An Hour of Power

Recently, I had an old friend ask for help in gaining clarity on his life. He wasn’t getting things done, and not spending time on his art.

We Zoomed, and he had a yellow pad filled with notes and observations — an externalization of his head.

No, I didn’t want him to read it to me. Instead, I asked a series of questions about the most important things he had to do every day.

An hour of cleaning

An hour of cooking

An hour of art

An hour of exercise

Eight hours of sleep

The problem was that he got mad when I didn’t want to slog through all his notes. Those notes, as I said, represented his confusion. If he had been able to write out his needs and plans with efficiency and effectiveness, he wouldn’t have needed to talk to me. He got mad. Actually threatened to end the call.

I just thought, “well, THAT will free up some time” and waited for him to either settle down, or break off the engagement.

I’m not there to resonate to his confused energy. He is there to resonate to my clarity.

He stuck with it, and what came up (of course) is that he had a standard of what was PERFECT (2 hours in the gym, 3 hours for art, two hours for cleaning, and so on) that ended up making a 30-hour day. But when pushed to define the absolute minimums, it was less. A lot less.