don’t see it. It’s easier to notice and to point out someone else’s delusions. Seeing our own is tougher. That’s the nature of the beast.

However, even when we can empathize with each others’ delusions, this doesn’t usually create much intimacy or belongingness. I still see the cruelty as being wrong, and as time passes, I find it increasingly difficult to unearth aspects of myself which can compare with the scope of paying people to torture and slaughter other beings.

Suppose it was 1943, and you sat down with a Nazi officer who expressed pride in the efficiency of the concentration camp he managed. Suppose he shared his delight at improving the facility’s conversion rate, in terms of how quickly they’re able to convert Jews into ashes… or the productive output of their forced labor… or the efficiency of recycling the prisoners’ stolen possessions. Would you be able to find a suitable self-delusion that would allow you to effectively empathize with this person? Could you pat him on the back and say, “Yeah, I get ya! You know… lately I’ve also been feeling more inclined to reduce large numbers of people to ashes. I’ve been wondering if I should work on that though”?

Or is it more likely that you’d be too busy dealing with your own disgust at this person’s attitude to really access much empathy in the moment?

If you’d sat down with Elliot Rodger before he went on a shooting rampage and listened to him talk about his hatred of women, his sense of entitlement, and his desire for retribution, would you feel motivated to want to connect with him further? Would you be able to empathize with his attitude? Or would you be more interested in wanting to get him off the streets and have him locked up somewhere?

That said, this empathy approach does help in fairly mild cases, especially with very open-minded, growth-oriented people. But in practice I don’t find it that effective much of the time. When I see that Nazi-like, entitlement attitude in someone as it applies to our treatment of animals, I normally feel more interested in leaving than in trying to relate to them. I simply feel too disgusted or disappointed to want to connect further, at least in that moment.

BDSM

Another reader suggested that BDSM could be a practical way to explore my connection to cruelty — specifically the S&M side of side of BDSM. I know women who enjoy this sort of thing — women who like being treated like objects, enjoy giving and/or receiving pain, or who get turned on by being humiliated. None of that feels good to me though. I just don’t like it. Even when I’m with a woman who’s happy to play together in this way, and there’s clear consent from her to go there, I can’t be that kind of partner for her. It’s too big of a turn-off for me.

When I do D/s play, there’s no violence or cruelty involved, either physically or emotionally. If I felt that the woman was beginning to feel embarrassed or humiliated by what we were doing, I wouldn’t continue playing with her in that way. My exploration of this area is light-hearted, playful, fun, and even silly at times. I only do it with women who perceive it in a similar fashion. It’s basically a form of role-playing that allows us to intensify our feelings for each other. For me the dominance aspect has to do with my enjoyment of being able to direct our play together, as opposed to doing anything that involves force or coercion.

I understand and accept that for some people, carefully chosen expressions of cruelty can increase the emotional intensity of a connection in positive ways. I just don’t derive that same kind of pleasure from it, even when I’m convinced that the other person would.

I enjoy such delicious emotional intensity from more subtle ways of connecting — through the sensitivity of touching, smiling, or sensual kissing. A slow, more tantric approach is so much more stimulating to me than anything that would fall on the side of cruelty.

Revenge

Another suggestion was to try to access the more vengeful part of me. What if someone wronged me in a really severe way? Could I get in touch with the cruelty aspect of myself more easily then, by wanting to seek vengeance?

Maybe if the conditions were right, I could get really pissed off for a time, but does that mean I have to wait for someone to do something really egregious in order to access those feelings? Even if that happened, knowing myself as I do, I’d eventually recover. I simply don’t like dwelling in those feelings for long. If I did indulge in those feelings, I’d expect that the people in my life would help to pull me out of that place and back to a more positive and constructive emotional state again.

I don’t feel that most people who transgress against animals are doing it with the intention of committing serious harm. I think the harm arises mainly from ignorance, denial, and rationalization as opposed to a genuine hatred of animals and the intention to see them suffer. As I learned in the recent Food Revolution Summit, surveys show that even most animal eaters want to see their food animals raised and slaughtered more humanely. I can’t think of anyone I know who actually approves of the standard factory farming practices.

Even when I consider a company like Monsanto, which is about as close to pure evil as a company can get — for instance, their actions have led to the suicides of more than 250,000 farmers in India — I still feel that they’re acting from a place of fear, greed, and ignorance. That doesn’t give rise to a strong desire for vengeance within me. Same goes with the Wall Street investors who help to fuel and reward such enterprises.

I just don’t feel any desire to exact revenge on people for eating animals or for working in that field. I feel more sorrow and disappointment with the situation than anger or hatred.

