My Master Key Experience

Overwhelm

During Weeks 6 & 7, I hit a period of overwhelm. My workload spiked which threw me and I fell a little behind though I managed to persevere and continue with my reading and sits. I also struggled with my first effort at my 7 Day Mental Diet having been thrown a barrage of negative stuff from those supposedly closest to me. (Both parents – divorced, miserable, angry and lonely and continually throwing their anger and misery at me!)

Previously, I would probably have ‘caved in’ at this point as this has for all of my adult life been a cycle, whereas this time had a shield!

I determined not to allow this to keep happening, to catch up with everything and to never let them knock me off course ever again.

Breakthrough

This has been a breakthrough, no, a massive breakthrough!

I have now caught up, I am on track though want to work more on my movie poster, Press Release and add more emotion and feeling to my DMP through today and the weekend.

I restarted my 7 Day Mental Diet on Monday and it has gone well this week. I even threw in a challenge for myself and visited both parents (one immediately after the other) prior to a business meeting and their barbs of negativity just bounced off me.

Incredible!

An Additional Breakthrough

As well as my reading and sits, I have continued with my ‘DO IT NOW!’ and ‘I CAN BE WHAT I WILL TO BE’ affirmations. To be honest, it felt a little weird to start with but now it is second nature.

However, I have also started to notice that I am silently chanting other phrases from the Master Key and Greatest Salesman scrolls  while working without consciously telling myself to.

Something is so obviously changing and it is so EXCITING!

The highs and lows of our Master Key journey are quite remarkable. Even so early in the process, I have noticed many positive changes, but this week has certainly been the most challenging by some stretch.

Overwhelm

So far, I have easily found the time to work on myself but last week I became inundated with work which needed to be done and this has continued in to this week. Ultimately, I started to feel rather overwhelmed by what I needed to get done. I have managed to continue with my reading, affirmations and sits but I was slipping with ‘the big stuff’ which was starting to make me stressed. My Press Release needs completing, I still have to work on my shapes and I haven’t even started on my movie poster. Fortunately, my workload has now tailed off and I am dedicating whatever time I need to get on top of everything over the next couple of days.

My 7 Day Mental Diet

To top everything off this week, after starting my 7 Day Mental Diet, I have come to the realisation that I am absolutely surrounded by negative people who seem to revel throwing all their negativity my way! The odd thing is, that by nature I am a very positive person and I actually thought that it would be an exercise that I would fly through. How wrong could I be!

My first challenge was my mother-in-law who never seems to be satisfied unless she is creating havoc for other people and throwing negative barbs at anybody and everybody. My shield was strong however her negativity bounced off me, I was feeling strong. Another good day followed, but then the crushing blow! I received a call from my old and inherently grumpy father to tell me that he had fallen over and been unable to get up and needed to call the paramedics. My father is slightly different to mother-in-law in that he is just plain grumpy and miserable and he needs to share with everybody in his vicinity just how grumpy and miserable he is. My shield still worked, though slightly battered. The following day, I received a call from my old and rather miserable mother who on occasion might surprise me by trying to be a little cheerful but this time I was not so lucky. She was ringing me to tell me that her life might as well be over as her arthritis was now in both knees and her hip and that nobody cares about her. I could go on about my strange family dynamic but I am sure you get my gist. The long and the short was that my shield failed. I could have dealt with one onslaught, I could have coped with two but all three in one week, that was just too much for anybody to deal with and the negativity got through!

Upon reflection, I realised that the people you would think should be the most supportive in my life are actually the most destructive. Actually, this is something I have known for a long, long time. However, of all the other people I come across in my day to day life, so many are just so negative. It’s no wonder that I try to avoid so many of them.

My resolve continues though undaunted. I have for a long time tried to draw myself closer to positive, constructive people and to distance myself from the negative, destructive people but the inevitabilities of life are such that you do come across them from time to time. A have started my 7 day mental diet again and resolve to complete it. I am however really challenging myself as I am visiting my father on Wednesday and then going to visit my mother immediately afterwards.

