How to Master Anything

Announcer 0:28

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John.

John Moore 0:48

Hello, everybody.

ut there are hundreds, if not: 1000

was a kind of a separate Roman gods. I'm not sure exactly how that worked. But Sol Invictus means like the invincible or undying sun, right. And we see this in similar things in Egyptian culture, where you know, the the sun, god Ra, you know, rides his bark across the sky, and over the horizon and is reborn in the morning and everything. So the undying sun, and I'm reminded of that when we have storms or things are going rough. And we can apply that to our own lives, right? There's no matter what we're going through, there's always some light somewhere, I would argue the light, there is light inside you, no matter how you feel, or what we cover that up with that each of us has a spark of divinity within us. We are connected to all things all things are, have a divine origin. Anyway, not what I'm talking about today. But as you know, if you listen to this, I like to go off on tangents. Today, I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to shift gears a little bit, and I'm going to talk about mastery. And before you think I'm getting egoic, and thinking about like talking about becoming a master of the universe, or something like that, or a master over yourself for that, we may be talking a little bit about that. I'm not, I'm talking about the mastery of anything, mastery of any skill, or any ability that you want to master. And I'm going to talk about what it takes to master anything, I'm going to give you some shortcuts that I have found. And I'll talk a little bit about why I don't want to, I don't want to get braggy braggy, or build my ego up or anything like that. But but you should understand that people you take information from are qualified, there is a real thing going on in the world that I have seen this pandemic bring out in people where expertise and experience is devalued. I don't know why that is. But people who spend a lifetime studying things have generally have better information than your next door neighbor, who has just read a couple things on Facebook anyway. And we're gonna go, I'm not gonna talk about politics at all, this isn't a political thing. I'm having a little sip of coffee here. warmed me up after being outside shoveling snow. But I want to talk about what it takes to master skill and why people generally don't. And to give you some idea that I am at least somewhat qualified to talk about this. Now, I am not going to claim that I am a master of anything. But I have worked at certain things till I have gotten a fairly high level of skill and been recognized for that level of skill. And I'll give you a couple of examples. One is that I spent a great deal of my life studying martial arts. My, my preferred martial art is Japanese jujitsu, which is different than Brazilian jujitsu. And I studied and practiced that for decades and achieved the rank of a third degree black belt, which is better, I guess, a higher degree higher ranking than the vast majority of people achieve and you know, got my teaching license. It's called a Menkyo, which is a teaching license. So I taught for a really long time. And I was able to do some cool things like You know, go teach, teach self defense classes at places like cool places like Harvard Medical School, and you know, some law offices all over Boston and go teach people who serve as bodyguards for the Secretary of Defense, we got to go, you know, teach them, so I got to do some really cool things.

Because I had achieved a certain level of training a certain level of skill with that. Okay, and I'm going to talk about what it took to get there. Um, you know, when I decided to go into shamanism, I went in just to pick up a few skills and, and, you know, never had any intention of working with anybody else, or teaching or anything like that. And then I figured out that I really love to teach. And I really love working with other people. So I have not, I now have clients all over the world. I've had clients in Europe and clients have in, you know, the, as far as you know, between between Europe and the West Coast of Canada. Anyway, I haven't yet to have clients in in Asia, or Africa, but I would certainly welcome the opportunity. But anyway, I've clients spread out all over the world, and students all over the place, and, you know, just really something I love, and they spent a really long time picking up skills and knowledge and practicing and going through some pretty big changes in my life to get there. So there are a few things. I mean, I, I, when I decided to go into technology early in my life was in my early 20s. I didn't have a degree in technology. And so I just self taught some technology skills. And then I had a 25 year career in technology, where I wind up being, you know, getting up to the level of vice president of a company, in charge of entire in charge of technology. So there's a few areas of my life and a few different things that I have, I won't say mastered, but I will say, have have gotten a high enough level of skill to be recognized I was tapped to, I co authored a technology book a few years back, and I've written, I've written extensively on spirituality and put out courses and I had a column and I do a weekly radio spot and all kinds of things. So I've been able to in the areas of my life that I really, really care about. I have been able to get to a point where a lot of people have not, are there people who are, you know, at a level, a higher level or more skill or more experience? Absolutely. Absolutely. And the other thing I want to say is that I don't think that I'm particularly smarter than anybody else, or better or whatever, I'm not comparing myself to anybody, other than to say, I figured a couple things out early in life and I want to share them, I figured some things out that have worked really well for me. And they did have, I did have a little bit of an advantage. Some might consider this a disadvantage, but an advantage I have was that I was I was born with some musculoskeletal birth defects. In fact, when I was born, doctors told my parents that I would never be able to walk. And one of the things that my parents did really, really right by me is to not accept that and make me appreciate that I could do anything that I really put my mind to that I might have to try extra hard or harder than other people were to do things certain things. Some things might come naturally to me some things are much harder to me. But you know not only did I learn how to walk but I played sports as a kid I played baseball, football over the summers I played lacrosse and soccer and I you know wound up really loving martial arts and training in that and you know, I talked about where I got to without. So that the number the number one thing But I got from all of that experience is just tenacity, just sheer sticking with something. Right? When something I cared about is really easy things I don't care about, I have a much harder time with, and I totally get that. So let me think of me think of something. Um, you know, I,