Emotional Honesty

Since I don’t actually feel a desire for vengeance, what about allowing myself to more openly express my true feelings?

I feel that I already do a decent job of allowing myself to feel what I feel and to acknowledge my feelings on the inside. I allow myself to feel the sorrow. Sometimes the magnitude of the cruelty emotionally overwhelms me. From time to time, I just let go and cry. When I allow those feelings to surface, I feel a sense of relief afterwards.

I don’t, however, normally share these feelings when I’m with people who eat animals, probably because I don’t fully trust them. But maybe that attitude is a mistake.

Normally when I’m out sharing a meal with people who eat animals, and I see the dead flesh on their plate, I feel sad about it. I feel disappointed. I feel ashamed that humanity is still doing this. Within my heart I’ll often say a silent prayer for the animal who had to suffer in order to become that meal. I’ll send out a silent “I’m sorry” thought, as if it’s my duty to apologize to all animals on behalf of humanity. But I do my best not to let those feelings show. I don’t share with anyone what’s happening inside me in those moments.

As we continue to eat, I may look away from their plate and try to distract myself from what I’m feeling. Or I’ll talk about something unrelated. Or I’ll do my best to enjoy my own meal. But there’s usually a part of me that still feels the sadness during those times. If someone comments about how delicious the animal flesh is, I feel the sting of that even more. A being had to suffer and die merely for entertainment purposes… so unjust and unfair. But I don’t show — I never show — what I’m really thinking and feeling.

As I write this, this behavior is beginning to sound inauthentic to me. Perhaps I don’t share these feelings because I don’t want to make other people uncomfortable. Maybe I’m just being polite. Maybe I don’t want to risk yet another debate about something that isn’t worthy of debate in my view. Once you’ve indulged in the equivalent of debating with a Nazi over whether a Jew is really a person for the 1000th time, do you really want to risk kicking off round 1001? The outcome is all too predictable.

Maybe that’s a mistake. I don’t have to turn my feelings into a topic for discussion every time I share a meal with an animal eater, but I could at least stop suppressing my own natural inclination to let my face reveal how I feel in the moment. Is it okay to let myself look sad when I’m feeling sad?

Sometimes if I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed in a larger group setting, when I’m very present to the fact that there’s a significant quantity of sliced up animal corpses in the room with me, and everyone else seems to be smiling and laughing and enjoying some festivities, with no acknowledgement whatsoever of the suffering and the sacrifice of lives it took to satiate their appetite for flesh, I’ll excuse myself and just leave for a while. At one large group dinner I attended, I discovered that there was not a morsel of vegan food for me to eat, despite the fact that I always let the hosts know about my diet in advance. I was hungry, and the server was very apologetic for the situation. I actually felt relieved though. I quietly left the room and went for a walk outside for an hour. The cool night air was soothing to my spirit. I rejoined the group later after everyone had their fill of flesh. I didn’t feel I’d missed anything that mattered to me. Sometimes I just need to go off on my own to engage in my own care of the soul practices.

The truth is that eating animals doesn’t just hurt animals. It also causes emotional pain in people who are sensitive to the emotional pain of other living beings.

If you were walking down the street, and you saw someone physically beating their dog and heard the dog yelping in pain, would you feel any emotional disturbance within you? Would you care? Would you feel anything for the dog? Why not for other animals too then?

When Elliot Rodgers hurt people, many others who didn’t know him or any of the victims felt hurt as well. He delivered pain to people who were nowhere near any of the bullets. I feel such pain whenever I see people condone acts of cruelty towards animals as well as people.

The pain I feel in those situations is normally much greater than whatever sting I may feel from violence that’s intentionally directed at me. I can stand up for myself. There are people I can turn to for help. I can consciously choose to bear the pain. I can seek meaning and purpose in it. But animals in factory farms are not even permitted to defend themselves. Even their beaks and claws are sliced off. Their purpose is to serve as gustatory entertainment for a significantly more powerful — and more violent — species.

I’m deeply disappointed that humanity is so willing to prey upon the weak, when it’s completely unnecessary for our survival.

Can these feelings actually help me connect with people and to enjoy more intimacy in my life though? Or do they only serve to distance and isolate me from others? I don’t presently know the answer to that. Are there more people out there who can relate to what I’ve shared here? Or am I just too different from you for having these thoughts and feelings? Would you rather see me honor these feelings… or suppress them?

Of course there are other possibilities to explore as well. These are the ones that I’m pondering for now.

---

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Build Your Business Online has posted a new item, 'Thoughts on the Santa Barbara Shootings'

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I’ve been asked to share my thoughts about the recent shootings in Santa Barbara involving Elliot Rodger. If you haven’t heard the story yet, feel free to Google his name if you want to know the details. Normally I don’t like to comment on current events because I prefer to write more timeless content, but this one feels more meaningful to me because it ties in with the speaking I’ve been doing lately regarding helping men and women to connect more authentically and lovingly with each other.

