The Learning-Spiral Thoughtmap explains that anyone on the Learning Team enters a new level of awareness by first looking bad, and evolving through FOUR STAGES.
The 4 Stages of the Learning Spiral
I often wish it were otherwise but there is no way to avoid that sometimes brutally-painful first step in the four-step Learning-Spiral: becoming conscious of your own incompetence.
This is when, often without warning, the Universe smacks you up-side the head how unaware you have been about how unaware you have been. It can be a devastating experience – the beginning of a ‘Phoenix Process’. Those shocking, embarrassing, perhaps even disgraceful moments of seeing the idiocy of something you were certain, only a moment before, was genius and useful, can be re-packaged into the starting points of a new and better future.
Here are two thoughts to keep in the back of your mind during such a roasting: A human being rarely changes until it becomes too painful to keep doing things the old way. If you responsibly experience the pain of new awareness it can serve you as the most powerful catalyst for dissolving your inner resistances to becoming more conscious.
The second thought is this: The more unexpected the event, the more information it contains. Since a Beep! is, by its nature, unexpected, it arrives full of valuable insights to unwrap and apply. Do not use the unexpectedness to beat yourself up for not seeing it coming. Instead try to receive the Beep! with appreciating yourself for having achieved the capacity to see it now, and use the shock of the unexpectedness to hammer a remembrance-stake into the new territory revealed to more easily find your way back.
You have two options. One is to be on the Looking Good Team busily doing everything you can to keep looking ‘good’ even if this involves avoiding learning. The other is to be on the Learning Team busily looking ‘bad’ as a side-effect of admitting that you did not know that you did not know and going through transformational liquid states.
The proposal is to rewire your mind about welcoming Beep!s. This moves you from the Looking Good Team to the Learning Team. Then each time you become newly conscious of an incompetence, your tears, red-face, bulging veins, and shaking hands will look inspiring to your peers.
driven by a wake-up call
STAGE 1: UNCONSCIOUS-INCOMPETENCE TO CONSCIOUS-INCOMPETENCE Ignorance of your ignorance is bliss! The first indicator that you have entered an authentic learning opportunity is receiving feedback that you are ignorant about something you didn’t know was possible to be ignorant about. Suddenly you see yourself as having been stupid in some tender place you assumed was working just fine. It’s a wake-up call: Beep! Game over! The rude awakening from being unconscious of your incompetence to becoming conscious of your incompetence makes you look bad to your friends, your boss, your partner… and especially to yourself. Conscious-incompetence is that moment when the façade you invested so much effort in concocting to present the illusion that you’ve got your act together is suddenly seen from the back-side as a bundle of fantasies and reasons cobbled together with paperclips and chewing gum. That pesky little dog has pulled open the curtain and your bare manipulative arse is revealed to the whole world. A cold draft blows in from a strange direction: becoming aware of something that you were not aware that you were not aware of. Ouch! Is it really this bad? Actually, it is probably worse. The feedback may have been knocking on your doors of perception for a long time and only now could you hear it. Better late than never… Certainly others saw the pie-in-your-face long before you did. A useful suggestion here is: try to not kill the messenger. Trying to kill the messenger suggests that your highest priority is still trying to keep up the ‘looking good’ illusion. Here is a useful strategy: When the shit hits the fan, let yourself get utterly lambasted.... Instead of being like a bear in the woods hiding behind a tree to minimize the Great Hunter’s chances of hitting you in a lethal place, step out from your hiding place, spread your arms wide, and stand still so He can take you out with one shot. BOOM! Your old world has died. As soon as enough dust settles and you remember that you can breathe, examine details of the feedback you got. Repurpose the details in your mind so they serve your Rapid Learning as an exact description for what to practice to get better results next time. The Learning-Spiral driver that moves you to STAGE 2 is choosing the learning path in preference to merely defending your old ways.
driven by practice
STAGE 2: CONSCIOUS-INCOMPETENCE TO CONSCIOUS-COMPETENCE Keep practicing. Even if you think you got it, keep practicing. Each step further along the learning spiral occurs through attentive and diligent practice. Persistence is key. At first every aspect of your new behavior is painful while physical joints and energetic synapses realign. “How do I even hold a violin?” is the same question as: “How do I even notice when I am being adaptive and giving my authority away?” or, “How am I supposed to know when my daughter wants attention and when she doesn’t?” There will be internal resistances from your fear of change, and external resistances from other people’s fear that you might actually change, plus resistance to your resistance, plus sore psychic muscles as you bend and stretch to take up ever-new presencing space. After all, how boring is it if you keep presencing the same old thing, especially for your partner? (Very boring…) Persistent practice is the driver that moves you to STAGE 3 in the Learning-Spiral.
