BABH S1Ep9: PRESENTS & PRESENCE (A Real Gift This Christmas)

Joel Young:

Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the be a brilliant human podcast with me, Joel young and welcome to you if you've just found me. It's wonderful that you're here that you found me somehow through the mysteries and magics of of the connectedness of our internet universe and all those things, or even word of mouth, you never know. Sometimes that still happens and also welcome back if you're a regular as ever. I so appreciate you. Taking the time to be with me every week and listen to my pontifications. If you haven't already, go ahead and subscribe wherever you're listening to this whatever podcast platform you're on, there'll be some way somewhere on there to hit that subscribe button. So you get notified each week when these episodes go live. And that's a fabulous thing. Also, I'd love it if you would leave a review.

You know, let me know, give me those five stars or whatever feels appropriate to you. And also as I often like to mention, you can message me, we have a system where you can leave a voice message for me. And on that note, I have an announcement. I'm very pleased with myself because this week I have set up the be a brilliant human website "dun dun duh". It's very simple. It's the name of the podcast, be a brilliant human with a .com on the end. So the purpose of this is to give you a place you can go to get the show notes. It's like show notes plus because wherever you're listening to this, normally there's, there's a place for text description of what's going on. But the, the website will have each episode that's sort of more detailed notes and even transcriptions, yes, transcriptions of the entire podcast.

But really I wanted to have an easy place for you to access everything. So all the links to all the different podcast platforms are there. And each episode: it's very simple. If you want to get to the notes for a particular episode, you just do beabrillianthuman.com/ (forward slash) and then the number of the episode. So if you want to go back to episode one, it would be beabrillianthuman.com/1. It's that simple. And also one thing I know from my podcast experience is, sometimes I think: there was that episode, I wonder what it was and I might not know the number of the episode. So you can just go there to beabrillianthuman.com go to the episodes tab and then type in the search. You know, whatever you remember about it. And it should hopefully come up with a couple of options of which episode it might be.

And you can listen again. So on each of the episode pages there, you can listen to it right there. I've got the cause I use the platform anchor.fm as you know, probably unless you're new, I use it. If you new did, you know, I thought I'd tell you I use the anchor.FM place to record and put out my podcast, but I've embedded the audio from there into each of those pages so you can listen right there. And it is an evolving process that website. So right now I think most of the descriptions are what you've got already, but over this next week I'll be uploading the transcriptions and doing more sort of detailed sort of bullet points of, of the notes of each show. Because I know, again, for me sometimes you listen to a show, there's a lot of information.

It's very auditory. I go quite fast. So, so it's quite good sometimes to look at the notes and just get a breakdown of some of the key points. And also then on some of the pages, if I, if I'm talking about a specific thing, then links to what I've referenced will be there on the pages plus on the, on the homepage, if you just go to beabrillianthuman.com if you scroll down a bit, I've also got sort of resources that I mentioned again, again, so there's links there to my one-to-one coaching. There's links to the NPA sheet, the free sheet, and also links right now to the boundary bootcamp wait-list which is coming early next year. Are you excited yet? So there we go. So this month we're in December episode nine in December. And it's kind of Christmas month. I was thinking about, Hmm, what should I do in December?

And I thought, well, why don't I go with the Christmas theme? And so each week, that's five weeks, five Tuesdays in December. So over the next four we'll be focusing on Christmas in general. Then on on the fifth one, which will be actually new year's Eve, I'm gonna talk a bit about visioning as we're going into the new year. So I thought I'd start this week with the dandy title of presents and presence. So it's auditory. You can't hopefully somewhere you've seen the, the written form, but it's presence as in gifts and presence as in being present. So that's what we're talking about and I've called it a real gift this Christmas because I'm going to be really focusing on, on presence itself. So my question to you is, what's more important to you? Is it stuff or is it experiences? Now gifts are great and especially when you're a kid, I mean, when was like sort of, I don't know, between three and 10 probably, Oh, I would go mad on Christmas morning in our household we had stockings.