This is a post I’m writing largely for myself, so I cannot say whether its message will resonate with you as much as some of the other articles I’ve written. But perhaps if you read it anyway, you may see some elements and ideas that you can potentially relate to in different ways.

Beings vs. Objects

The way Elliot described his relationship to women reminds me a lot of how humanity relates to animals. We treat them as objects, we see ourselves as more powerful than they are, we exercise that power with agendas that give rise to great cruelty, and we feel entitled to their bodies. We deny their beingness and turn them into products. If they resist, we overpower them.

I see animals and people as beings, not objects — different kinds of beings, but none superior to the other. In a subjective sense we’re all part of the same whole, inseparable. Humans are a part of the animal kingdom. We are a species of animal. But is it really a kingdom? Do we claim to be royalty in this network of beings?

When people or animals are viewed as objects or products instead of as beings, then it’s easy to rationalize doing as you please with them. You are god over objects. Objects are pawns that you can manipulate. A different set of rules applies to objects vs. beings. Once the beingness is removed, you’re free to do whatever you want. Objects aren’t subject to ethical or moral considerations.

To me, it’s the same perspective that allows people to say: “No big deal… he was a Jew anyway” or “Ahhhh, she was a slut and probably had it coming” or “Oh well, it’s just a dumb chicken.” All of these can be used to relate to other beings with cruelty.

Oneness vs. Separation

We all have this potential for cruelty within us to one degree or another. An event like the Santa Barbara shooting incident serves to remind us to look at that more consciously. It’s easy to say that Elliot was crazy nutso and that he is nothing like us. He’s an anomaly. His parents must have raised him wrong. He must have had a defective brain. Let’s distance ourselves from him. Let’s make him an outcast, even after he’s already dead.

But isn’t the perspective that Elliot shared just a more exaggerated version of one that we also hold? For some people all it takes is to examine what’s on their dinner plate to see what they’ve been denying about their own choices. Are you not objectifying and dominating other beings to some extent?

To me the way we relate to all beings is deeply interconnected. I’ve seen that by improving my relationship to animals (including no longer eating them), it changed how I relate to people. If I can objectify animals and if I do that pretty much every day, then it is really such a stretch to extend that to groups of people? If I’m activating my brain’s objectification circuitry every day with living beings, then of course that pattern will only get stronger. And it won’t be fully restricted to animals.

I still recognize within myself the potential for disconnection, objectification, and cruelty. Those thoughts are still there, generated in parallel next to other alternatives. I’ve simply trained my mind to substitute more compassionate actions instead. But that doesn’t erase the disconnection-based thoughts. They’re still there; I’m just not acting on them.

The Disconnected Mindset

I can remember a time in my life many years ago when I had few friends and felt very disconnected from people. I saw people as separate objects that were very different from me. In those days I could steal with impunity. I did a lot of social engineering, which involved having manipulative conversations with people to direct their actions, so they’d unwittingly help me achieve my agenda. No beings were being hurt. I was just manipulating objects. I felt no remorse for what I did.

That perspective is still within me. I’ve long since adopted other perspectives that I found more empowering, so I no longer act on the old perspective, but I can still access it if I choose to.

At the time I held these darker perspectives, I never connected the dots between my ability to manipulate people, how I related to animals, and the lack of deep connection and intimacy in my life. I was intimacy starved, although not as badly as Elliot to be sure. And so I replaced that lack of connection with something that made me feel strong — stealing. That brought me some notoriety and attention and actually made me more friends, but the connections never ran too deep. No one really understood what I was like on the inside. I never had a girlfriend during that time. Perhaps the stealing made it easier to justify the lack of intimacy as well. Who’d want to be in a relationship with a thief anyway?

Turning Our Backs on Darkness

Today I find myself challenged by the opposite perspective. How can I maintain a sense of oneness with the darkness I perceive in others?

When I’m connecting with a friend and then I see that person eat animals, casually denying the beingness of those animals and reducing them to consumable products, I often feel disconnected from that person. I don’t want to see with that kind of cruelty. I left that kind of behavior behind a long time ago. Why should I need to see it in my reality? This limits how closely I’ll want to connect with this person.

Maybe I should only connect with other vegans. At least then I don’t have to witness such violence when we share meals together.

Sometimes that is what I do because it’s easier. It’s easier to label animal eaters as violent and crazy and avoid them altogether. It’s easier to label the Elliots of the world as “not me” and to steer clear of them. But is this a growth perspective?

