Try to sell your home

Try to sell your home

Once when Steve Hardison and I were discussing a few of my old habits
that were holding me back from realizing my business goals, I blurted
out to him, "But why do I do those things? If I know they hold me back,
why do I continue to do them?"

"Because they are home to you," he said. "They feel like home. When
you do those things, you do them because that's what you're
comfortable doing, and so you make yourself right at home doing them.
And as they say, there's no place like home."
"Home" can be an ugly place if it's not kept up and consciously made
beautiful. "Home" can be a dark, damp prison, smelling of bad habits
and laziness. But we still don't want to leave it, no matter how bad it
gets, because we think we are safe there.

However, when we inspect the worn-out house more closely, we can
see that the safety we think we're experiencing is pure self-limitation.
It's very hard to leave home—many of us try and fail many times. Noel
Paul Stookey wrote a hauntingly beautiful song called "The House
Song," which captures this feeling. The opening words are, "This house
goes on sale every Wednesday morning...and is taken off the market in
the afternoon."

After grasping Hardison's metaphor of home, I immediately saw that I
needed to move out of my house. I needed to move up in the
neighborhood. I needed a better home. A home that contained habits
that would keep me focused on goal-oriented activity. Hardison helped
coach me in that direction until the new activities began to feel like
where I should have been living all along.

Hardison's metaphor of "home" as the equivalent of old disempowering
habits has stayed with me for a long time. Recently while I was putting
together a tape of motivational music to play in my car, I included the
energetic "I'm Going Home" by Alvin Lee and Ten Years After. As I
drove around listening to it turned up all the way, I thought about what
Hardison taught. I let the song be about the new home I would always
be in the process of moving to.

Don't be afraid to leave the psychic home you're in. Get excited about
building a larger, newer, happier home in your mind, and then go live
there.

In Colin Wilson's brilliant but little-known, out-of-print novel Necessary
Doubt, he created Gustav Neumann, a fascinating character who made
many discoveries about human beings. At one point Neumann says, "I
came to realize that people build themselves personalities as they build
houses—to protect themselves from the world. They become its
prisoners. And most people are in such a hurry to hide inside their four
walls that they build the house too quickly."

Identify the habits that keep you trapped. Identify what you have
decided is your final personality and accept that it might be a hasty
construction built only to keep you safe from risk and growth. Once
you've done that, you can leave. You can get the blueprints out and
create the home you really want.

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