Wish me luck!!!

Wow! This journey is challenging (in a good way).

Whilst I have broadly succeeded in breezing through the tasks and requirements, the most difficult challenge for me recently has been to not express opinions.  I never realised how many opinions I had on just about everything!

Some opinions I found were very easy to lose, whereas others have proved very difficult to quash. Certain things have been rather interesting though. Often over the weekend, I pop down to my local pub to watch a rugby match. I am somewhat of a rugby obsessive and have a greater knowledge than most on all aspects of the sport. Always when I am there , people ask my views and previously, I have always been happy to express my opinion. In my effort to not having opinions on the last occasion, when I was being questioned, I was avoiding expressing any view which actually unsettled a few of the guys around me.

It was a test for me but in reality, I guess the guys down there only ask me stuff as I am so much more knowledgeable in that area and my information benefits them, so I probably won’t be quite as tight lipped next time.

It’s all the other stuff though that is a real challenge to throw away but I have to say, I am ‘lightened’ by the process however hard it currently is.

 

Throughout the previous weeks, I had managed to follow  and complete everything as required with absolutely no trouble whatsoever. Last week however, I slipped! I still completed all my reads and sits but when it came to the task on my Service card I struggled.

I must expand on that a little. When I wrote the task down, I really did not consider the amount of time it would actually take and the amount of time I was actually going to have available to me. Anyway, during the week I started to work on the task at hand and soon realised the magnitude of it, though I still thought that I would have enough time to get it completed over the weekend. Then, over the weekend I actually had to go out on both days in a work related capacity and for quite a few hours on both occasions. The upshot of all this was that I did not manage to get my task completed.

My reaction to this was not to reason that I had actually moved through the task significantly and was much further forward than I previously was, but to get down on myself and beat myself up which of course made me feel even worse. Now, this was my past behaviour. Previously, I have always done this when I have not managed to achieve something for whatever the reason.

This time though, I only had a small period of gloom. Then, I shook myself down, reasoned that actually I was a lot closer to the completed task than had I not been doing this process and that on occasion unforeseen stuff actually does crop up. I completed the task fully during the early part of the week and now I feel really good about it as it was a huge job now completed.

The lesson learned from this for me is that I should not beat myself up, particularly when it it not deserved. OK, fair enough if I had not tried, but I tried my best! Actually I should be (and am) proud of my achievements over recent weeks. Obviously, it’s a work still in progress but I am seeing noticeable positive changes in myself and for me to see that so soon is absolutely fantastic!

Having chosen to change my PPN’s and rewritten my DMP accordingly, it has certainly started to resonate with me in the right way. I think it was so well put my a lovely lady in our “tribe” who said something along the lines she was so used to doing and acting in the way other people expect or believe her to act and do and not previously really considering what she really wants for herself that my experiences echoed. Now, I am sure now that my PPN’s are the most relevant to me and not based on other peoples perceptions or conditioning of me.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my first PPN leapt out at me but the second, not so. But now, True Health feels right.

Why?

In my youth, I was always very sporty. I was always playing rugby, swimming, playing badminton and tennis, cycling and hiking. Not a day went by when I wasn’t exercising. I was very fit and healthy. When I moved to London from my childhood home in Devon, I did not do much exercise for a good couple of years but it just didn’t sit well with me, so I got back into my regular exercise and doing much as I had previously done in my youth and got incredibly fit once again.

Throughout the rest of my twenties and into my thirties I continued  to maintain a high level of fitness. But then I had ten “horrible” years health-wise. Fortunately, things are all good now and I am absolutely focused on regaining my excellent levels of health and fitness making the PPN of True Health a perfect fit for me right now.

 

 

My MKE journey is continuing and I am genuinely enjoying the process and the challenge. And it can be quite a challenge! (But not in a bad way.)  Addressing things about yourself is actually really refreshing.