In my world, acts of cruelty resulting from objectification of beings are everywhere. All I need to do is go to a typical place where people are eating, and it’s unavoidable. I can’t help but notice the stench of death in the air.

Instead of distancing ourselves from it, perhaps it’s better for us to face this sadness and disappointment, to let it carve out a deeper space within us.

It can be very blissful to connect with another person’s light. But do we also connect with their darkness? Do we reveal our darkness to others?

Are you able to share the part of you that’s the thief, the liar, the rapist, the mass murderer? Do you deny that this part of you exists? Do you sense its presence but feel that it’s unworthy of love? What part of yourself are you still ashamed of?

Bringing Light to the Darkness

On my lifelong path of growth, I’ve often found that denying and suppressing my dark side doesn’t work so well.

When I sought to overcome my shoplifting addiction, initially my approach was to try to live a normal life for a while and not do anything illegal. I suppressed and denied the part of me that loved the thrill of stealing. I adopted a very mundane and unexciting life for a while. I felt that the thief part of me was too wild and uncontrollable, and I could never let him out again. I had to kill him off or at least suppress him. Otherwise he’d eventually land me in prison.

That approach seemed to work okay for a while, but many years later, I still felt that something was missing from my life. I’d recall the spark of aliveness I felt when I was stealing, and on some level I lamented its absence. I was married with kids, flowing forward along an easy path. But it was too easy. That wild and uncontrollable part of me was still there, just caged. There was a part of me clamoring for some form of expression, but I wouldn’t consciously let it express itself.

Eventually I realized I needed that part of me. I didn’t fully trust it, but I didn’t feel I could be fulfilled unless I came to terms with it. So I began to dialog with it. I journaled about it. I wrote about it publicly. I acknowledged its presence. I forgave it. I looked for ways to reintegrate it into my life through action, tempered by more conscious awareness and compassion. I embarked on a process of reintegration.

That same energy I used to put into stealing is the energy I use today when I want to communicate a message passionately to an audience. It’s the part of me that loves to experiment. It’s the part of me that will speak his truth even if I expect the message will be unpopular. It’s the part of me that loves to travel. It’s the part of me that was able to acknowledge an unfulfilling marriage and transform it into an ongoing friendship. It’s the part of me that can handle being in an open relationship. I gained a richer and more satisfying life when I reintegrated my dark side.

Connecting With the Darkness

What possible light is to be found in Elliot’s situation? For me the message is a personal one. I need to resolve my relationship with the darkness I perceive in other people, not just with the darkness I perceive in myself.

Presently there are aspects of humanity where I see little or no light. Just as people are dismissing Elliot as a crazy violent lunatic, I’m increasingly tempting to do that with others when I see them commit acts of cruelty. Every time I see someone eat animals, there’s a part of me that’s deeply disgusted by such behavior. Sometimes I’m tempted to eject from any further connection with them. My first inclination is to run from violence.

I find it easier to see the light within fellow vegans; I usually feel lighter, more peaceful, and more relaxed in their presence, even when no food is involved. I find it easier to explore greater depths of intimacy with people whose values are close to mine. I feel especially fortunate to have such a loving and like-minded girlfriend. She’s such a wonderful source of support for me on this journey. Our relationship is stimulating to be sure, but it’s also very relaxing and easy. I feel completely at ease in her presence, in ways I don’t experience with most people.

I find it difficult to connect with the side of people that can so easily turn animals into objects, especially when those same people express shock and outrage when human beings are objectified in much the same manner. Part of me wants to roll my eyes at them for the glaring double standard. If you can deny an animal’s beingness and turn it into an object, is it really such a stretch to do the same to a woman? Or a Jew? Or anyone else? Of course it’s not a stretch at all, and so quite predictably, we have a lot of objectification in our world, and it’s all interconnected.

Even within the subset of human-animal relationships, there’s incredible schizophrenia. Cats and dogs are beings and should be treated with compassion, except when they’re claimed by pet stores, in which case they’re products… while cows, chickens, pigs, and fish are objects and should be treated as consumables. Yeah, that makes sense!

How would you feel if someone took your pet and shipped it off to a factory farm to be turned into a consumable? If someone killed your pet and ate it, would you care? What if someone did this to a friend’s pet? A stranger’s pet? How can you love one animal and exhibit such cruelty and apathy towards others? Do you not acknowledge that this will infect your human relationships with a similar type of schizophrenia? Do you pretend that this won’t affect the degree of kindness, compassion, and intimacy you experience in your life? Of course it will have an effect!

This aspect of humanity strikes me as ridiculously unintelligent and disconnected — as dark as darkness gets. At times I doubt that I’m actually a member of the same species that’s capable of this insanity. I don’t want any part of it.