and this is not, you know, this is not to take anything away from any anybody, but I'm not really into say knitting, right, and I know lots of people are, and that's fantastic. And whatever you're into, that's great. You know, and in fact, my significant other is fantastic with fiber arts, she knits and weaves, in fact, spins her own yarn, and all kinds of stuff. And she no dyes, her own wool and all kinds of very skilled, very beautiful stuff. Fantastic. She really loves it, it's never been something that I've been into doing myself. And so, a couple times, I've tried to do it, or whatever, I just kind of don't kind of go get it, and I don't really stick with it. But if it were important to me, I would I would learn how to do it. And, you know, for something that really, and maybe someday I will, maybe someday I will be like, you know, what I really want to get into knitting, it just seems like seems like something I would love. And, you know, I would stick with it until, till I got it. So, so anyway, I have a few things to share that I hope are helpful. If you want to achieve something in your life, anything, I don't care what it is. So, you know, let's say, you know, let's talk about goals and stuff like that a little bit, okay, so people will frequently have a goal, that is a very long term goal. And they will give up, because they don't achieve that long term goal in the short term. And it doesn't make a lot of sense, this is where tenacity comes in, right? For example, you know, if I, if I started out in martial arts, for example, saying, I just want to get my black belt, I just wanna get my black belt, just want to get my black belt. Um, you know, it took me years to get my black belt years, maybe seven years, something like that was a very long time in my school to get to get to black belt level. You know, I probably would have quit after a month or something, because that wasn't on there, even on the radar. And it's fine to have long term overarching goals. But I think you have to be a little realistic. And sometimes it can be helpful to set shorter term goals. So key number one, to mastering anything, or getting good at anything, at least, is to have a level of tenacity. Meaning you're going to stick with it, you're going to you're you know, you're going to practice something for a long period of time where people fall down with this. There's a couple places one is the one I just talked about, is having a long term goal as a short term goal, and not understanding the difference. And the second one is not practicing the basics enough. And this is something I remember, not that long ago. My daughters were taking driver's ed class, and they were they had both driven for the first time with a driving instructor. And they came home and it had been a rough experience and whose first experience driving is completely smooth. I mean, the rough experience and the driving teacher yelled at them. And I don't know. They were just in shock about how how challenging it was to do something that they had never done before in their entire life. So they came home and they were like, I'm, I'm a terrible driver. I'm not gonna be a good driver. And like, wait a minute, wait a minute here. This is your very first time driving and you expect that you're going to be an expert that the first time you go out