And the rule in the house was that if you got up early, you could open your stocking, but you couldn't open the presents until later. The wrapped presents. But I sometimes would get up and I was a kid who liked to sleep. Right? But on Christmas Eve, sleeping was horrible. Going to bed and then so excited and I wake up at like 4:00 AM rushed downstairs and mam had probably just gone to bed having filled the stockings and done, all the mad things that mum's do on Christmas Eve so I could open my stocking at 4:00 AM and it was such a thrill. So I'm not knocking gifts. I mean they're wonderful. And also, you know, some people I think I've talked before about the five love languages. But one of the love languages, which is how we sort of ways that we interpret love. It's gift-giving.

So gift-giving is a love language, serve you one of those people that that means love. Then gifts are going to be probably more to you than, than people that don't have that love language. But I think it's fair to say that as you get older and sort of accumulate more stuff, gifts or things become much less important than they used to be. And what starts to matter more is time with those that matter. Making memories. I mean they say it's more excitement around Christmas and more things like, like seeing my daughter, I mean with my daughter, we still have fun with gifts. I mean we do, we, we love that, that part of it. But really it's it seeing her and having quality present moments that gives me that sort of excitement and the anticipation around sort of the Christmas festivities and chances are if you're listening to this podcast, which is a conscious living podcast, and I'm probably to some degree preaching to the converted, but I did, I thought I'd hone in on, on present itself, the art of being fully present and I'm in this episode, particularly with Christmas coming and all the festivities, the holiday season and all that stuff.

Then especially I wanted to focus on some things that arise around the festive season. So let's dive in.

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So should and never are words that you know I'll rarely use. And I'm still going to say that you should never underestimate the power of being truly present with someone or something, including yourself. It's some interesting things about presence. So you can't fake presence. You just, you just can't, you can't fake it and you can't do, I'm doing the air quotes so you can't do presence, you know you can't half bake it and you can't multitask presence, you know, either you're present or you're not. And true presence, really, it's, it's empty mind. It's single focused. It's, it's right here, right now. It's agenda free awareness available to the full sprect... Sprectrum? The full spectrum of life experience. And it has a power to it. Presence does, it's like there's a seductive magic to it that can untie the naughtiest, not it can bring the life to the inanimate and melt the iciest of hearts in a way presence is, is like a, it's like a deep intimacy with what is.

And when you look at anything with pure presence, it's sort of willingly unfilled its petals, revealing its intricacies, its rhythms and its mysteries. So that's a bold statement to make about presence. And that's kind of like full ideal presence. But let me give you some, some kind of, some examples of my experience of the power of presence. So when my granny was alive the last 20 years of her life, she had Alzheimer's, which is a, is a horrible disease and have you, you've ever experienced it, you'll understand this. Towards the later years she really wasn't there at all in some sense, but earlier on when it was kind of setting in she would have this experience of, of going in a loop. So she would ask a question and then you don't answer it. And then she just asked the question again. And in her world it was clear that she hadn't asked it already.

So there'd be this loop with the same question going over and over and over. And what I found was that some people in the family had a hard time with it for all sorts of reasons. It is difficult to deal with and they get frustrated and the loop would just get worse and worse and worse. But I decided that I would just be really present. I kind of made it, made it a game. The game was, you know, if I'm going to be asked the same question again and again and again, what if I answered it, anew every time? What if I tried variations of the answer. And so I was able to become present to her and, and stay in, in the stillness of presence with myself. But a really interesting and unexpected thing happened. I'd find that she'd go through the loop maybe five, maybe 10 times.

And then suddenly it was as if she, she dropped and then she started to go into to talking about stories of when she was younger and things that I'd never heard, you know, from her history, from the war, from from her experiences when she was a child. And she just sort of go into this, this story and start telling me things that I'd never heard, which was, you know, in a way opened that, that door, that gate to something that was didn't seem possible. And then she would go back into the loop. And then maybe a few times, but I always attributed that opening to, to, to my willingness to be present to that experience rather than getting getting frustrated. So that's one example that I have. And, and the other one is I want to talk about the impact of presence as it, as it shows up in, in performance or, or with performers.