The shock that people feel from an event like the Santa Barbara shootings — I feel that kind of shock whenever I see people eating in a typical restaurant. What for some people is an exceptional event, well… for me it’s a fairly routine occurrence. That’s the consequence of caring. If you care, you invite sorrow. If you care more, you invite more sorrow.

Joy and Sorrow

The irony is that it’s the connection to this sorrow that is also my greatest connection to love and joy. One aspect of my relationship with Rachelle is that we both feel challenged and sometimes overwhelmed by the cruelty we see in the world. This shared sorrow actually deepens and strengthens the connection we share with each other.

One way we deal with that is to create a safe space for ourselves. My house is an environment that we can carve out as our sanctuary and not feel dragged down by acts of cruelty or the stench of dead flesh.

When one of us feels a bit overwhelmed by what we see in the world, we take time to comfort each other. We share our thoughts and feelings. When we feel infected by darker energies, we help each other release them. We hold each other and restore our vibes back to a place of love. We focus on our light, and the darkness fades.

What I haven’t yet resolved though is how to relate to people who objectify others. Where I perceive beings and acts of cruelty, they perceive objects and products. So do I join them in their objectification of the world and try to turn down the volume on my sensations of compassion and morality? No, I can’t do that. I feel I’d lose too much of who I’ve become on this journey. That would disgust me to such a degree that if I had to choose between doing that and choosing death, I believe I’d choose death. I am simply not willing to live as a man who doesn’t care about animals and people alike.

Another option is to turn my back on such energies and avoid them as much as possible. Connect only with like-minded individuals. That would be pretty difficult given the work I do in the world. I love my work, especially speaking, so I don’t see how it would be practical to avoid something that’s so ubiquitous in the world… although if I moved to a different country where there aren’t so many McCreepy’s around, it might be much easier.

When you see someone you consider fairly attractive, and then that person lights up a cigarette and takes a puff, does that affect your level of attraction? I know many people for whom this would immediately downgrade the attraction because they find smoking unhealthy, unintelligent, or just plain disgusting. I experience a similar perception, although probably to an even stronger degree, when I see someone eating animal flesh. My attraction to that person usually takes a hit. Depending on my mood, I may have to exercise some discipline in order to continue a conversation with them… just like you might have to do the same if you find yourself in a conversation with someone who’s smoking while you’re talking and you’re choking on the smoke.

Where’s the Light?

I recognize that if I objectify and condemn people who eat animals, then of course I’m setting myself up for disconnection from them. But if they objectify animals, then on some level they must also be objectifying themselves because they’re animals too. In order to objectify other beings, you must also objectify part of yourself. So wouldn’t that imply that the most honest way to treat them would be as objects, since that’s how they’re treating themselves?

But if I’m also unwilling to objectify myself, then I can’t so easily dismiss and disconnect from those that I perceive as performing insane acts of cruelty. I can’t just run from that. I have to get back into alignment with oneness and realize that like it or not, we’re all connected… including to Elliot… and including to McCreepy’s.

Yet how can I continue to grow my compassion if I feel dragged down by a society that I perceive as lagging in that area? To me it feels like a step backwards to re-engage with this part of myself. But I also note that at one time, it also felt like a bad idea to try to re-engage with the part of myself that was a thief. My attitude changed when I finally saw the value in that part of myself.

Perhaps that’s what I’m missing. I don’t see the value in cruelty. I don’t see the value in turning beings into products. I only see the harm, the waste, the disconnection, the environmental damage. I have zero appetite for any part of that world. It seems completely disgusting to me from end to end. The entire animals-into-products industry is on par with Elliot Rodger’s people-into-targets rampage.

The only good I see in those elements is the transformational effect that can occur from perceiving these incidents as messages or wake-up calls and transcending them.

But that isn’t the solution I used with the darkness I found in myself. I tried transcending it at first, but that only got me so far. Reintegration worked much better. Does that imply that at some point, I may need to learn how to engage in a dialog with my own cruelty and somehow reintegrate it back into my life, instead of continuing to apply the transcendance paradigm? Maybe that is what I’ll do someday, but for now I don’t see enough light in that direction to seriously explore it. I do know, however, that life has a way of dangling solutions at me that I’ll initially reject and eventually embrace when the time is right.

If I want to continue exploring intimacy and relationships, then how can I continue that journey if I find myself unwilling to connect very deeply with most people because their daily behaviors are morally unconscionable to me? Is it possible that the solution really is to reintegrate my own cruelty, such that I can better relate to what I perceive as cruelty in others? Hmmmm…

This is an area where I’m still actively exploring, learning, and growing. It’s an area which for me, still remains very raw and unresolved.