it's like, I don't know, some: 9000

They're building this muscle memory. So I was watching a class by this artist recently is very good artists particularly skilled at drawing, drawing realistically and his his pieces are not just realistic, but show a lot of character and show a lot of action and his lines are beautiful and composition is great and all of these things. And he was talking about. He had a teacher and there's a specific way that he was taught how to make circles, draw circles, right? And drawing a circle, you know, there's a specific, you know, artistically, there's a few different ways to do it. But there's a different way of holding a pencil than you would if you were writing, right, the way that you hold the pen to write is a different way of using your arm. And there's a different, you know, distance between you in the paper and all of these things. So his teacher made him take 10 pages of paper every day, for a year, and make circles on the front and back. So 20 pages of circles every day, for an entire year. And most of us do not have the tenacity to do something like that. Although I sure would like to try, I guess, I mean, I do enjoy drawing and painting. So I do think that that's probably good lesson but and what he said was that masters are not afraid to engage the basics or reengage the basics. It was the same when I was coming up in martial arts and training, you know, everybody wanted to get to like, show me the advanced stuff, show me the Five Finger Death touch, show me the jumping backflips spinning in the air, blah, blah, blah, right. And my teacher would have us practice the same basic footwork, there's 10 basic ways to move your feet in my system of martial arts. And he would have us practice that over and over again, for three hours, sometimes. Most people don't have the fortitude to do that. But, you know, over time, you get really good. You don't even have to think about anymore. If you remember, I'll talk about a skill that you probably most likely have mastered. And you can probably think of others. And we don't think of these things as hard anymore, because we do them without thinking. And that is something like tying your shoes or brushing your teeth. And when you were a small child, it took a while before you could do either of those things without thinking really hard about what you were doing. Right, and you had to have your you know, your parent, lean over you. And I remember when I remember learning to tie my shoes, and we did the whole mix the rabbit run around the tree and up through the whole kind of thing. And to do that over and over again and think really hard about it. And I couldn't get the laces quite tight enough. And they would come untied all the time. And I mean, it took a while to get good at that even though it's a fairly simple skill. We don't remember stuff like that, usually because we're really young, but we don't think we I don't remember learning how to walk. I you know, it was probably somewhat challenging for me having you know, some birth defects that might have prevented me from walking. I'm having another sip of coffee here. Pardon me. And let's get coffee. I'm the, you know, learning how to walk. If you watch you know, you watch a toddler or baby first learning how to walk they have to be very conscious of making steps and they fall down a lot, just good that they're so low to the ground and generally kind of kind of, you know, pudgy, so they they, you know, they bounce a little bit when they fall down and they usually don't get hurt or at least hurt too bad. You know, and then they want to run right? Um, my my daughters were runners let me tell you chasing twins. You had me, boy, you know, got some exercise back then. Okay, so you have mastered skills. If you can walk brush your teeth read right?

Um, you know, talk all of these things you at one point you couldn't do and you mastered them. Think about how complex a skill something like writing is like handwriting. You know, first of all, you know there is the artistic part where you have to make the letters look like something else. So there's this whole muscular thing I hand eye coordination then you have to learn how to spell stuff. And that can be really challenging. And some people have learning disabilities that make that much harder and, and get over and get over it, you know, not get over it, but they, they learn how to work within their, their learning disabilities to, you know, become proficient at these things. And I'm always amazed by that I'm, you know, having overcome some disabilities myself, I, you know, always impressed by people who, who can work with what they've got. And, and, and do great things. You know, lots of great minds had what we would now consider learning disabilities at some point. You know, people talk about Einstein. He was a special case, but, you know, one point he was considered on teachable and sent home from school, I think very early in life, that was probably a good thing for him that probably wound up, you know, pushing him a little bit. I know, for me, I was when, when somebody told me, I couldn't do something, I would do it just to spite them. I would do it to prove them wrong. Like nothing pushed me further, and that's me. You know, that might not be you. But that's definitely me. If somebody says, You can't do that, Oh, yeah. Well, let me show you. I will do that. And I'm still, you know, I'm still quite a bit like that. I was told, I remember taking, taking a test, one of these standardized tests they give to every student in the entire United States, constantly testing, I still have no idea what good that does. To one of these standardized tests, and scoring poorly in the I was in middle school, and I scored poorly in the writing assessment part of it. And, you know, my mom went to some parent teacher conference or something, and she came home, they're like, well, they told me you couldn't write, like, really? Well, that's interesting. Um, you know, I'm a published author, you know, I've written stuff, I've written lots of stuff, I write all the time. It's a big part of what I do is writing stuff. So I don't know. I don't always, again, somebody tells me, I can't do something, it's gonna push me a little bit. It's extra motivating. I have a healthy distrust for authority and a healthy dis trust for I do trust the opinions of experts to to an extent until it gets into something like you can't write or you'll never be able to walk or you know, when they start saying ridiculous stuff like that. So, a couple of keys of math mastery that I've kind of talked about, I'm going to recap a little bit. Because I want this to be useful. So there's something you've ever wanted to learn or do or get better at. I don't care what it is, could be, you know, starting and running a business or you know, some physical skill, some sport, some art, you want to learn, you want to learn how to sing. I have a lot of people. Lot of people make excuses. They're these sort of cut, you know, these, these, what I call pocket excuses. These things that people pull out of their pull out of their pocket. Like, I can't learn how to sing. I'm tone deaf.