driven by identity shift
STAGE 3: CONSCIOUS-COMPETENCE TO UNCONSCIOUS-COMPETENCE Practicing your changes: attitude, timing, purpose, tone of voice, inner energy management, discernment, respect, energetic space distinctions, and so on. Practicing changes who you are because it changes how other people experience you. Listen closely to other people with the intention of hearing what you are creating in them about you. When other people experience you differently, then you have changed. Not before. Conscious practice builds matrix in you to hold a changed Being. This indicates that practice is perhaps the most powerful non-aggressive transformational force in the Universe. By changing yourself you change other people’s experience of you. By changing other people’s experience of you, you have changed them… and thereby changed the world. At some point during practice you forget you are practicing. It simply becomes your ordinary way of perceiving and interacting. It becomes who you are. The practice slips unconsciously into your pocket with your car keys and becomes your new normal. You have become unconsciously competent. The Learning-Spiral driving force to STAGE 4 is your willingness to shift identity, to let your self-experience alter, to become a new you. Letting your previous identity go the way of the dinosaurs permits personal transformation into STAGE 4 of the Learning-Spiral.
driven by love
STAGE 4: UNCONSCIOUS-COMPETENCE TO UNCONSCIOUS-INCOMPETENCE The Universe will be the first to confirm that you have changed by giving you new jobs to do, jobs that you may or may not have dreamed of, jobs that pick you up by the scruff of your neck and drop you into situations you could never have arranged for yourself. No matter how inconceivable, these sudden gameworld shifts are not a mistake. The Universe only gives you a new job when you are able to handle it. You can trust the Universe on this one. However, in the fine print at the bottom of the new job contract, often overlooked in the rush of enthusiasm about your upgraded status with the Universe, there is this sentence: The Universe hereby certifies that you have the potential to do the new job, however, that potential may still be dormant. Activating your potential may require you to continue further times around the Learning-Spiral after you commit to doing the new job. Sign here: ______________.
There is no certification of blackbelt mastery in Possibility Management. Once you have gained a bit of STAGE 4 unconscious-competence your friendly local Possibility Team will help you avoid retirement by not letting you rest on your laurels. They will give you about fifteen seconds of applause and then level-you-up to your next unconscious-incompetence with a swift kick-in-the-butt: feedback and coaching about a new thing that you didn’t know you didn’t know about! Beep! Shift! Go!
Experiments
IGNORANCE IS BLISS
Matrix Code LEARNSPI.01
Realising that you and many of those around you have been living as Modern Cultures Zombies is a shock. Your first response is likely to spend all of your time trying to be someone else. You try with all your might to make yourself a better person.
You are in a Fantasy World. You will never be a ‘better person’. It is simply a construct of your Box, that your Gremlin could use for the rest of your life to keep you stuck in a swamp of Low Drama where nothing will change.
Instead, why not embrace being a Zombie and see first hand what it is doing to you.
Can you feel what it is actually like to live in this state of ‘blissful ignorance’?
This experiment is for 3 days to stay as ignorant as you are right now about your condition. Commit to learning absolutely nothing during this period. Do not notice anything new about yourself. End any spaces where you might receive feedback or pick up something new. If you start learning something from a movie: turn it off immediately. Commit to staying exactly where you are.
Why not commit that for the rest of your life, you will never again try to be a better version of yourself. Disillusion yourself!
After the 3 days, please register Matrix Code LEARNSPI.01 in your free account at StartOver.xyz. In the Proof section, please write a few sentences about what it was like to live a life of ignorance. This Experiment is worth 2 Matrix Points.
BEEP!ATHON
Matrix Code LEARNSPI.02
A Beep! is a feedback that something is not working. It might be something you notice, come from someone on your team or even come from the Universe.
If your mission is to escape the patriarchy and be your destiny in action then feedback is gold. Every Beep! opens a doorway to something else being possible. Treasure them. This is your chance to get your life back.
But of course, Modern Culture could not have us getting our power back. In school a Beep! meant being humiliated, punished or exiled, so we learnt that they are a scary thing and to be avoided at all costs.
Inside of you it is wired that Beep! equals sudden death.
It is possible to get killed and not die.
This is your experiment.
It is time to Shift Identity into a Beep! Seeker. Someone who hunts down Beeps like long lost treasure that they know is their best chance of causing something else.
This experiment is for 7 days to try and get as many Beeps as you can manage. You can include an Expand the Box Training in the week to really notch up some Beeps. Now you know why it's called a Beep!Book. Please have one at hand at all times for this experiment. Maybe you get a Beep! at 3am in the morning. Maybe talking to the cashier. Don't miss out on the treasure. Remember 'if you do not write it down, it did not happen'.