Trust

There is a deeper principle which guides me here though, and that is trust. Over the years I’ve cultivated an unshakeable trust in this reality. I don’t fully understand that nature of this place within which I find myself, but I trust it implicitly, and I don’t allow myself to doubt this trust. I always hold the belief that there is a positive purpose for this journey and that no matter what happens, I can always, always, always trust the universe. In fact, I believe I have no choice but to do so.

So in each struggle I find lessons. In setbacks I discover opportunity. In tragedy I seek deeper meaning.

The billions of objectified animals of this world have touched my heart to such a degree that my sense of compassion remains wrenched open. I find it impossible to turn that part of myself off. I can’t help but feel for them. I’m unable to watch someone eat animals and not feel some sorrow.

Even those people that I perceive as committing heartless, cruel, and evil acts — I still don’t see them as separate from me. I know there’s a part of me that still has the capacity for cruelty.

The pain that animals endure each day serves as a constant reminder to allow myself to feel the hurt and pain of others and not to turn my back on that. This becomes an invitation to engage in my own form of activism, which is one way to transmute that sorrow into joy. I share this part of myself openly when I can, which invites many rich connections into my life. I get up on stages in different cities to encourage others to find and follow their path with a heart. I do my best to help people escape unfulfilling jobs and enjoy richer and more fulfilling career paths. I invite people to connect more deeply and to share more hugs in my presence. To me these activities are all connected. It’s no exaggeration to say that if I didn’t learn to care about animals, I wouldn’t be doing any of this work today. I simply wouldn’t care enough to do it.

Caring… compassion… fulfillment… abundance — they’re all connected and inseparable.

It’s the same mindset that turns an animal into a consumable product, a human being into a corporate slave, a woman into a sex object… and yes, a person into a target. If we want to move beyond this type of behavior, we need to release the entire beings-into-objects perspective and replace it with more conscious and empowering paradigms, such as the perspective of oneness and our inseparable interconnectedness.

How can you deserve and invite more freedom for yourself if you don’t respect the freedom of other beings? Respecting and even celebrating the freedom of other beings serves to enhance and expand your ability to exercise your own freedom. These are parallel, interconnected, and inseparable journeys.

Despite the challenges of this journey, I feel very inspired to continue. I have an unshakeable faith that there’s a greater intelligence at work behind the scenes, helping us evolve into more intelligent and compassionate beings. I wouldn’t label that as coming from any kind of god. Even the word Source sounds a bit hokey to me. Rather I would say that it’s the combined energy of our collective desires that we’re tuning into. I think that we’re the source of this unfolding transformation.

I know it’s a tall order to open our hearts and expand our compassion as we grow, but if I can embark upon this journey starting out as a thief, I know you can do the same. Since we’re all interconnected, we can’t deny that some part of us want to embrace this journey, while another part of us wants to resist it.

Let Elliot serve as a reminder to keep following your path with a heart, and know that it’s not just about you. As much as we’d like to, we cannot turn our backs on the darkness of others, or on the darkness within ourselves. We can try transcendance. We can try re-integration. We can explore other solutions. But denial is beneath us.

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Steve Recommends

Spring Forest Healingfest (Free) – Learn to heal yourself with qi gong

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Lefkoe Method – Eliminate a limiting belief in 20 minutes

PhotoReading – Read books 3 times faster (discount for my readers)

Paraliminals – Condition your mind for positive thinking and success (discount for my readers)

Getting Rich with Ebooks – Use ebooks to create streams of passive income

Sedona Method (FREE audios) – Release emotional blocks in a few minutes

The Journal – Record your life lessons in a secure private journal

Life on Purpose – A step-by-step process to discover your life purpose

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Read related articles:

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• Are Darkworkers Evil?
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Build Your Business Online has posted a new item, 'Skydiving Recap'

Skydiving last month was beautiful. It was easier than I expected.

On April 14, Rachelle and I went skydiving with Skydive Las Vegas, along with another local couple (who actually met at one of my workshops). As far as I know, this place only offers tandem jumps, so that’s what we did. This makes it easy since you’re strapped to an instructor who handles opening the chute and tells you what to do. The only real work is to get your body into the correct position as you exit the plane. Gravity takes care of the rest.

We picked a beautiful day to go. It was around room temperature on the ground, but higher up it’s a bit colder. It wasn’t cold enough to be a bother. The cold felt refreshing on the way down.

The whole experience went by really quick. From the time the plane took off until the time we were back on the ground was probably less than 30 minutes. I’d say the entire experience from when we arrived until when we left was about 2.5 hours. With driving time from my house, it was about 4 hours door to door — a nice way to spend a Monday morning.