Um, I don't think that's the thing, actually. Um, I mean, it might be but I think it's, I think it's very, very rare. It is it is far more rare than the number of people I've heard say they were tone deaf. I can't I can't say I'm tone deaf. What that means is they tried to sing at one point in their life. They were off key because they had never trained in singing in their life, never taken a singing lesson in their entire life. And all of a sudden, they weren't Beyonce, or Mariah Carey or whoever they were comparing themselves to. And so they they ascertained that they were tone deaf, it's not any kind of diagnosis. It's a self diagnosis. And frankly, it's crap. Um, you know, similar things to people say I can't meditate Because I can't stop my thoughts, okay? You're comparing yourself to Buddha. You know, I'm going to, I'm going to give you some real practical advice, too. So people have these pocket excuses if that's you cut it out. That's my practical advice. Stop it. If there's anything you want to do, and you have this pocket excuse, I can't do that. Because that's, that's convenience. That's a convenient excuse. What you're really saying is, I was not born being able to do this skill, and I feel embarrassed trying or I, you know, it hurts my self esteem to not be perfect at something I tried the first time. That's really what it is. And when you you know, not to be harsh with anybody but but understand it, understand that that's it, you are not tone deaf, you are not unable to meditate, you're not able to unable to draw a straight line. That's another. That's another one I hear about people learning to draw, I can even draw a straight line. So what do you think you gotta learn how to draw straight line? Do you think it's really important to draw a straight line in art? Hardly. Hardly anything in art consists of a straight line, unless you're doing like architectural drawings, or something like that. I can't even draw a straight line. I've heard that so many times. It's a pocket excuse. It's a, you know, it's an excuse you somebody heard once? Oh, yeah, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hang on to that. So I can use that. So I don't have to, you know, and I don't care. Like if you don't want to learn how to sing or draw or ride a horse or what, you know, whatever, that's fine. But drop, drop the excuses. Like just say, you know, like, with me in and knitting, like, I just haven't been into knitting. I am fully convinced I could learn how to knit. If I if I wanted to, I would have to put some effort into it. Because I never, I think my grandmother tried to teach me when I was a kid. And maybe I did a little bit. You know, and it just didn't interest me that much. So if you're not interested in something, that's totally fine. But get really clear on when you're using these pocket excuses. What that actually means. What you're actually saying, and you should have this BS alarm going off in the back of your head, every time you or anyone else around you uses one of these excuses. I can't do that. Because, huh. You know, and it's trite. But, you know, there used to be a thing where, you know, can't is a four letter word. What is Qantas? Really like it's final? It's like, I can't, I can not. I am not skilled at this yet is a much more accurate description. So a couple things. Couple things I'll recommend. That's one of them. One of the things I recommend, yeah, a big one I recommend is understand, like, if you if any of these excuses. If you're using any of these excuses, just understand what they are and understand that they're crap. I'm going to start when somebody tells me I can't sing because I'm tone deaf, or I can't carry a tune. Or I can't do this because X, Y or Z, and it's one of these excuses. I'm just going to point at them and say, bullcrap. No, I want to that I'm a nicer person.

