The third P of the 3 Ps is the wildly controversial – Progress. Noticing progress with our self-growth improves our career and life advancements.

The 3 Ps are an easy way to break down the everyday practice of being a superheroine.

But before I jump into progress… let’s do another quick pass on the first two Ps – peace and playbook.

Today I’d like to talk a little bit about meditation… it’s one of the deeper peace practices and I can tell you from experience that it has been one of the most powerful transformation tools in my life.

When I started my meditation practice I was reading lots of books like Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and  The Power of Now, Ken Wilburs no boundary and integral theory, Mark Epstein’s Thoughts Without a Thinker, Adyashanti End of Your World and many more…

And the word on the street… ‘if you will’… in the community of peace practitioners… went something like this… you are either one of two kinds of people, either you like to meditate or you like to do yoga. I like these kinds of classifications at the beginning of anything new. When you are starting out it gives you a good way to pick one of two options. Then jump into whichever one you choose. Well, I’m the type to jump… but I realize some people are the tippy-toe, tippy-toe types. It’s all good. Take your time or jump right in or anything in between, pick one and go!

Meditation to me, seemed like it was easier. I had a false sense of thinking that movement couldn’t do anything to help me with practicing real peace. Of course, I was wrong!

At the time, I was in serious need of creating major change in my life so I was also willing to do the thing that could get the best results. So, I went to Kripalu ironically for a meditation retreat through movement with Kim Eng who is Eckart Tolle’s partner. And I can say, it was lovely to be in her presence.

When I returned home after this retreat I followed my sense of agency for making meditation practice in my life. I signed up for a local meditation class where I would meet four other women on a similar path. We were the only ones in the class and the five of us would secure a solid bond of sisterhood beginning with our time together in that class.

The instructor suggested 1000 hours of meditation to get started. I did the math on that and immediately reacted with frustration… I wanted instant gratification and 1000 hours was gonna take a bit. It was the only option I felt I had at the time to create the change I was seeking so it sealed the need in my mind, and I committed myself to meditation practice. Looking back, I am absolutely grateful I did. Had I not taken those steps over 10 years ago, I would not be on the path I am today. One thing truly leads to another, and it led me on an adventure to discover the most amazing things about myself and about life one step at a time.

Here are my top 3 suggestions for anyone starting with meditation…

  1. Seek guidance on the how to’s of a practice. There is a way to sit, a way to breathe, and a way to choose an object of focus for the meditation practice. I’ll share links in the show notes.
  2. Meditation practice is just like anything else you practice – start with 5-10 minutes a day and work your way up as you continue your practice.
  3. Explore different types of meditation because there are many different varieties. For example:
    1. Guided meditation – recommended for beginners where someone instructs you what to do and how to do the practice.
    2. Choose an object of focus for the meditation practice – like your breath or a physical object.
    3. Yoga Nidra which is more like meditation to me… I know it sounds weird like it’s yoga in the name, but this is one of my favorite meditations or yoga practices – which ever way you look at it.

That’s all I have for now on peace and practicing peace.

Now on to the Playbook!

I’m so excited about the playbook, it is powerful and I’m thrilled to bring such a powerful tool to the world! I feel as though something so powerful should come with warning signs… If coffee must come with a warning sign in an effort to protect the user, so should this playbook!

Just like coffee… I could say Caution: Contents HOT! That is rather fitting when I think about it! If I go a step further using more words I can say…

Caution: May unleash unlimited potential at will… results are never guaranteed and the only one responsible for behavior is the player or the user. That is actually true in life. You are the only one responsible for your own behavior. We’ll touch on this inside the playbook.

I’ll let my listeners and clients decide how to fill in the blanks on any other Cautions that should come with a playbook for women on women’s empowerment!

Let’s get into the outline! I have a final draft that goes like this:

  1. The Objective of the Game
  2. The Playing Field
  3. Skills, Talents, and Essence
  4. Connection, Inspiration, and Support
  5. Playing the Game
  6. Improper play, Illegal action, and misconduct
  7. Outside the Playing Field

And now for the third P in our 3 Ps – Progress

For an Everyday Heroine, at the core of her being there is a guiding principle that drives her essence, her being, her chi, her prana, her mission in life… and it comes from a place that understands whole-heartedly that if you are not growing you are dying. Not everyone believes this and not everyone is an Everyday Heroine. That’s partly what makes it so controversial.

Many thought leaders claim the quote ‘if you are not growing you are dying’ but when I do the research the credit goes to William S. Burroughs.

The part that makes this principle controversial has at least two forces.

1 force is the illusion that women must work harder than men to ‘compete’ and to claim their share in the workforce. Obviously, that is not true to some extent!

The other force comes from this place where there is just so much noise coming at people from so many different directions that we just don’t know what to think about progress and it is easy to get into overwhelm about all of those messages when no matter what they say it feels like pressure from each direction. One side says you must progress and the other side says, you’re perfect right where you are, no need to change.

