|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…
|
on what your days reveal about your priorities, a future self with something urgent to tell you, and the questions that locate you on the map of your becoming
Hello there, friend.
I want to talk with you today about floors. About future selves. About five questions that, in my experience, have an almost unfair ability to locate exactly where you are in the process of becoming who you actually are. And about the cinnamon roll that was sitting in front of me this morning while I was thinking about all of this. [It matters. Stay with me.]
These ideas arrived from different directions this week and landed in the same place inside me. So I am going to offer them to you the way they arrived: together, unhurried, with full confidence that you will find what is most useful for wherever you are right now.
✦
on raising your floor, and why this is the most important thing almost nobody talks about
Here is the idea, offered without decoration because it deserves to land clean.
The speed at which a person scales their life is directly linked to how quickly and wisely they raise their floor. You can know someone’s floor, including your own, by what they do. By what they say yes to. By what their actual days are filled with, as opposed to what they say their priorities are.
This is where it gets uncomfortable in the most productive way. Because most of us are saying yes to things that are genuinely interesting and genuinely relevant and genuinely valuable. These are wonderful things. They are also, quietly and at scale, the thing standing between us and the work that only we can do. The work that carries 100 to 1000 times the leverage of the merely interesting things. The work that goes deep enough to change everything.
“Every time you 10x, you will have to re-examine your floor. You will have to raise it, sometimes uncomfortably high.”
— Ben Hardy
Raising your floor goes against psychological gravity. It means operating by a different set of rules than the ones the current system runs on. It means focusing on something higher and more leveraged, rarer and more valuable. It means solving what others have yet to consider. It means paying a price that others would look at and decide is too steep.
And it is the whole game. Every person I have watched build something real, something that genuinely compounds and endures, has been someone who was continually willing to re-examine their floor and raise it. To look honestly at what their days actually contained and ask: is this the most important thing I could be doing with this hour? This season? This chapter?
The cinnamon roll, for what it is worth, was absolutely worth my time. [Some things are genuinely the most important use of a Saturday morning. Use discernment.]
A practical note on what raising your floor actually looks like: it is almost always subtraction before addition. It is completing commitments that have run their course. It is the conversation where you say, with full warmth and full integrity, that you are choosing to redirect your energy. It is the calendar audit that reveals, sometimes with great clarity, that the most important work has been getting whatever was left after everything else. Raising the floor is the decision to reverse that order.
✦
the future version of you is begging you to be here
Mia Rigden wrote something I have been carrying around since I first saw it. She said she thinks about it every day. I understand why.
“There is a future version of you absolutely begging you to enjoy where you are right now.”
— MIA RIGDEN
This one lands differently depending on where you are. If you are in a chapter that feels genuinely good, it is a gentle reminder to receive it fully rather than managing it from a slight emotional distance. If you are in a chapter that is genuinely hard, it is something more radical: the suggestion that even this, even here, even now, is something your future self will look back on with a quality of longing you cannot quite access from inside it.
Because the future self knows what this chapter was teaching. The future self has the context that turns this moment from something to get through into something that was preparing something. The future self can see the full arc in a way the present self, standing in the middle of it, can only sense at the edges.
And what the future self is asking for, with what I can only imagine is enormous tenderness and a little urgency, is this: be here. Fully. Let this chapter matter to you while you are living it. Let the people in it matter. Let the morning light matter. Let the cinnamon roll matter, with its spiral of warmth and frosting sitting in a brown cardboard box in a patch of sunlight, asking nothing of you except your full and unhurried presence.
The Reversal of Desire, which Phil Stutz teaches, is the practice of moving fully toward the present moment rather than away from it. The future self calling back to the present self is the same teaching from a different angle: the present moment you are in right now is the one a future version of you will wish they could return to. That future self is already sending the signal. The signal is: this is worth your full attention. This is worth showing up for.
✦
five questions that find you exactly where you are
These arrived from a piece about identity transitions, about the quieter and more profound kinds of change that happen one layer at a time, without announcement, often without us fully knowing they are happening until we look back and realize the old story has become impossible to continue living inside.
I want to offer them to you exactly as they arrived, because they deserve the directness they were written with. And then I want to say one thing about all five of them together.
1
What finally made the old story impossible to continue living inside?
The quieter moment. The thing that had always been true but suddenly became undeniable.
2
What part of your old identity did you have to grieve?
The version of yourself you had to dissolve before the new one had any evidence to stand on.
3
What are you now available for, and what has your body already decided to move beyond?
What your whole self has already voted on, before your conscious mind finished the sentence.
4
If your life right now had a chapter title, what would it be?
Let the first answer arrive. That one. The one that came before the editing began.
5
Complete this:
“The version of me that survived everything believed ____. The version of me now knows ____.”
Here is what I want to say about all five of them together.
These are questions that begin conversations. With yourself, first. And then, if you are lucky and brave and have the right people around you, with others. They are the questions that locate you on the map of your own becoming. And they are, in the most loving sense, ruthlessly honest about the fact that the map keeps changing. That the territory keeps expanding. That the floor keeps asking to be raised.
The version of you that survived everything believed what it had to believe to get through. And the version of you that is here now, reading this, sitting with these questions, carries a knowing that the survival-era beliefs were always temporary scaffolding. They held you while the real structure was being built. And now the scaffolding is ready to come down and what it was protecting is ready to stand on its own.
A note on the grieving question, because it is the one people most often want to skip: the version of yourself you had to dissolve to become who you are now deserves to be honored. Genuinely honored, with actual feeling, before you move on. The new chapter is real. The thing that was released to make room for it was also real. Both are true. The willingness to hold both, to grieve the old identity while building the new one, is what keeps the transition from becoming just another story you are performing rather than actually living.
✦
where these three ideas land in the same place
The floor. The future self. The five questions. They are all circling the same understanding from different directions.
You are in the middle of becoming something. Right now. In this chapter, with these specific circumstances and these specific people and this specific quality of morning light. The becoming is already happening. It has been happening. And the most important decision available to you, continuously, is whether you are participating in it consciously or letting it happen to you while you are occupied elsewhere.
Raising your floor is the conscious participation. Sitting with the five questions is the conscious participation. Letting yourself fully enjoy where you are right now, as the future self is begging you to do, is the conscious participation.
All of it is the same practice: showing up for your own life with the full quality of attention it deserves. Giving the most important things the most important hours. Grieving what was real. Building what is becoming real. Being present to the chapter you are actually in rather than the one you are planning for or recovering from.
“Pausing to decide if something is worth your energy is itself a profound act of self-respect. It is the skill that makes all the other skills possible.”
— CORY ALLEN
The floor of your life is revealed by what you say yes to. The wisdom of your life is revealed by what you have learned to pause before answering. And the presence of your life, the actual felt aliveness of it, is available in exactly the measure that you are willing to be here for it.
Your future self already knows this. They are sending it back to you right now, through this moment, through whatever is sitting in front of you on this particular morning. The cinnamon roll in its cardboard box. The tea going warm. The light coming in at the angle it comes in at today and at no other day exactly like this one.
Be here. Raise the floor. Answer the questions. Your whole becoming is waiting on the other side of your full and willing presence to what is already here.
With warmth and full presence [and one completed cinnamon roll and zero regrets about it],
Paolo
FILED UNDER: RAISING YOUR FLOOR · IDENTITY · THE PRESENT MOMENT · QUESTIONS WORTH LIVING WITH
Leave a Reply