The Universe’s Timing
We just launched the new Stature character sculpting deep dive course last night. It’s doing great so far, with dozens of people already signing up for it in less than 24 hours.
At this rate I expect that we’ll have a nice big group of hundreds of people going through the course together.
I actually started working on this course at least two years ago. Initially it was going to be a course on goal setting, particularly how to set aligned goals. I did a lot of work on that version of the course, but I never fully finished and developed it because I felt like it wasn’t going deep enough.
I realized I was lacking an answer to some very basic questions: How do I choose a goal? What makes a goal a good one? What kinds of goals am I more likely to achieve? What if I set a goal and don’t achieve it, but I still feel it was worth setting because of the growth I gained from pursuing it?
I felt like I had a decent design for the upper layers of goal setting, but something felt misaligned beneath the surface. So I put that project on pause and eventually revisited it later to see if I could complete it.
When I revisited the project though, it felt dead to me. The lessons and ideas seemed hollow and lifeless. I felt no special connection to it anymore. The project had no soul or spirit to it.
But it sparked the thought that I should evolve the original concept into a course on clarity. I worked on that a lot in 2018. Eventually it grew to a large outline of 90 lessons. I was planning to develop it into a video course and actually recorded the first few lessons. But I could tell that something still felt off. The ideas didn’t feel like they were converging well enough. The course still felt more hollow than I wanted. Note that I had a large outline of the course with 90-100 lessons mapped out. But eventually I had to conclude that I just couldn’t feel good about the design and ideas. They looked good on the computer screen, but they still felt soulless.
The ideas in the original version of the clarity course seemed way too neat, logical, and mental. It felt like I was trying to put clarity into a mathematical box, tie a bow on top, and gift it to people as some form of practical wisdom.
This was rather frustrating since I was eager to get my first online course developed and launched. I could come up with plenty of ideas and create content for it, and I even published text versions of 20 of the lessons inside CGC. But the energy signature I was really looking for wasn’t there.
I suppose it’s like working on a movie. You may film all the pieces and assemble them in the editing room, only to discover that the movie doesn’t work as a whole. So what do you do?
I decided not to force it. I stepped back and basically invited the universe to help me. Oddly, that eventually led to getting inspired with a completely different idea: To launch a course on abundance and to develop it co-creatively with my readers. The format would be 30 live webinars in 30 days. We did that in August 2018. It launched smoothly, hundreds of people signed up for it within the first 2-3 days, and I loved the whole experience. That project definitely had the type of energy signature that I’d been seeking. We recorded all the webinars and released it as Deep Abundance Integration, and now it’s a permanent addition to this site. The feedback on DAI has been stellar.
Then I revisited the clarity course again and worked on it some more. But it still wasn’t cooperating. It felt like the whole idea was fighting me.
But interestingly, another door opened. Within the months after Deep Abundance Integration, people started requesting a course on Subjective Reality, which is basically the perspective that we could be living in a simulator or dream world. I hadn’t written much about that topic in years, but it came up repeatedly in DAI because it’s such an empowering frame for solving certain problems. In terms of creating abundance in my own life, I consistently get better results using subjective framing to make decisions versus assuming that we live in an objective reality. The objective model looks okay on the surface, but the results are just deadsville when I try to achieve anything meaningful with it.
So we did the Subjective Reality course, called Submersion, again in co-creative fashion but this time as a more introspective audio course of 60 lessons in 60 days. People loved that course, and more keep signing up for it. A few signed up for it today in fact. I feel awesome about it too as I really poured my heart into that one, and I think it shows. I felt super locked onto the inspired, creative, aligned energy I wanted to experience. I enjoyed the creative process immensely. It was such a different vibe from working on the goals course and its later version, the clarity course.
So after this I worked on some other projects, including completing the official launch of Conscious Growth Club in April 2019. Throughout the year I kept reengaging with the clarity course to try to push it forward, but it still wasn’t cooperating. It felt like I was trying to force something that just didn’t want to converge.
The ideas from DAI and Submersion were still rich in my thoughts throughout the year, and I came to see that I was still trying to be too objective with the clarity course.
It really was a strange contrast between the beautiful flow of working on DAI and Submersion, where it felt like I was riding waves of energy that were stimulating as I went, and trying to make progress on the clarity course. It was like trying to walk through a door that refused to open.
So I stepped back a bit from the project and invited the universe to help me with it again. Eventually I started seeing a path forward. I realized I had to make a different type of course to access the kind of energy and flow I craved. Clarity just wasn’t an inspiring enough topic. Nor was goal setting. It felt like when I made those offers to reality, it was saying no. I could try to force those projects forward with personal energy and discipline, but reality was making it abundantly clear that it wasn’t going to cooperate. So I surrendered and sought to realign the offer with the energy I love so much.
One way I get in touch with flow is by tuning in to what I care about. I care about helping people grow. It was this sense of caring that was a big part of my offer to the universe when creating DAI and Submersion. Both courses had a strong element of healing trust wounds, especially Submersion. So I went back to that energy once again.
By this time I was sensing that the course I was trying to create needed another evolution. I felt it was really supposed to be a course about character sculpting. The healing aspect is to heal our relationship with ourselves and also to heal the relationships among different parts of ourselves. That wouldn’t be the entire focus of the course, but it would be a significant part of it.
I emailed my newsletter subscribers and asked them about their problems and desires with respect to their characters. I received many thoughtful answers, took lots of notes, and eventually compressed the feedback down to 5 key character transformations that people wanted.