Before jumping, we had to watch a short video explaining what to expect and the various risks involved, including the risk of going splat on the ground. Then we had to sign a liability waiver, the likes of which I’d never seen before, basically stating that no matter what hideously catastrophic outcome might possibly occur, we wouldn’t even dream of suing the place.

The plane ride up took about 20 minutes. In our group there were 7 jumpers and 7 instructors, so we had 14 people packed into the back of the plane. We all sat down straddling long wooden benches that ran from the front to the back of the plane, so then we could slide down the benches towards the exit door when it was our turn to jump. Rachelle was the first one from our group to jump. I was the last. That was due to the order in which our instructors put us on the plane.

It was pretty loud on the plane, so we couldn’t engage in much conversation. When the door opened it was super windy — and a bit cold.

When it was my turn to jump, I basically just let my instructor lead and went with the flow. He seemed pretty happy and very non-suicidal, so I figured everything would go according to plan. It did.

I didn’t notice any stomach-drop feeling upon exiting the plane. It was a little disorienting at first as we spun around a bit, but soon we were facing the ground as planned. It felt more like having a powerful high-speed fan blowing at me than actually falling. Many roller coasters are more intense in terms of the physical sensations.

Imagine being strapped to the front of a car driving 120 mph (about 200 kph). That’s what it felt like — super windy!

Emotionally the experience was fun and exhilarating. Freefalling felt surprisingly peaceful and serene, albeit very windy. I enjoyed seeing the beautiful scenery on the way down, although it was a bit blurry since we were going so fast and I was also wearing goggles.

When the chute opened, I felt this feeling of heaviness as my body hung from the harness. The straps actually hurt my inner thighs a bit, especially as we turned.

Shortly after our chute opened, the instructor handed me the straps and gave me the opportunity to steer. That was kind of fun, but the harder I turned, the more painful it was with the straps pushing into my thighs. I would have enjoyed doing more of that if it wasn’t so physically uncomfortable.

After descending with our chute open for a few minutes, the instructor told me to lift my legs up to prep for landing since his legs are supposed to hit the ground first. I expected this instruction… just not so soon. I thought he was doing it way too early since I estimated we still had about 90 seconds before we hit the ground. In reality it was probably more like 20 seconds — the ground came up faster than I expected at the end.

Since I was the last off the plane and therefore the last one to land, it was a really interesting perspective to see everyone else on the ground as I approached from the air. They looked so small, like ants from high above. It was a surreal sensation, like being in some kind of 3D simulator, as I watched their tiny little bodies scale into full-sized human beings as I descended.

Landing was fairly easy. The instructor tugged on the chute straps just before we hit the ground to slow our descent, so we landed gently on our feet. There were other staff members nearby to help steady us.

Cost-wise, the jump was around $200 per person. Then there are various upsells if you want a video or pics of the experience. I wasn’t planning to bother with these initially, but a reader who’d previously gone skydiving highly recommended splurging on these extras for my first jump, suggesting I’d regret it if I didn’t. I’m glad I took his advice. These extras make it easier to remember what the experience was like and to share it. Imagine a skydiving recap post with no pics — that would be pretty lame.

The instructor took the pics and video with two GoPro cameras strapped to his hand. Rachelle and I each ended up with over 300 pics as well as a video. I think the pics were basically taken on a timer, so some of them aren’t so interesting, but there are definitely some nice gems in there. I’ve shared a bunch of them below if you want to see what it was like.

Overall it was a fun experience. Would I do it again? Sure, I’d be up for that, but I can’t say it’s would be a big deal to repeat it. It takes a fair amount of prep time for roughly 5 minutes of excitement. That’s sort of like standing in line for a couple of hours to go on a thrill ride. If you’re really in the mood for it or if you’ve never done it before, then go for it. Otherwise, I might question if it’s worth the effort. I might go again someday, but for now I’d rather keep exploring in other directions.

One of my readers told me that after his first jump, he’d never want to do it again. He said it would be worse to do it a second time since now he knows what to expect. I feel the opposite. I think it would be easier to do it again, now that I know what it’s like. I imagine this is a very individual thing though.

Here’s Rachelle’s take on the experience — I asked her to share since I figured some readers would enjoy reading another perspective:

I can’t recall the exact time the idea of going skydiving first popped into my head as something I’d like to do one day. But I do recall thinking very early on in my relationship with Steve, “I would totally love to jump out of a plane with this guy! We should go skydiving someday!” I’m glad that day finally came to be.

