The edge effect, adaptation, what Jim Rohn calls your three to five.
Change in inevitable. The cogs of life continue to turn round and round. Our time is finite and we can either be part of the change that occurs around us or we can be passive and life then feels like it happens to us. Anybody else flapping in the breeze? Or the term I use when adrift is being a man tosssed in the waves.
I’m all about change being engineered. Strategized and managed, either by oneself or with the assistance of someone. (That’s where I come in.)
So here’s the deal, humans are amazing. We do beautiful, brilliant, fascinating, and out of this world stuff… literally. We also do horrific and grotesque things, both to one another as well as ourselves. Fuck, the stuff we do to ourselves. Crazy, huh? How many of you out there are torturing yourselves on a regular basis? I’m not talking about kicking your own ass at the gym either, I mean subjecting yourself to horrendous suffering at the hands of your inner critic, your saboteur, or that shadow that tells you you’re worthless, unloveable, or unimportant.
What’s amazing about humans is that we adapt. We evolve through exposure to what our environment creates for us. This is our training throughout childhood. (And beyond too.) However we behave and however we come to make the decisions we do comes from that training. It’s mental, physical, emotional. All our reactions and the chain of events in relationship to any stimulation comes from our imprinting from experience and training. Got it?
What I’m getting at is we can and should be engineering specific environments in our lives to create adaptation in the ways that augment our capacity for love, peace, potential, safety, connection, fill in the blank______. As a mature adult, take charge of this phenomenon and fucking grow out of the painful patterns that continue to cycle and retraumatize you.
Making a short story long, the edge effect is where we come up against things that are different in life. The grey area of blending what we know and what we don’t know. People or environments that are abnormal to our own reality or historical experiences thus challenging our norm. One of my favorite sayings is, In order to get something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done.
Jim Rohn said,”You’re the sum of the five people you spend the most time with.” Choose them strategically and wisely to challenge you, to bring out your most brilliant and beautiful parts of you. And for gods sake people who are different than you.
If you want to know more, just ask.