So this is kind of inspired by why did on Sunday, on Sunday I went with my neighbours. I've mentioned Beth, Beth and her good fella Al. Hi Beth & Al, I know, you listen second, shout out. You're doing well. And but what happened was I was invited to go to this event it was a charity event and I'll tell you a bit about the story of, of what the charity was for, just because it's, it's a, a moving story. But, but basically Beth who has been learning the piano and her piano teacher was part of organising this event and it was basically a bunch of his students who are performing to raise money for James and James, a little three, three and a half years old. Little lad. He was deprived of oxygen when he was born and ended up with cerebral palsy, which means that he can't talk.

And his parents have had a device on loan that allows him to communicate with eye movement. There's is very clever devices where they can use eye movement to communicate what they want, the decisions they make. But unfortunately, with the funding and the NHS it's short term loan and the NHS are going to take this machine back. So the event was to raise money to buy a machine for James which will obviously make a huge difference to his quality of life. So by the way I have asked if there's a link if there is a link, I will put it in the show notes. Who'd been defined that beabrillianthuman.com/9. If you feel moved by that and want to contribute to Jame's fund so he can get his get his machine then look out for that?

At the moment I don't have it, but if I, if I do have it at some point I could mention, I will mention it if it comes along in a future podcast and you're gonna find that if you want to donate some money towards that machine to change change the potential for James's life. Anyway, so there was this concert and I was invited to go along, so I did some, me Beth and her partner Al we all went along and to this event. Now it's interesting because I wanted to talk about what I observed. So let's put this in context. This is not the X factor, this event, it's really students. So there's beginners and more advanced people. And I looked on Facebook and it said all that, like 12 people are going to this event. We walked in the room, there's like 50 to a hundred people in this room.

I was like, Oh my God. And Beth who hasn't performed before and sung in public before in that way was like naturally going, Oh shit. And as far as I'm concerned, everybody who got up on that stage was an absolute winner just just for doing that. But I did notice something watching the performance in terms of, of the impact of presence. So there's kind of a, there was a qualitative difference in certain performances and on the effect that it had on the audience. And what I noticed it was where there was fear showing up or really strongly showing up in someone, it made a difference. So like mostly I imagine that the fears were, were thoughts of, you know, what's the audience thinking, you know, are they hating me? Or negative self projections, you know, like fuelled by the fear. If you think about it, you know, when you're on stage physically you're on stage, but you're out there in the audience worrying what they might think or you know, doing the comparative thing, then you're there out there.

You're not on the stage. So, so who's on the stage in a sense, kind of nobody, or at least only part of you. And so when you're not in you, this is the presence thing. If you're not connected to yourself, then things don't tend to run so smoothly and the quality of transmission tends to decrease. So when you're not present to any task, whether it's performance or whatever, and when you're not present, then sort of things get tripped up. So I think a lot of people that were in that performance, you could see them shaking and all the rest of it, and it was a wonderful warm audience and all that. All the performances were, were, were brilliant. But I'm pointing to what I noticed was the difference between some who were present and some who were not. And those that were more present tended to, to, to project themselves or things just ran more smoothly for them.

And also the performance is a good example because we will understand how an audience catches the vibe. So you know, the, the old top performers, if you go to a concert or somewhere, they're totally present. So it's, and again, it's not a performance as in pretending. It's like they're totally there. They're in the performance, you could say they are being the performance itself. So the point is that presence has a power to it. And it impacts those that witness it and fear and projection as imagining what others are experiencing tends to compromise the presence. It sort of impacts the energy that you put out and therefore the energy that's received. So in a way, the more present the performer was, the better the experience for them and the better the experience for the audience. So you're probably wondering at this point, how does all this relate to me and to the Christmas period? Well, let's talk about that then. [inaudible]

Okay, so let's focus on those family gatherings. They have a Christmas showy. So in an ideal world, you'd be fully present with the people you spend time with over Christmas and know, be saying, well, these are people I avoid saying for a large portion of the year. But hopefully I've established that that your presence is a gift, not only to them, but it's a gift to yourself. Because the experience is better round. So let's talk about some of the blocks to presence that are kind of prevalent in our, you know, very busy and I could say somewhat psychologically confused culture. So my top three culprits are GT resistance and distraction. So let's start with duty. Now for the most part, GT visits are a recipe for non presence. Why? Because the sponsoring thought for the most part with a duty visit is that you're doing it because you have to rather than you want to.