I had grown up with a bit of a fear of heights. This might have been instilled in me from falling down stairs when I was just a baby. Being in tall buildings and looking down never bothered me, but climbing up a very tall, steep ladder and then knowing I’d have to come back down… that typically made me pretty nervous. I would do it anyhow, especially if it was needed of me, but I would do so very slowly and cautiously, as I wanted to be sure my foot was very secure on each ladder rung before continuing down to the next. But skydiving — would that trigger any nervousness due to the involved height? I wasn’t sure. I guess there was only one way to find out!

The few days leading up to our scheduled skydive were generally pretty relaxed and excited for me, in terms of my emotional state. Although, at times, I would find myself thinking about it and getting inexplicably scared for no real reason. I would push those random thoughts aside and ask myself, “What are you doing? This fear is something completely imaginary! You’re completely safe and sound right now, and yet here you are putting your mind — and thus body — through a fearful state. That’s not very helpful. Why do you want to create that emotional experience for yourself? …You know you don’t. So stop it. Simply turn your thoughts and vibe to something else that you do want to experience.” And so that’s what I would do.

I would imagine myself being very happy and excited to skydive — because, in reality, I was! — and I’d imagine everything going perfectly smoothly in terms of safety and procedures, etcetera. I’d imagine what it must be like to fall through the sky, take in the beautiful surrounding views from above, and the perfect exhilaration I’d feel doing something so delightfully insane like jumping out of an airplane for the mere pleasure, fun, and experience of it all.

The actual skydive turned out to be very much like I had imagined it. That said, I’d still very much encourage anyone to do the real thing vs. simply imagining it.

My skydive partner (i.e. the skydive professional I was attached to for the tandem jump) and I were to be the first ones out of the plane. It’s funny how that came to manifest, because I recall when Steve and I were talking about it the night before, he asked if I had a preference over being first or last to leave the plane… and I had said I thought it would be fun (and even a little challenging — in the positive sense) for me to go first, while he had said he thought it would be interesting to go last. And that’s exactly how it played out: I was the first out of the plane, and he was the last.

I figured that going first would give me less time to be nervous. Not that I wanted to just get it over with, but growing up, and even in my 20s, I had a tendency to wait to be the very last person to do something in a group setting, like a school presentation or acting scene, or a dive during swimming lessons, etc. This time I wanted to challenge myself to be the first. The way reality played out couldn’t have been better.

The skydive itself was an amazing experience. It’s a practice in complete surrender. Although the safety video we had to watch beforehand specifically stated that this was not a ride because we are active participants, I nonetheless found the overall experience to be very much like a ride. You just need to give yourself over to the experience, soak it all in, let go, and have fun. I had a huge dorky smile on my face during the whole dive. It was hard not to!

Free-falling is a delightful sensation that I would very much like to experience again. (Having a working parachute is a prerequisite, however!) It gives you an opportunity to see and feel the world in a whole new way. It almost feelings like flying, or at least how I’d imagine it would feel to be Superwoman and have the ability to fly at high speeds — but while only being able to fly in one direction and speed.

The parachute float-down was quite enjoyable too — it was relaxing, peaceful, and quite beautiful. But I definitely preferred the sensation of free-falling, which felt more exhilarating and even somewhat surreal.

Would I ever want to go again? Sure! Why not!

If you’re thinking about going skydiving someday, you should definitely go. Even if you have a fear of heights, I sincerely believe that you should go skydiving anyway and not let any fear hold you back. After all, the fear only exists in your mind.

Skydiving is an amazing, delightful, exhilarating, surreal, and especially fun experience. I would highly recommend partaking in this activity to anyone. Its sensations are unlike anything you’re used to experiencing throughout your everyday normal life, and therefore, what you take away from it is going to be rather unforgettable.

This was such a delightful occurrence that has provided me with wonderful memories that I’m sure to keep with me for the rest of my life.

 

Here are some pics to show you what it was like:

All suited up

 

Walking to the plane

 

On the plane

 

Flying over Boulder City, just southeast of Las Vegas

 

Enjoying beautiful views of Lake Mead and Hoover Dam

 

She’s good to go

 

It gets very windy when the door opens

 

Rachelle is the first to jump

 

And I’m the last to jump

 

Goodbye, plane!

 

Wheeeeeeee!

 

Freefall

 

Feels like flying

 

The ground is getting closer…

 

… and closer

 

Deploying the chute

 

Steering the parachute

 

Rachelle is steering too

 

Descending over a golf course… does this count as a birdie? :)

 

That was fun!

 

The best excuse for messy hair

 

Sharing appreciation for a fun ride… and for choosing the right quantum reality

 

So wonderful to share a new adventure together :)

---

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You may view the latest post at http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2014/05/skydiving-recap/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Your Business Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com