#spirituality #selfdevelopment #personaltransformation
Where do you find belief in yourself?
— When you begin learning from a strong person, it can feel as though a squirrel is learning from an eagle. We are all different, but in that situation the squirrel realizes it will never be able to fly like that. That is certain. How do you deal with this?
— There is an enormous amount of content available now: so many teachers, coaches, instructors, and all kinds of people. Many people ask, “Where do I find that belief? How do I take steps myself? How do I do anything at all?” You listen to someone, and what do you tell yourself? “Well, it worked for him because he's that kind of person…” We have just heard a good metaphor: “How can a squirrel learn from an eagle if it knows from the outset that it won't be able to fly?”
This is actually a very deep and important question. It underlies our everyday lives and the enormous amount of material we take in. On one hand, a person consuming all this material may never ask the question: everything seems possible, and that message is often repeated. We know many authors, bloggers, and coaches who say that anyone can do anything. At Business Molodost, we once had the slogan, “Anyone can become anyone.” On the other hand, people watching all these videos may not have the strength to believe it, and their ego won't let them move to that first position. Inside, they carry an enormous fear that they won't succeed.
What can you learn from a strong person? The state of a student
When we talk about the squirrel and the eagle, we need to understand what the eagle will do as a teacher. If a squirrel is learning from an eagle, many people start thinking that it must learn to fly like an eagle. When I hear this, I think about how one person can learn wisdom, love, freedom, a sense of space, interaction with another world, and relationships from another. There is always something you can learn from a strong person.
The question is: why am I coming to a teacher? Am I going there to become that person, or to be myself while strengthening my own capacity to grow and develop? People very often ask me for an example from my life, of how I did something. Or they ask, “Alexander, if you were starting a business, how would you do it?” “If you were in my situation in the real estate business, what would you do?” “Alexander, how exactly do you interact with your wife? How do you deal with your child?” I don't answer directly. With these questions, I always bring the person's attention firmly back to the reason.
Where did this question come from? Why are you asking me? Do you want to understand how the world works and study it through my example? Or do you want things to work out the same way for you as they did for me? Do you want to understand the nature of truth? Do you want to understand how the world is structured, or copy this model so that the same thing happens for you?
If you choose the latter—and, for the most part, 99 out of 100 questions are asked for that reason—you have an illusion that you and this person are the same. From the moment you ask the question, you fail to distinguish yourself from the other person, especially if you are asking a teacher. In other words, coming to a teacher with this question, you are saying, “I will become what you teach.”
If a squirrel wants to become an eagle, no eagle who is a true teacher will agree to work with it. This is a quality of a teacher: how truly capable they are of recognizing a person's real request and deciding whether to begin working with them; of determining what that person will and will not be able to do. How well does the teacher understand that this person will not be able to fly or achieve certain results? How clearly do they see and know this?
A teacher's ability to see the real next step
I often give this example. I have a great many businesses of different sizes. People often come to me with questions: “How do we change our sales automation system?” “How do we structure our relationships with partners in terms of incentives?” But I see that this person's business will close in six months. How should I deal with that person? Should I give them an illusion and a solution for sales automation or working with partners, knowing that it has no significance? They are doing it so that their business will grow and they will get a result in two or three years. But here it is clear: in six months, they won't be there. Should I tell them? Should I talk about automation, or bring to light certain things they really need in the business now, for their actual next step? Because they will soon face this when they leave the business or their job. That is where they will have to make the right decision, and they need to start preparing for it now.
This is the teacher's ability: to see another person's real next step. And the student's ability is to want to be a true student, rather than to become the teacher. A true student will never compare themselves with another person in order to copy them, unless it is a specific task—for example, in sports. Especially when it comes to serious matters: watching a video about business development or personal growth, or coming to an experienced person for spiritual development or expanding the scale of their life.
The power of uniqueness: live without comparisons
Any specific question of “How did you do it?” rests on an illusion. I am a unique person. The way I did something, my relationships with my family, my wife, my children—that is my life, not someone else's. What's more, only I can truly understand my experience of living, my entire psychological and physical makeup, my hormonal state, all the nuances and sensations. You can make an enormous mistake by asking questions this way or wanting to achieve the same thing: you never know what you will encounter. I guarantee that many people would burn out in the very first hour of living my life, while for someone else it would seem a very easy way to spend their time.
These comparisons come from worlds of chasing achievement and personal gain, not from worlds of truly hearing the space around you and being a student. So when questions arise—“Could I do that?” “How do I reach the same heights as this person?”—or you find yourself thinking, “I'll do exactly the same thing,” stop and look. Why do you truly want to do something? Do you really need to reach some supposed heights? Or is there something you can always learn simply from a good person?
We live in a world of such falsehood, where so many people don't try to take the student's role and find something they need, something useful, in every moment of life—something that will help them develop, not simply for their own sake, but so they can help other people.
We are constantly judging and discussing other people, mocking them, looking for problems: “What did this person say wrong? Where did they make a mistake?” If I have come to learn, I need to forget about all of that. I should not be comparing anything; I need to enter the true role of a student. This isn't easy, especially in a world where false teachers exist. Among teachers who really are eagles, some are convinced they can make the squirrel fly, while others simply want to eat it. I suggest you always remember this, stop yourself, and remain in a place of freedom and a true understanding of what is happening. Don't rush through life. Love the people around you.
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Original video · Russian audio