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My hypothetical friend Rob wants personal growth and counseling skills, so he signs up for a class. One of exercises involves visualizing energy in his body, shifting it from an agitated red to a calm green, and noticing his body becoming calm. When talking with another person, he visualizes that energy floating to them, and they become more calm too.
He doesn’t ever wonder whether the visualizations work by self-suggestion, adjusting his limbic system, posture, and tone, or whether they operate by some real energy that exists outside his mind. He doesn’t have any interest in testing or refining these energy techniques, because it doesn’t matter to him how they work, and they’re not central enough to his life to devote significant time to improving the results. He wanted an easy-to-learn tool to help calm him and his clients, and he got it.
I’m thinking about why people explore energy, so I can improve Energy Geek, both the content and the marketing. I’m seeing two main motivators: Results and curiosity. Rob is motivated by results.
I’m motivated by curiosity. When I was 11, a friend who loved fantasy novels talked about feeling energy from trees. I tried, and I felt a warm tingling. Was that energy or imagination? I have no idea. But I started exploring, stumbled onto a handful of real results, and have been driven to understand energy ever since. I care about results, but I specifically want to understand this thing I’ve been experiencing, what it is and how it works, and I trust that will lead to something useful. Often, when I get a successful result, my main excitement is knowing that I’m on the right track in understanding energy — the specific result is secondary.
Rob wants effective tools for calming himself and his clients. If you have a non-energy-related technique that works better or is easier to learn, awesome, he’ll take it.
I want to understand energy, which hopefully leads to something useful. If you have a non-energy-related technique, I don’t really care, because it doesn’t help me understand energy.
I’ve been viewing my unique quality as a focus on results. After all, concrete, measurable results show me I’m on the right track in understanding energy, so I care a great deal about getting concrete, measurable results. And Rob? He’s totally uninterested in seeing what his energy visualizations actually do. Does he even care about his results?
But I’m realizing: Rob cares about results as much or more than I do. Just different results. And, when every class offers “better results” (from something), that becomes a generic platitude rather than a real differentiator.
Curiosity is the real reason I explore energy. It’s the reason to test specific techniques, to separate out what’s energy and what’s imagination. I need to start from curiosity, and let results be the guidepost, not the destination.
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Very interesting post. Thank you.
As I read you post about curiosity and results I think to a line in a film I watched years ago with my son, you may have seen the movie yourself I believe quite a few people did it is called Jurassic Park. It was actually the third movie. In any case Dr. Grant is remembering when he last talked to a young man named Billy in the movie who had been killed by the Island. He says, “I have a theory that there are two kinds of boys. There are those that want to be astronomers, and those that want to be astronauts. The astronomer, or the paleontologist, gets to study these amazing things from a place of complete safety. ”
Then the boy Erik who he is talking to says.” But then you never get to go into space.”
To which Dr. Grant says,” Exactly. That’s the difference between imagining and seeing: to be able to touch them. And that’s… that’s ALL that Billy wanted.”
I believe to really know something to make it a part of you, you must do both, study a subject and also take part in it, practice it until you can not only do it consciously but subconsciously.
Thanks. Yes, I want to study and understand, but also do. Both are important.