So some part of you feels a sense of resentment. So you know fully there you're in the resentment and that resentment sets you up for the second one, which is resistance. So especially around Christmas and these gatherings are a common sort of point of resistance is is that fear? Because in a way resistance is the fear. It's the fear of those sort of habitual issues, those things that come up. So for example, in, in your mind when we going, Oh my God, mom and dad are going to get into an argument about the parsnips again, or maybe it's like, Oh my God, uncle Tony is going to be horribly drunk and say something unbelievably insensitive, inappropriate again. Or maybe it's, maybe it's, Oh my God, grandpa's going to be dribbling and farting all through dinner, which makes the kids feel sick and, Oh no, Oh no.

Or it's the classic, I'm going to want to kill my sister 10 minutes after we broke the door. Why? Because, well, you know what she's like. So it all kind of boils down to that fear of, of sort of failing sort of, well, fear of what you're gonna feel if something happens that actually hasn't happened yet. And yes, maybe there's historic proof of the pattern of events, but chances are that you have those fears last year and fear as we learned from my performance examples, SAPs your presence. It sort of, it makes you not, they're not even with you and therefore you're not functioning. You're not expressing or receiving at your optimum. And certainly not in that magic zone where something different and wonderful could happen. And naturally that resistance fuels the temptation to distraction. So let's talk about distraction. One word phones or that's like the, that's like the sort of in your pocket, handy, bendy, handy bandy, handy, bendy, available point of distraction, social media, those solo games, you know, all of that stuff you can just hide away in, which of course means that you're not present a tall.

Then of course there's the distraction of things that don't matter. So of course, what doesn't matter and what does matter is it is a matter of personal choice. It's a subjective thing. But you know, perhaps you know what I'm talking about here, it's like those gatherings where you come away feeling like, you know, you don't really know anyone any better if it's the office party rather than a family gathering, you come away. None the wiser by anybody. You know, I've gone through the motions, you're distracted by the routine, by the polite, by the withheld heart, and you haven't really fully in sort of heartfully engaged with anyone. So again, having your mind or your energy elsewhere or caught up in some resistant thoughts or, or Pat ground text conversation is not presence. These are States of non presence. You are not there. You're trapped in.

Effectively what you're doing is you're trapped in a halfhearted half self experience and you, my beloved, listened to deserve better than that this Christmas. So let's imagine what's possible with presence [inaudible] so if I mentioned this already, presence has a magic to it. So just like with my granny, the presence that was there was somehow able to break through the seemingly unbreakable loop. So if you think about these, these family gatherings and what you think is a world trodden and seemingly unchangeable and you'll experience now with the power of presence, you could open into the most unexpected and delightful places. You could open a doorway, open that portal both in them and in you. And just like the performance example presence or non presence is contagious, the audience would catch the vibe and, and feel it. So have you ever noticed that when there's one truly present person in a crowd, they're like a beacon.

They're like a magnet. They are shining light. And if you have an interaction with them, somehow you come away feeling enlivened and more present yourself. So imagine if you could bring the gift of that this Christmas. That's the gift of presence. This Christmas. If you could like that fire under the old dynamic, well then my friend who knows what might unfold. So now you might say that's all well and good Joel, but how do I conjure up presence when a large portion of me is already groaning at the prospect? Well, there is a way and the route to presence. Here's the write this one down. The route to presence is finding that place in. You were choosing to be there and choosing. You align. So another way to say that is find your congruent. Why? Why are you choosing to be there? And because I have to is not going to cut it here.

It's not. That's what you've already been telling yourself. That's not an answer. That's not a congruent answer. That's gonna activate presence within you. I mean, finding a reason that genuinely feels true, aligned and good to you. So another example for you. So early in my relationship with the mother of my daughter who's now 23, a long time ago now now she was sort of she will say herself, I'm sure that that she takes a long time to do shopping. Okay. So we went bra shopping, shopping for a bra. And long story short, it took four hours for her to pick a bra. Now ladies out there, you might say yeah, for as it's perfectly normal, but remember I'm a bloke. Okay. And at the time, stereotypically I was a bloke who was not the biggest fan of shopping. So it was not a situation that I naturally enjoyed.

