How happy would you say you are?
If you score yourself out of 10, what would you say?
Of course we all know that this thing called “happiness,” or I prefer to label “feeling good” bounces around for each of us each day, week, so on.
But, in general, where would you say you are out of 10?
And by “10,” btw, I mean, that’s your peak.
10 is as good as it can possibly get, it’s the absolute best feeling you’ve ever experienced.
This is your Highline.
Your Highline
The Highline is your peak.
It is the high watermark of sorts for being your absolute happiest.
Contrast, in our system of therapy and transformation, Rapid Sustained Transformation, RST, your Baseline is where you are on average right now, and your Lowline is your darkest pit.
So if you think about every moment of your life so far, looking back, can you identify your Highline?
Maybe it was just one moment?
Where for whatever reason you were feeling at your peak, such as a client who “smells the sunshine.”
Or one day?
Like your wedding day, or some other special day?
Perhaps you are hitting new Highline peaks a lot of the time?
Such as a day I refer to as my Top of the World, which was this one most magical day when I was living in the mountains of Vail, Colorado launching off a peak.
Whatever this moment is, or these moments are, really challenge yourself here to find these times.
So you can relive and raise them.
Worthy goal?
I’ve never thought of happiness as a worthy goal.
I prefer the notion of feeling good because it gets you out of that dastardly thinking brain, which can create an endless loop on this topic.
Am I happy? What does it mean to be happy? Could I be any happier, blah, blah, blah.
Versus, just feeling so good right now, and ideally, every now.
But, still, I’d never say that’s a valid goal.
My experience is that mostly unhappy people think about happiness.
Happy people are simply living their life, doing their thing.
And my view is that we’re all here to do our thing, we are on mission in this reality, we have something to get done in this lifetime, whether happiness is part of this or not.
Yet, what I have seen, and what has been MOST important for me on this topic is that feeling good is a master key.
Master key
You will never reach peak performance unless you reach peak feeling good.
It is this simple.
The human peak for happiness and performance is one and the same.
It is the flow state.
So for me, even though I’ve never seen happiness as a worthy goal, when my brain was so beaten down by the overwhelming challenge I’ve faced driving my mission in the world, it became an essential goal.
In effect I tricked myself into feeling my best.
I needed to feel good, ideally, feel my absolute best, so that I could drive my absolute best performance, so that I could do my absolute best in driving this mission, so that I could, what, feel my best?
What I learned is to train yourself to feel your best, live here, and keep moving on your journey irrespective of where you are relative to the destination.
Happiest?
I started writing this today at 4:32 am, right after Rascal scurried away.
Waking up with him laying on my right arm, and Elyse pinning down my left, that brain got thinking—
Wow, I don’t know if I can be any happier than this.
Rascal isn’t affectionate, he doesn’t just come and lay on me that way, so waking with this furry creature on my arm is special to me.
Elyse too is cat-like 🙂
A love of my life who keeps me at a distance, other than when she’s left here with me.
Feeling their breathing, beating chests, I floated deeper into this feeling.
Can I feel any better than this?
Mind you, I’m not always waking up at this peak, some days far from it, and the leg is still pinging a little pain so I’m not in my best routine doing things like working out or going out or really seeing people.
So, yeah, I can see it getting even higher than this.
But never through Rascal or Elyse or another being or going somewhere, doing some thing, or any other “objects” in this field of reality.
Higher and higher ONLY happens in your brain.
Higher brain
Some years ago my buddy George got me listening to this track by Sia, called Titanium.
You might know it goes:
I’m bulletproof, nothing to lose
Fire away, fire away
It was a hard time for me back then.
Around when we published the book on Trump absolutely thrashing those 16 Republicans he blasted from the stage.
Politics is the worst to me; I just wanted to talk about winning at the highest levels.
But foolishly found myself standing in the political firing range.
Taking shots from all around, the worst from “friends,” I saw that wherever this path was headed I needed to be bulletproof.
Projectiles will keep coming at you in life, and the best you can do is keep reaching higher and higher levels in your brain.
Irrespective
The notion of happiness irrespective of conditions has captivated me for a couple decades.
I bet I first came across it in the first wave of new age self help books that I began reading.
It’s also a huge theme in all the Eastern stuff.
And as I’ve written about many times over the years was really driven home for me in Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search For Meaning.
A reason being that if you can keep your head high in the worst hell on Earth, the Nazi death camps of World War II, then you can do it anywhere.
And shame on me, and disrespect to all those people who have been murdered by tyrants in this world, if I can’t do it here.
Irrespective of conditions, you can ALWAYS keep raising your Highline.
LCD Lowline
A client said to me last week, “You’re only as happy as your least happy child.”
See beyond that I said to him, there’s an enormous difference between empathy and mutual misery.
And if you live by the lowest common denominator Lowline in life, you’re in for a lifetime of misery.
This is a reason that I got rid of media.
You simply cannot be your happiest, be feeling your absolute best, be pushing your Highline higher and higher every single day if you are filling your head with misery.
By far the most destructive force on this planet is human thinking.
These brains of ours infected with the human condition, the 70,000 or so mostly negative and redundant thoughts that are on average cycling in so many brains on this planet, keeps our species in the pit.
And, IMO, you must do everything you can to stop being dragged down to this LCD.
BBB
This is a reason why even in my build back better phase that I wrote about here, where I was immobilized on my back for some 6 weeks, that I refused to feel worse.
Never brought me down that the body was in tremendous pain.
That’s the body’s job; it knows how to heal.
It’s just sending “you” whatever signals it is experiencing.
Your job as a conscious operator of this human body and brain machine is to choose how you respond.
One thing I loved about this phase was that you can never deny physical pain.
Like a fire alarm going off next to your bed, no way you’re just sleeping through it.
You must deal with it.
And I used it to reach higher and higher levels in the brain.
Heaven, found
Something happened to me over this phase that was heavenly.
Now, I don’t use this word in a religious way, but in the sense of finding your heavenly peak.
And this mental tool kept coming back to me that made it SUPER EASY to keep reaching this Highline.
It’s a cheat code of sorts.
Just one tiny thing that I am doing in the brain every second, every day, that has now become the one and only tool that I’m using ATFT (all the f’n time).
This cheat code, known as a Program Interrupt in RST, came to me about 7 years ago and has been well integrated into all of our human tech.
But laid-out cycling my tooling, seeking what would help me keep the brain highest even while it was being filled with pain, this kept coming back to me.
Over those 6 weeks all I did were client calls and train the body and brain.
And by the time I was done this tool was basically all I need to keep raising the Highline higher and higher every day.
This one tool could easily and happily transform all of humanity.
And keep raising the Highline of our species.
Raising Highline
Keep reaching, my friend.
Your absolute best ways of thinking, feeling, being may not always be within reach.
But they are always within your control.
I never say this lightly.
Now I have 23+ years of seeking to optimize this path of being human, and believe me, I know how near impossible this can sometimes be.
But you know what I’ve most discovered?
If you can just keep raising the Highline, you live here and can take it all the way.