For each person you meet, before even saying hello go with: 'please tell me the ways I am being, what I am saying, doing, or not saying and doing, that are not working for you'.
Carry around questions such as:
'Please tell me how my communication does not work'.
'Please tell me how I am being does not work for you'.
The purpose of this experiment is to change your relationship to Beeps forever. This will change your life.
After the week, please register Matrix Code LEARNSPI.02 in your free account at StartOver.xyz. In the Proof section, please write a few sentences about the most life changing Beep! you received during the week. This Experiment is worth 4 Matrix Points.
BEEP!ATHON PART 2
Matrix Code LEARNSPI.03
Avoiding Beeps keeps you exactly where you are. Without stage 1 of the Learning Spiral nothing changes. This is the phase when you get a wake-up call and something that was unconscious becomes conscious.
How do you keep yourself from even getting onto the Spiral?
Well, your Box convinces you that it's too scary to try something out and you eat up its stories like the tastiest pie. Maybe your Box has it that your just no good at that particular thing and if your not good then what's the use in even trying. "Painting.... I cannot do that I am not an artist." So you put down your tools and any hope of something different is over.
You end up missing out on developing the very non-material skills you need to be a space where your Bright Principles and Archetypal Lineage can do their work in the world.
This experiment is to change that.
First, make a list of 40-50 things that you do not know how to do and that you have been avoiding jumping into trying because you know you will get beeps.
Do this with your Possibility Team and help each other to make the list.
Think about things you have not been able to do in terms of soft 'non-material' skills.
The propose to the whole Team that you start an experiment for next 7 days to try at least 90% of the things on the list.
Do them in your life for the next 7 days.
Get all the Beeps you can. Treasure them by writing them down in your Beep!Book.
You have to collect at least 50 Beeps. Try for 100 if you really want something to change.
Report back at your next Possibility Team. Share your 3 best Beeps and report if you have noticed any shift in your experience of Beeps.
After the week, please register Matrix Code LEARNSPI.03 in your free account at StartOver.xyz. In the Proof section, please write about a skill that you developed during the week. This Experiment is worth 4 Matrix Points.
BEEP!ATHON PARTY
Matrix Code LEARNSPI.04
Without the clarity of rapid learning, you end up focusing in the positive direction. You look at what you could do to make things different. This is not where the treasure is! The treasure is to be found by looking in quite the opposite direction: at the places where you are telling yourself you cannot do something because you have Beeps about it.
If we can find those things then we get some new options for moving further on the learning spiral. We discover what to start practicing in order to shift from conscious incompetence to conscious competence and begin building up our spiral momentum. Beeps tells us what we need to practice for this shift to happen.
This experiment is to have a Beep!athon party. Your days of birthday parties, Thank God it is Friday parties or Let's Watch Avatar for the 50th Time parties are over. It is time for some High Level Fun.
The objective of the party is to compare the things that you really wanted to do in your life with what is actually going on. These are things that are important but no urgent.
Dress up as your treasure hunter of choice and go on an adventure to find the Beeps that are stopping you from doing this thing in your life.
These Beeps are the very things that stand between you and what you want to be doing with your life. What a gift to help wake someone up to what is really going on.
You might find that the Beeps comes from things that you tried as a kid that people really did not like. You were too loud, too crazy, too alive. This is the finest treasure because it opens a doorway to an Emotional Healing Process. Do the process and something will change.
Any group of people contains a wealth of group intelligence. The guests at your party are no exception. Mine them for everything they have got.
Make a list in your Beep!Book of all the new things to practice that you learn from this experiment.
After the party, please register Matrix Code LEARNSPI.04 in your free account at StartOver.xyz. In the Proof section, please write about a practice you will not start as a result of the party.
This Experiment is worth 2 Matrix Points.
LEAVING THE LOOKING GOOD TEAM
Matrix Code LEARNSPI.05
The Path of Transformation involves falling over and splatting your face in custard pie over and over again. Often it is going to be in public. Often it will be in front of your friends, colleagues and partners.
Are you going to get used to it? Or are you going to sneak back to your Fantasy Worlds where things are fine just the way they are?
It is up to you.
What I can tell you, is that the faster you can get to reality and the Beeps it lovingly holds for you, the faster you can shift and become something else.
If you are still in the 'Looking Good Team' where your primary objective is keeping the peace, putting a brave face on it or convincing mum and dad that you are doing a 'good job', then nothing is going to change.
The places in your life where you are still in the 'Looking Good Team' are precisely the places where you are committed to not being in reality and not changing. You have exactly what you want. And what you want right now is to look good.
That Transformation thing sounded nice but when the rubber meets the road are you really willing to take the leap?