But I will ask them to challenge and I've done this with, with clients, because I coach people as well, when I've had coaching students say, you know, coaching clients, rather not coaching students coaching clients say, I can't do X because of why I would say, Well, I mean, to challenge that belief you have, I'm going to challenge you to prove prove that that's wrong. You do the same thing with yourself. If you have a belief that's holding you back, challenge yourself to prove that your belief is wrong. A belief is just something that you hold to be true, regardless of its whether it's true or not. So these excuses are just beliefs. And the other thing that beliefs are is they are habits of thought. So if you tell yourself enough times, I can't sing because I am tone deaf. That becomes a habit. And it also becomes a self fulfilling prophecy meaning, um you know, I always remember, I remember like, in college, and high school and stuff and people like, you know, there's a, there's a bug going around and I'm gonna get sick, I'm gonna get sick, I'm gonna get sick, those people always got sick. And I would say, I don't have time for this, I got finals coming up, I'm not getting sick screw that, and I would never get sick. I remember there was a, there was a some kind of bug, and it was a virus or bacteria or whatever in the water supply in the building I lived in in Boston, of in this horrible, rundown building. And we had, there were 200 people in the building, with really bad stomach issues. And, you know, to the point where some of them, some of them, you know, did have to go to an emergency room or, you know, see a doctor or whatever, and they came in, and they're like, you cannot use the water till we figure this out. Don't brush your teeth, don't take a shower, don't drink the water. And I was like, screw that. I mean, I, you know, probably not going to drink the water, but I'm gonna brush my teeth and take a shower and do all of those things. I'm not gonna you know, how long I have to smell bad and have nasty teeth. So I did, and I never got sick during that time. So belief is powerful beliefs important. I'm not saying you can ignore health warnings, and I'm not at all recommending that I was younger and not as not as cautious about my health back then maybe. But, um, you know, who knows, we know placebo effect, you know, is like, has a huge effect on many things. And so does know SIBO effect is the opposite of placebo. Meaning if I give you something and I tell you that it's poison, you're going to act as if, right? So mindset has a really important part to play. So understand where your excuses come from for things that you want to master, but haven't been able to yet. I've already mentioned this, but practice the basics. So mastery of anything, there's some I don't know where this rule came from. And it seems really, it seems like a really too broad a thing to actually measure. You know, so it's probably probably inaccurate when applied to reality. But it there is a truth ism to it, where they say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master any skill. And I would say I mean different skills. Try, you know, take a different amount of practice to master. Right? shooting a bow and arrow probably takes a longer time to master than throwing a throwing a nerf ball into a trash can from across the room. I don't know, depends on who you are, I guess. Anyway, but the idea is that you have to put, if you want to master anything, it's going to require effort, and it's going to require time. And there's this other mistaken belief that is frequently unspoken, but I see it happen with a lot of people in a lot of different fields. And that is if I am making an effort at something, I don't have the talent for it, or I wasn't born with it, or I'm not good at it and I can't get good at it. And this is part of that talent myth. Right?

had to eat. I forget how many: 1000

I can remember, I remember certain,

you know, certain martial arts, things I was trying to get. And, you know, seeing a teacher do this thing where you could like, leap through the air and scissor kick somebody's legs and twist around in midair. And, you know, tie the person up in a pretzel and just looking at that, and like, Okay, you made that look easy. I, for me to do that, do that specific technique, I'm probably going to have to put a really lot of hard work into it. And it wasn't to say I couldn't learn stuff that was really hard that I put a lot of effort into, I could, and I did, and I put a lot of effort into getting good at what I did. And into learning how to teach as well. Teaching as a skill unto itself. And teaching adults is different than teaching kids. And, you know, I, I threw myself into the fire. A lot of times, I taught, like I said, I taught, I remember teaching a class at Harvard Medical School. And then a couple weeks later, I taught a class at a shelter for pregnant teenagers, very different audiences, very different audiences. And not to take anything away from the pregnant teenagers living in the shelter. Because they were tough, and tenacious. And, you know, unfortunately, a lot of them had been abused. And so they were really, really interested in learning how to defend themselves, and they're there soon to be children. But different, very different approaches, right? Very different approaches to teaching different audiences and people want to learn, you know, they're not as interested in the anatomy and physics of it as just the sheer practicality and the, the, you know, the people in Harvard Medical School. You know, if I talked something, you know, if I made something up about anatomy or something like that, they'd call me on that. So it's different, you have to shift your, your approach a little bit. So. So efforts, okay. So, understand that if you want to master anything, you're going to put a significant amount of time into it, and you're going to stink at it for quite a period of time, you're not going to be good. At almost anything you try the first time. You might have you know, what they call beginner's luck, or beginner's mind known. I'll talk about beginner's mind in a second. It's another one that is really, really powerful, will shorten your learning curve.