But I think I realised on that day I realised it was going to be a long time and that, that, that I had to, I had a decision to make basically. So I could either just bitch about it in my head and have a miserable time. Option one, I could strap off, you know, that's it. I'm off bugger you option two or I could find a way to really be there. So she was in, obviously went for option three here. So like she was in the changing room, so I decided that, you know, things are going on that they were shop assistants, they were pulling things off rails or this kind of thing. And I thought well among as well discover what this whole shopping thing is about. It was like, it was in my head. Well you know, people do shop for a long time.

They seem to enjoy it. I don't, but there must be a reason that would be something to it. So I decided to go into that discovery mode and decide, you know, what's all about. So I, I literally got up, went across to one of the shop assistants and I think I literally asked her, I said, what is the shopping thing about? I think she was quite amazed, but what I learned that day was that it's about colours, it's about shapes, it's about exploring. And it's about experimenting and different people have different colours that work for them, different shapes and different clothes. At work and actually it's more of an adventure. So I basically learned to shop on that day. And nowadays my daughter will take me shopping. I love it when you come shopping with me dad. Cause I'm, I'm there and I'll go around and I'll find things.

I know my daughter's colours, I know her shapes. I know what suits or what doesn't. And I'm willing to experiment and just have fun with it. You know, I genuinely enjoy it. And subsequent partners that I've had, you know, over the years record, I've been amazed. We go shopping for the first time that they take their man shopping to discoveries, actually enthusiastic. He's actually involved and pretty handy at it as well. So here's the point of this is on that day I found my congruent wire. I could have stayed there under duty, be a good boyfriend, sit and be miserable, you know, play on your phone. Or though that, that time we didn't have phones. But I've found my congruent, why, why I was choosing to be there and that, that's how the, and then the magic happened. And to this day that has continued to be a benefit for me.

I love shopping with the women in my life and I love shopping for myself, which I probably could have to this day have been just a, another grumpy bloke who sits in the corner looking miserable. And when the woman comes out just goes, yeah, it looks nice without any conviction rather than going, Hmm, not quite. Doesn't quite suit you. Oh, when a vet camp they didn't like, no, it doesn't quite see you stepping into my feminine. So there we go. But that was the point. I found my congruent wine. It was the same with granny. When I think about it, because I'm again being asked the same question 15 times in a row isn't naturally a joy. But again, if you recall, I literally decided to make it a practise of presence. And something beautiful unfolded again. I found my congruent why? So I went from what again would have been a duty visit.

Old granny's not well. Got to go and visit her to something where I could be fully present. And from that, you know, I got to hear things about her life and about my family that maybe never would have heard. I got connection with her in a way that I never would have, would have experienced. So that was from finding the Congress [inaudible] which allowed me to be present. So this Christmas, my beloved listener, if there's a gathering that you feel duty bound to attend or feel trepidatious about, then my invitation to you is it takes some time to contemplate what your congruent why might be

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So I have a little bonus suggestion for you here because I know sometimes you can ask yourself that question and you kind of, so in the form of what seems impossible that you end up just scratching your head and going whatevs right? So I don't want that for you. I want to give you a way that you can, can sort of work with that. And I'm going to offer you a way to use the NPA process just to sort of support you in finding you congruent. Why? So, I mean, if, if you're able to just sit and find your answer then then brilliant. You know, jobs are good and you've got it. But if it ain't coming easy, then I want you to go and download the NPA sheet as ever. It's free. You can get it easily at Bieber, inhuman.com if you want to go straight there.

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Human.Com/Npa sheet, that's NPA. And I've got, I've lost the pneumonic. I said it so many something Papa alpha. What's air November. Thank you. November Papa alpha is cause we're in December. That's what it is. So paper, inhuman.com/npa sheet. We'll get you straight there or you just go to the homepage and PayPal and human.com. And you'll see it there. There's, there's a link towards the bottom of that page and you can find it. You can download it. I'll send it straight to you. Now the NPA process is, and I haven't really talked much about it so far on, on this podcast. I probably ought to at some point you do a sort of full disclosure on NPA. But I haven't. But if you're done of the sheet, you'll notice it's a six line spoken word processes. There's, you'll see the six lines there. And in the lines there's some blank spaces where you would put what I call the cookie cutters or the keywords into the space.