What I have found this week.

After watching the webcast (twice) I had the realisation that my choice of PPN’s might not be correct. Initially, one PPN leapt out at me and that was Liberty. The second however was somewhat more difficult to select.

Initially, I chose Helping Others. This was due to the fact that I have always been known for being a helpful sort of person. However, is that MY Personal Pivotal Need? Or is it other people’s perception of me? I concluded that it is actually other people’s perception. It’s not that I do not want to help people! It’s just that, that is what I do as (I believe) I am a kind and helpful person and I have always and will always help people if I possibly can. It’s not a PPN, it’s just what I do.

So , my next second PPN choice was Autonomy. However, upon reflection, I considered to be rather too close to Liberty and due to the way I already lead my life I tend to live my life in a way that I choose already just with some restrictions currently.

I considered the other PPN’s.

Legacy does not jump out to me. My step-children who I love dearly will already receive a legacy from me, but more importantly, I think that the way in which I have brought them up has given them both many of the tools they need to get whatever they desire anyway.

Spiritual Growth I just don’t get! My view is that we are all growing spiritually regardless. Our growth is part of our journey.

For me, I feel that Recognition for Creative Expression demands more ego than I have or will ever have.

True Health however, resonates with me enormously and that is my final second choice. In my youth, I was always very healthy. Sport and exercise and good diet was always important to me. While I was playing rugby, tennis and badminton competitively as well as swimming and going to the gym and maintaining a healthy diet, other were drinking, smoking and eating junk food. Of course, I could be quite reckless on occasion (or even rather often), but my underlying lifestyle has always been based around True Health.

Throughout my adult life this has still been the case though unfortunately throughout my forties, I experienced a catalogue of health challenges which were quite serious. Initially, they were physical but the affect of them had an effect on my mental health, causing anxiety and depression. Fortunately, after some pretty major surgery and recuperation, things are all good now and actually for a man of my age I would be considered to be very fit and healthy.

The underlying fact though is that True Health has always been and will always be a PPN and I now feel very comfortable with my PPN’s.

 

 

 

 

So, my MKE journey is continuing well and I have to say that I am actually really enjoying the experience although certain aspects are challenging in some respects.

What am I really enjoying?

I guess the whole process in general. Being part of a group of like minded individuals encourages me to keep going. Plugging in to the Marco Polo app and being part of our ‘tribe’ and following and engaging I have found to be really useful.

Sunday nights webcast was awesome! Understanding the importance and the power of the DMP has been key for me. What blew me away somewhat was finding out about our PPN’s. The exercise in using our non-dominant hand first reminded me of my university days where I often had to write with my non-dominant (right) hand after left shoulder injuries. I looked back on my university notes recently and found so much of it pretty illegible and in French which I hardly read, write or speak any more.

Actually, realising that my PPN’s are different than what I initially thought was pretty mind blowing which then challenged me to really review my DMP. Again, it took me far longer than I thought it would but the process has been rather exhilarating.

The repetition of the reading exercises has been less challenging than I anticipated as well and I think I now get why it is so important.

Any Struggles?

I have had no real struggles to speak of. Even my sits have been pretty easy for me. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. I had been setting a timer for 16 minutes to allow me a minute to settle and then have 15 minutes to focus. I had managed that really easily since the beginning so I thought I would challenge myself and extend it to 30 minutes. When I tried that I failed miserably and lasted less than ten minutes! I think it must have been too big a leap, so I went back to my initial time and I am extending it by a minute a day to make it more manageable.

 

Moving Forward

The speed reading really interested me and I am really looking forward to putting what we learnt into practice. I was surprised how much I was actually nearly or occasionally doing already, so I do not think it will be a massive challenge for me to tweak things and improve my reading speed.

I cannot wait for our next instalment on Sunday. This sure beats waiting for any TV series!