So let's talk a little bit about shortening your learning curve. One way, one really good way to shorten your learning curve on anything, is to get individual attention, attention from somebody who's really good at that skill. So if you can, you know, you can go take a class and something but if you can get a private lesson in something that will, you know, somebody who's somebody who's good at teaching a and really and has a good handle on that skill. Take a private lesson, get a coach, any of these things you can do will, will move you move you forward much quicker. And then the other thing is called beginner's mind. And this comes from Zen, I believe. And, you know, there's a book by Suzuki called Zen Mind, beginner's mind. I'm very fond of it. And what he says is in the beginner's mind, and I'm gonna paraphrase a little bit, but in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities.

And the expert mind, experts mind there are a few.

So, there's an old Zen story. And you might have heard of this, but it's about a student who goes to the Zen master, and says, you know, I want to learn everything, you have to learn everything you have to teach me and blah, blah, blah. And the, you know, the, the master sets a cup of tea out and starts pouring the tea. And the students looking at him, and he's, he's pouring and pouring the tea and the tea cup is full, and he keeps pouring in, the tea is spilling all out. And since like, what are you doing? What are you doing, you're spilling the tea all over the place. And the Zen master says, Well, you didn't come to me with an empty cup. You came to me full of now, what you think of knowledge and opinions and all of these things. And so if you want to taste the tea that I have for you, you have to empty your cup. And this is about taking on the beginner's mind. Now, I've seen this in, I've seen this in martial arts. And I remember years ago, I went to go teach a seminar with my teacher at this place. And it was, they were going to be like a bunch of different teachers teaching different arts. And there was a teacher teaching what's called when Chung, which is a Chinese martial art. It's the one that Bruce Lee studied before he founded his own martial art. And I had never studied Wing Chun before. So I showed up early. And I had to, you know, I had to be dressed because I was teaching afterwards. So I came in, normally, I would, you know, not get dressed up in my, in my uniform with my black belt and all these things. But I was teaching right after, so I came in. And the guy was like, oh, you know, oh, here's the sky. And he gave me this look. And I knew, I knew in his mind that he was thinking, Oh, here's this guy, he's gonna come in and talk crap about my class while he's taking it. And the reason he thought that is because it was because people do that all the time, I've experienced that myself. I've experienced people walking in off the street into a class that my teacher is teaching. And start, you know, basically hackling from the back of the class, and like, this is your first day, you have no idea what you're talking about. But there are there's a lot of ego. And you know, I just wanted to learn from this guy. And I remember he, he, you know, showed us something and I go, I said something along the lines of wow, I really liked that. And he came up, he goes, Oh, you don't like that? And I was like, no, no, I really like that. I would never say I don't don't like that. And it took him a while to kind of relax around me. Because I think he thought I was going to come in there and disrupt his class because people in the West I will say, I don't think you would be able to do this anywhere in an Asian martial art school without serious repercussions for it. But people are very disrespectful. And frequently not everybody, but there are people who are disrespectful, and walk in with an ego and want to teach teach the class. I've seen this in teaching shamanism as well. People come in and they want to take over a class from the teacher

you know, I've been in classes where that's been irritating to me because I'm like, I am not here to learn from you. I'm here to learn from this teacher. If you want to offer a class I you know, offer a class but you know, don't don't try to teach the class. So have a beginner's mind. When you come into something new forget what you think you know about it. And it particularly if you're studying with a person who has been doing something for for a while, they might have a different approach or different way to teach you something. And if you are closed off from that you're going to take a lot longer to learn what he has to that he or she I'm sorry, I don't mean to be sexist in my he she or they has to teach. Drop your ego. Okay, drop your ego as best you can. And understand if you like if, if in your head you're feeling the urge to like, correct as you know, correct a teacher. Um, understand that that's ego. You know, it's not Teachers aren't correctable. It's not that, you know, I don't ever present myself as a guru. I'm certainly open to questions. And if people go, Oh, you know, you said this before, but this seems to contradict it. What do you mean by that? Well, that's an earnest question. Right? Or I don't understand this, like you said this, but not quite getting it. There's an earnest question or concern. Not, oh, well, you said this, but I was taught to do it this way. Okay, great. You know, you're, then you don't have to learn anything from me. I'm sorry, that you, you know, I'm sorry that you wasted your money. And I've seen, this hasn't, hasn't been an issue for me yet. Not saying it won't ever be. But I have seen my, my teachers, teachers in various subjects, ask people to leave and say, I will refund all your money, you're clearly not gonna learn anything. And on top of that, you're going to disrupt the rest of the class. And if you go to a class, and your ego makes you fight with the teacher, disrupt the class, decide you can teach the class better than teacher or whatever.