This experiment is to inquire into the places where you are still in the 'Looking Good Team'. Write a new page in your Beep! Book titled "PLACES I'M STILL IN THE LOOKING GOOD TEAM". Start writing the list yourself then get together with your Possibility Team and ask them "Please tell me how I am committed to looking good over and above transformation." Once you have your list, choose 2 or 3 of the places where you are still in the Looking Good Team and design experiments you can do this week to practice being in Team Transformation. Your Possibility Team can give you possibilities. Do the experiments!
After the week of practicing, please register Matrix Code LEARNSPI.05 in your free account at StartOver.xyz. In the Proof section, please write about the consequences of one of the new experiments.
This Experiment is worth 1 Matrix Point.
CONSCIOUS PRACTICE WEEK
Matrix Code LEARNSPI.06
Incompetence is when you cannot do something.
Competence is when you can.
The only way to shift from incompetence to competence is practice.
You can spend hours, days, weeks or even lifetimes in Low Drama bemoaning your 'X on the map' which is the place you are right now but nothing will change.
Nobody is listening and going to suddenly come to your rescue. If they do, they are not really helping you because where you are right now is your problem.
So if you want things to change: practice. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and create the life that you have always wanted.
Your Gremlin might try to convince you that you can practice 15 things at once: You cannot. He wants you to fail because practice is hard and Your Gremlin would rather go and watch TV.
This experiment is to choose 2 or 3 things to practice for the week and devote all of your conscious attention to them. Whenever you meet anyone, have conversations about the things you are practicing. Ask for possibilities on how you could do it differently. Design experiments for you to do with them to try something new.
Why not do this ongoingly for the rest of your life? Always having several clear things you are practicing in your life is bound to lead to some seismic shifts. Jump into a Life of Practice today.
After the week, please register Matrix Code LEARNSPI.06 in your free account at StartOver.xyz. In the Proof section, please write what your main practices were for the week. This Experiment is worth 1 Matrix Point.
LISTEN FOR WHAT YOU ARE CREATING
Matrix Code LEARNSPI.07
From the moment you wake up in the morning until you drift off into sweet sleep: You are always creating.
It is hard to look outside your Box and out into the world and stare directly at the very real consequences of how you are showing up. Far easier to blame it on someone else. They did it. The Universe did it. As the song goes: "It wasn't me".
If you do look over there you will almost certainly have a shock. Your Gremlin is busy taking revenge or making sure they stay small with your hilarious 'jokes'. Your hiding in more ways than you can count. You're creating anything but intimacy and connection in your relationships. Boo hoo. Poor you. Hold on a minute, you created this situation for yourself. You can change it!
This experiment is to spend a week ongoingly putting your attention on what you are creating. Particularly when you are in conversation. What does your presence, your form of Speaking, your form of Listening create in the other person? If all else fails: ask them! "How did this conversation make you feel?" Create a new page in your beep book titled 'WHAT I AM CREATING'. Write them down. When your Being wants something different to what you are creating: declare your incompetence and begin to practice.
After the week, please register Matrix Code LEARNSPI.07 in your free account at StartOver.xyz. In the Proof section, please write what was the biggest shock about what you are creating right now. This Experiment is worth 1 Matrix Point.
GO THROUGH A COMPLETE LEARNING SPIRAL
Matrix Code LEARNSPI.08
Having the Map of the Learning Spiral fully integrated into your 5 bodies changes your life.
You will never need to ask yourself what to do next to grow and learn ever again. For, it tells you exactly where you are right now AND exactly where you need to focus for Evolution to do its magic.
If you are unconsciously incompetent: find a Beep as soon as possible. Do not waste your life smugly telling your friends about all your news skills. NO. Find the next challenge!
If you are consciously incompetent because you have realised you suck at something, then start practicing. It's only thing that will make a difference.
If you are consciously competent then it is time to shift your identity. Let yourself become the new you who is totally capable of drawing little furry dogs.
What better way to get it fully into your system than to go through the whole cycle as consciously as possible.
This experiment is to grab a buddy and commit to learning one new 'mini skill' today. This could be learning to juggle, learning to tie your shoes the other way around, learning to sew on buttons, learning to count cards. Or even learning to unicycle! Notice in each moment where you are in the Learning Spiral for each aspect necessary of the 'mini skill'. When you reach a new stage 'high five' your friend and announce "I got to Conscious Competence in ...". Try to break it down into as many sub skills as possible and zoom round the spiral for each of them until you can DO IT!
After the week, please register Matrix Code LEARNSPI.08 in your free account at StartOver.xyz. In the Proof section, please write what your main practices were for the week. This Experiment is worth 1 Matrix Point.
