Video transcription
So it’s Sunday – the end of the week. And just as beginnings are important, so too are endings. Whether it’s the end of the week, or the end of a day, the ending is an invisible but important boundary in time. You may recall earlier in the week I spoke of 2 kinds of beginnings. The machine beginning, which was just like unpausing the song that had already been playing. When you operate as a “machine” you are doing what you’ve always done, and creating what you have always created.
But if you want to consciously create anything new you need what I called an “awakened” or “living” beginning. Well the same distinction applies to endings. There are machine endings and awakened or living endings.
A machine ending as you might guess is simply pressing pause on your machine. In fact you don’t even have to do anything because your machine is already programmed to do just that. Your machine is very efficient and effectively operates on autopilot, with the minimal amount of energy or effort.
The LIVING beginning starts with your Master hero who sets the trajectory and tone of your day for your Grunt. The living ending starts with your Witness hero and then your Hacker hero, and performs several vital functions that connect today with tomorrow and with your goal. Without a “living” ending your 4 Heroes team will be no smarter tomorrow than they were today. And unless you are already totally nailing your new habit then you’ll need to get smarter. You need a living ending to your day.
So the living ending begins with your Witness hero. The Witness hero as I briefly introduced him or her earlier in the week lives out of the question “What’s going on?” or “What has been going on?”. And they are attuned to what is going on outside of them; their perceptions, as well as what is going on inside of them; their feelings.
Imagine a little camp fire in your consciousness. Sitting around it are your Master, your Grunt and your Witness. The Hacker is off somewhere else just at the moment. A conversation is going on between these 3 heroes. The witness looks towards the Master and then the Grunt and asks “did we do what is important, what we said we were going to do?”. If you have done a check-in this week then you have already met your Witness hero.
Imagine your 4 Heroes as old and best friends. A team that are totally dependent upon another for their shared sense of success. This first question creates the context for their conversation. The face of the Witness then softens and looks towards the Grunt. “How did you get on?”. And maybe your Grunt looks pretty worn out. Or perhaps a bit guilty. Or maybe has a quiet smile. This campfire conversation is the start of the living ending of each day. A brief “living” moment in time that acts as a form of nourishment for the journey as a whole. Nourishment in 2 forms.
The Witness brings forward the nourishment of acknowledgement with your Grunt. It could be pride, or a shared sense of frustration. But it always has empathy. There is no judgement between genuinely good friends
In tomorrow’s Smartstart video we will continue this topic and talk more about the second form of nourishment as the Hacker joins the conversation. Our focus will then shift towards the nourishment of learning, and how better to equip and prepare and support the Grunt in their efforts for their tomorrow.
So let me end this first week by commending all of you who have made it thus far. Its never easy to create something new in your life; to move from “machine” beginning and middles and endings to “living” ones. But it also what makes us most alive and fully human. Go well.