dians in the world during the: 1980

In fact, I went to school with at least one of them. But a lot of a lot of great comedians went to my college in Boston, and I just go to comedy clubs, and hecklers bothered, bothered me to, you know, to no end, because I paid to go to this club to see this comedian. And here's some person sitting at the front of the stage just, you know, yelling out or whatever. And they're just distracting from the show. And they're not funny, and I'm not paying to see them. And so, I used to really dislike that. And I remember I remember having seen a comedian, I went to a show with a bunch of comedians. Probably, I think it was probably the last comedy show I ever went to live so far. No, that's not true. I've been to some some others. I have a friend who's a who's a, an up and coming stand up comedian. But anyway, the last one I went to in Boston, I'll put it that way, years and years ago. And there were people yelling stuff out, and you know, whatever. And this comedian came out who was kind of a host, kind of the emcee for the evening, and basically said something like, you know, I used to work as a barista at Starbucks. And if, you know, somebody threw up on the floor in the bathroom, it was my job to clean it up. But that's not what I wanted to do all day long. Like, I wasn't asking people to come in here and throw up on the floor, so I could clean it up. And when you go to a comedy club, yeah, you know, it's comedians job to when they're up on stage to deal with hecklers. But that doesn't mean they want to. And when, when he said that, like, the entire audience erupted with applause because we were all tired of these hecklers. So don't be like that.

Be nice when you go to learn stuff. If you go to a class with a teacher, and you don't like the teacher, or you don't like what they're teaching, or you think you can do better, or whatever. It's not up to you from take away from the experience of other people. Handle it respectfully. If you want to leave the class, do it in a way that doesn't disrupt the class. Or if you don't like it, you know, go home, or stay to the end of the day and go home and you don't ever have to, you know, do anything with that teacher ever again. But don't be like that. So drop drop the ego. I've said that a lot in this podcast about dropping your ego. So I want to wrap this up. I'm coming to the hour mark here. And, you know, I hope this has been helpful. This has been a little less about spirituality and more, although it applies, it certainly can, you know, certainly applies to spiritual pursuits, or, or anything. But I want us to be incredibly practical, and I hope that you'll take what I've said to heart here because I believe in you And I want you to believe in you. If there's anything that you've ever wanted to do, and you say I can't, and you still can't get around saying I can't just tag it with a word yet. I can't do that yet. Because at least you're implying that you'll be able to do that someday. And if you have, if there's anything you've mastered, tying your shoes, any hobby that you have any work skill that you have, even dealing with other people know that you could you have what it takes to master just about anything. And by Master, I don't mean you have to be the best person in the world at something. I just mean, you have the ability to get to a level of satisfying competence with something where you can do things with less effort than a beginner and to a higher degree of skill than you might have even imagined. You can learn how to draw, you can learn how to sing, you can learn how to shoot a basketball or a bow and arrow or anything or meditate. please meditate, everybody should meditate. I don't use the word should very often. But I do believe that everybody should meditate. It's so good for you. And it doesn't have to be it does not have to be religious or spiritual at all. It can be just body, body mind, spirit practice. And I realize they use the word spirit here. But I said it doesn't have to be spiritual. But what I mean is you're you're training all parts of yourself. You're doing a good thing for all levels of yourself. So with that, I will wrap it up for this week, I hope please visit my website, please subscribe to this podcast, check out my YouTube channel, check me out on Instagram, follow me on Facebook, do all those things. And I hope to hear from you. If there are topics that you'd want to cover or people that you want me to interview I'm hoping

soon to be getting some more guests on the podcast. With that, know that I love you. I believe in you and I will talk to you real soon.

Announcer: 1:02:49

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John more. For more info or to contact John go to maineshaman.com That's MAINESHAMAN.com