Now there's a whole process normally where you find what is, what is a connected cookie cutter. What is a, a keyword that's alive in you. But for the purposes of this and just trying out on it, and if you haven't done a lot of NPA or haven't done any NPA, it's a good way to start. So I mean it's just the cookie cutter, the thing that you put in that blank space. So what you can put in there is literally congruent. Why? So what you do is you get the sheet, you'd put congruent why in all the spaces, then you'd read the whole thing, say it out loud, and then just let it go. Now what you might experience there with MPS is true. Whatever the thing is you're working on, sometimes you might have a, an aha or a moment. We might get some physical sensations happening.

You might find the answer just boom, it just just comes to you. Or you might feel nothing. And that's okay too, because what really you're doing with the NPA processes is you're greasing the wheels. Really, you're dropping the resistance and open the doors so that the, the answer can come and find you. So if you can, that'll help. If you're having a hard time, go do it now. Go and download the process sheet. Not only will it help you with this, getting a Christmas straight, but on, in so many other ways as well. So again, it's be a Britt human.com. You can go there, you'll find the link or.com/p a sheet. So there we go. That's me for today. Thank you so much as ever for listening. I hope this episode got you off to a good start this December perhaps gives you another dementia on your preparations for Christmas.

Again, I so appreciate you subscribing. Send me a message. You know what you want me to talk about? Just offer some feedback. Just say hi Gordon. Someone just do it. Hit that button and say hi Joel. I thought I'd leave you a message. That would be cool. Any feedback also? I'm going to ask for what do I want for Christmas? Well, I'd love for Christmas. Is it for you to share? Well, send me a message. Subscribe, do all that stuff. But I'd love you to share the show. There's definitely ways you can share it. Cause if, if you enjoy it then, then it's great to share it with your friends. There are several ways you can do that. On Facebook. You can come to a NPA rocks. That's the MPA page, which is facebook.com/npa rocks. And I always put posts up around the time of the each episode going out.

So you can find one of those and just click share. Or if you're someone who, who listens to this on YouTube or if you tone, you can go onto YouTube. My YouTube channel is youtube.com/joel young. Very simple. It's called the be a brilliant human channel there and find one of the videos or is it's basically a a picture with a moving audio wave and the, and the recording for over the top. And you can share that onto Twitter, onto, onto different places. And you can also just share the new website. Why not show the new website, didn't think of that is paper and hema.com. Just put that in, share it. Or if you want to share a specific episode again, you can use that, that thing, be able to human.com/episode number one, two, three, four, five, six 99, whichever one you want to do.

And one of the things when you share the share, this kind of thing and it would really, really help me, it's telling you folks why you love it. Why are you sharing it and why do you think they'll benefit from listening? It's one thing to just share it and that's great if you do that. But if you share it with a, with a Y to sort of, you know, congruent, present, why why you think they'll love it, why you think it would be good for them to listen, that the great encouragement to people to actually click that link and check us out. And of course as ever, it's a busy time, stressful time or can be a stressful time. Suddenly you've got something going on, it can heighten it with Christmas and all that stuff. Then then of course you can come and investigate a one-to-one or one to one sessions with me.

As you know, you can go to Jordan, mpa.com/sessions or again, if you're on PayPal, inhuman, human.com. There's at the top on the menu there's a, there's a thing that's says sessions. You can click there or in the resources section, there's a sessions link there as well. And remember, you can book a 10 minute free session with me if you're interested, happy to chat for you with you for 10 minutes, check it's a fit for you. Find out what's going on and and see how I can help you and as ever, just go ahead and download that MBA sheet. You haven't already done it. And if you have already got MBA, then just just, I knew I haven't had time with your congruent, why do the exercise do what it is? So next week we're continuing the theme. So next week I'm going to be sharing 14 festive FUBARs you just shouldn't take personally, so I will see you next week. Otherwise, thanks so much for being here and let's cue the mu [music].