This opened the door to lots of inspired energy. I basically started over from scratch, not feeling anchored to the original ideas from previous iterations of this course. I felt a lot freer when exploring character sculpting. This time it did feel like the cooperation with reality was starting to flow. I sensed that the universe liked this offer a lot better.
I was pushing to launch it starting in December, and I even set the launch week for it. But I couldn’t get it to converge in time. I sensed that the energy and flow behind the idea was still good, but the universe wasn’t cooperating with my intended launch timing. For instance, I got a cold with a lingering cough, which would have made it difficult to make decent audio recordings. For a variety of small reasons, it was feeling pretty forced to try to launch this in December. So I decided to surrender to what was coming up, and I set the launch to start on January 1st instead.
That felt more aligned. It wasn’t a long delay, but it gave me time to get over the cough. And I could take more time with some of the launch aspects instead of feeling like I was rushing too much.
Then as we neared the end of December, I gradually began pondering an idea that reality was offering to me: to blog every day of 2020. Eventually that inspired me to write the 365-Day Challenges article, and I’m committed to the challenge. I started on December 24 and have been blogging every day since. Somehow this action served as an invitation (and sometimes a synchronicity) for many other people to commit to a similar challenge. Inside Conscious Growth Club right now, we have a bunch of people working on yearlong creative challenges. Some are doing shorter 30-day challenges too since that’s the theme for our January monthly challenge. So there’s been a huge increase in creative output inside the group.
I don’t feel that I caused this but rather that I responded to a certain energy signature that came knocking on my door with the invitation. I think some other people who are sensitive to similar guidance picked up on a similar knock in their own lives. I just happened to be the first one I know of that tipped at this particular time, and then it was like watching dominos fall over the next several days.
Making this commitment to daily blogging has felt like opening a floodgate of inspired energy. I’ve been feeling energized and alive every day since I started. I’m really loving the vibe of it so far, and I believe I can keep this up for a year. It may dip at some points, but I think I can pace myself. I haven’t done so by writing shorter posts though. In the first week I averaged more than 2000 words per post. And I don’t seem to feel like I need to slow down.
However, I’ve also been feeling that on some level, the universe still has its own plans in terms of timing. Lately I’ve been feeling extra sensitive to when it seems to be saying “slow down here” versus “okay, go ahead at full speed.” It’s weird, but somehow it’s working for me.
For instance, while working on launching Stature, I felt like the universe had its own intended pacing for how things were going to go, and I had to align with that. If I try to drive things forward faster than it wants, it slows me down. I’m getting better at predicting the flow of this energy by feel instead of constantly running into walls and feeling like the brakes are being applied. As an example, I was planning to record an invitation video today for the Stature launch, but I could sense the energy wasn’t lining up for that. As it turned out, for a long stretch of time this afternoon, there was a helicopter circling overhead, and my mic is sensitive enough that it would have been picked up on the recording, which would have been pretty annoying if I was trying to do a recording session at the time. So I’ll table that recording session till the alignment is there.
While I often feel like I want to go faster, the universe seems to have its own timing in mind.
The nice part is that when I feel the alignment, it’s like an internal signal to go, go, go. I feel inspired and uplifted, and I love diving into work mode when I feel like this.
When I had mapped out the first 4 lessons for Stature and my next step was to record them, I waited till the timing felt right. I did a sound check and started recording the first lesson. As I was just wrapping up that first recording, I was inviting the listener to consider the timing of doing the Stature course now. “Why now?” I asked. I wanted them to think about whether there was a special personal reason for doing a character-level deep dive at this particular time in their lives.
Just as I finished saying that, I glanced up and saw 11:11 AM on the clock. I thought that was a neat sync since 11:11 comes up a lot for me. So I spontaneously mentioned this as I finished the recording, noting that I thought it was a neat sync. (I wrote an article about 11:11 many years ago to share what I think it means, so check that out if you see this time or other recurring times or numbers.)
What I didn’t realize at the time until a Conscious Growth Club member pointed it out to me was that there was an additional layer to this sync that made it even stranger. After editing the audio, adding the intro / outro music, and publishing it to the Stature portal, it turned out that when you played the completed audio lesson, I spoke the words “eleven eleven” precisely at the time index of 11:11 in the recording.
I definitely didn’t plan that. When I did the recording, we hadn’t even finalized the intro music, so I didn’t know how long it would be. I don’t even see how my subconscious could have nailed this so accurately. It’s pretty bizarre. But this sort of incident feels like a bigger acknowledgement from reality too, as if to validate that I’m finally getting into proper sync with it. It really does feel like I’m synching with reality’s cooperative flow better than ever.
It seems that other people are picking up on this too. I keep getting emails and comments from people that seem to suggest we’re all feeling some kind of timing alignment coming into play here. I don’t pretend to fully understand it, but it’s palpable. Something is afoot.
Does this sound crazy, or does any of this resonate with you? If what I shared here about the universe’s timing lands with you, I’d genuinely love to know, so please get in touch if you feel like sharing. Maybe if we compare notes, we can develop a better picture of what we think this is. It makes me wonder if there’s some deeper consciousness or maybe a collective consciousness that’s trying to get a bunch of us to sync up timing-wise and do some interesting things creatively.
Regardless of how weird it feels sometimes, it’s really good to be in the flow with reality once again. I’m super optimistic for the co-creative phase of the Stature course because of this, and I’m glad that I waited till the alignment I sought was truly present. Now it feels like I’m receiving more than I asked for. It’s such a delightful energy to dance with. This requires a lot of trust, but it’s working beautifully so far, and it aligns with the type of character I want to continue sculpting myself into – a man who enjoys dancing with reality, even when it pulls off some really strange dance moves now and then. 😉