If you think or feel that you need or want to change then that’s probably your call to greatness talking and you may want to listen to that call. Best thing to do is go back to P #1 where you practice peace, get in touch with your inner self and let that part of you drive the ship. Unsure about the whole thing… there are many coaches out there myself included that offer coaching consults. That’s where you can get on a call and get coaching to see if growth and progress is right for you.

When this feels right for you. Don’t wait and don’t hesitate… check out the links in the show notes, go to mariakauffman.com or my social media channels and find the coaching consult links… get on my schedule. It is a powerful call! It opens life up to powerful change when you say ‘Yes’ to your call to greatness.

The Everyday Heroine is ultimately meant to grow as an individual and to share her story of growth with others so that they too can benefit when they wish.

I have three levels of perspective on progress that hopefully help and highlight the benefits each way…

First – progress from highest level self

First, I like to look at progress from my highest-level self first. Coming from my coaching school, I follow a framework where there are two types of energy and seven different levels. My highest level self is that part of me that witnesses my life ever so patiently over the course of a lifetime.

This higher-level self has no judgment and no attachment to any single moment in time. This is a beautiful thing because within each of us we all have a higher-level self that simply loves us no matter what is happening. It knows that in each and every moment the perfect thing is happening to unfold the story of a lifetime. Your higher self knows that the journey we are on in this lifetime is unfolding perfectly at each moment. You experience pure joy and passion.

Second – progress from the lowest level self

Next, I like to look at progress from my lowest level self. This is the highly judgmental part of me that requires a judgment on whether the circumstance is good or bad, success or failure, happy or sad, your fault or my fault… on and on and on!

I actually love this part of me too because this is the part of me that is going to say, hey! You deserve to make more money than those jokers you are working with so go do what you need to do to make it so!

This is something to be increasingly more aware of when and how it happens and all you need to do is notice it. Anyone with a meditation practice understands this skill because it is one of the first things you learn from a meditation practice. Sharon Salzberg is a wonderful guided meditation resource, and she will often say ever so soft in the middle of a guided mediation… that when a thought comes up – ‘just notice it’. I’m sharing a link where you can hear an interview she has on the topic of lovingkindness.

When you are aware that you are in your lowest level self you can check in and ask, how are you here to serve me right now? The lowest-level self acts from a place of stress, scarcity, fear, and limits. It responds in reaction to something in the human world like an interaction at work or driving down the highway, the results of a performance review or a job interview.

This also includes the reactions to the thoughts in your brain – how you wake up in the morning, what is the nature of your first thoughts when you wake, your thoughts about your thoughts about how you wake up in the morning. The reason why you check in is to see if it the direction those thoughts are taking you are in service of you. If they are you can choose to follow the direction. And if they are not in service of you then you can choose a different direction. Everything begins with a thought in life.

So when you hear people yelling about all the pressures around progress in this highly judgmental world of ours… the pressure to grow or to change or to be this or be that or be the other latest and greatest thing… you know right away, they are trying to be in service of you.

The people yelling ‘be the change you wish to see in the world’ like Gandhi would say are also trying to be in service of you. Clearly, Gandhi was speaking from a higher-level self. And to create the change or progress that Gandhi was able to accomplish, you had to use a higher-level self to overcome those obstacles.

Another quote I love when I discuss progress is the one from Einstein that says… you cannot solve problems from the same state of mind that created them.

This is exactly what he was talking about. Regardless of who you are, operating from the lowest-level self literally has a vibrational frequency. You can sense it, feel it. Lower-level energy is heavy, constricting, draining, destructive. And higher-level energy is light, expansive, uplifting, constructive.

Everyone knows someone who can suck the energy out of a room even when you are on the phone with them. And you also know someone you love to be with because you feel better after you are with them.

And I think we all can agree that there are problems in the human world that need to be solved. So in order to solve them, you must change your state of mind or get into your highest-level self in order to literally rise above the problem to solve it. The sayings are rather true when you hear someone say ‘be the bigger person’ this is what they are talking about. Vibrate at a higher energy level. Or rise above is another term used when overcoming obstacles. We need to rise above it.

Even if you are the one that is solving a problem that someone else created, you need to get into an energy level that is above the energy level that created the problem in order to solve it.

Third – progress from the authentic self

This leads us to the third level of perspective I like to talk about when I talk about progress– which is somewhere in between our highest-level self and our lowest-level self is our authentic self.

Typically, our highest self and our lowest self is something that we experience more seldom and they are fleeting in nature. In fact, we need to be somewhere in the middle to function as normal humans. Our authentic self is the average resonating level of energy we tend to function at over time.

Think about it, When we are stressed out or depressed or anxious, we can’t make much progress. And on the high side, when we are totally in bliss or in our passion it is also difficult to pay attention to normal human needs. When we lose track of time doing something we love, we are in our bliss.

When we are devastated or when we are in love, we can be in a state that ignores our own basic needs.

To be authentic means that we add up all our moments in life including the stressful situations, the blissful states of being, and everything else in between. We average them out into an energetic level that we know of as our authentic self.

This is where I need to throw in another plug for a peace practice. A term I love to use for practicing peace is ‘getting grounded’. Everyone seems to get it when you tell them to ‘get grounded’. Or you know what it means when you say that a person is grounded. As an electrical engineer, grounding is an essential part of designing a safe electrical system.

A well-designed grounding system allows unsafe electrical charges that build up over time to discharge into the earth so that no one and nothing gets hurt. A peace practice does the same thing for humans. Getting grounded means that you have a mechanism for discharging the buildup of emotions into mother earth.

Emotional charge that you collect from living life as a human needs somewhere to dissipate. That way it doesn’t collect or get stuck in our bodies. When it gets stuck we get dis-ease. Staying grounded and practicing peace helps our authentic self to resonate at a higher level of average energy… we discharge safely and we don’t have emotional charge hanging around to compromise the health of our authentic self.

You can also understand what I mean when I say that someone gets triggered. That’s a stress response. You are less likely to get triggered or to trigger with such intensity if you are regularly discharging or getting grounded. This is not something to completely avoid mind you. It’s okay to be stressed and to get triggered. You may not be exploring or growing enough in life if you are never stressed. The only way to grow is to get out of your comfort zone and triggers are normal.

From Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, he illustrates that we have a direction we can choose to take that leads to progress. I love how his hierarchy is shown using the geometry of a triangle. It insinuates that growth has a direction or a progression upward into the higher levels. It also insinuates how largely important it is to feel and be safe at the base levels so that growth has a solid foundation and a chance for upward mobility.

I believe that self-actualization is the direction of progress for anyone seeking to be an empowered person. It is the path I have always wanted to take. I have always believed that working toward self-actualization means being your best self. And at the same time, there is no pressure to get there, to get anywhere. You are perfect as is. The things you do each day may or may not add up in the end to growth or self-actualized. And it is all perfect.

So when I talk about progress, I am referring to personal progress for two reasons:

#1 Because the only person you can change is yourself. You cannot change anyone else. You can only lead by example so that others can choose to follow or not. Self-improvement is a personal choice.

#2 Because being your best self is the best way to solve problems in the world we live in. When you live life with a general attitude of ‘if you’re not growing, you are dying’ then you naturally become the change you wish to see in the world. The more you progress in life, the better you become at solving problems from a different state of mind. You naturally seek out the things that will help you grow at the time you need or want it.

Progress can accelerate and it can feel really satisfying. By that I mean I just feel lighter and more efficient with everything I do now that I am able to use my energy in a different way. I’m much more productive and it still feels lighter. Before I started my meditation practice my world was completely different. It was heavier and a lot less satisfying for me. I’m pretty sure that life is meant to be enjoyed and this is how we make progress toward that enjoyment.

Here’s the crazy thing I found over time. One, I needed to practice peace to help myself grow. Two I was spending so much energy, in the lower levels that it was exhausting. I realized I’m going to spend energy anyway, it is much more enjoyable to do it from the higher levels than from the lower levels. I just needed to get rid of a lot of built-up charge so that I could live lighter and enjoy life from the higher levels.

Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies. Life can feel like you are living out a real live version of this movie. So just remember, in the end, he gets the girl! Progress does happen. And in the movie, it is hard to tell in the beginning what its gonna take to make real progress. I trust that everyone listening is giving it their best shot. You are most likely the type that is open to learning a new path forward. That is more than half the battle and progress is being made.

From my own experience, I know this to be true. In the moments when life feels incredibly frustrating progress is asking for a chance to grow. Something or someone was always there when I really needed it. Or the perfect information showed up right on time.

Now, I’m finding out that I had most of it wrong. We live in a world that teaches us a lot of things that we need to unlearn later in life.

Progress just like in meditation practice is simply something to notice. Progress will happen naturally.

I take comfort from A Course In Miracles. Reading a lesson a day is one of my current peace practices. It helps me go deep. Lesson 3 is titled, I do not understand anything I see. It is a powerful lesson that inspires me to see the world differently. It reminds me that it is not my place to make sense of the things that I have no control over.

As I bring this episode to a close, I’ll sum up the 3Ps once again…

  • Peace – Practicing peace offers you a mechanism for accessing your inner strength especially when you are not practicing and when you need it the most.
  • Playbook – This is a new perspective and guide on playing the game of life for the Everyday Heroine, i.e. empowered woman
  • Progress – Actualize your advancements by noticing your progress.

For life coaching with Maria Kauffman check out our products and services here.

To schedule an empowerment session with Maria, go here!

For now, enjoy your adventures and journey responsibly!

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