Introduction and Chapter 1 – How to

stop being right and start being real

Accept what is.

Make real the parts of yourself that you thought you had to hide.

Shoulds prevent us from seeing how life really is and from taking
appropriate action. They keep you in denial about your actual feelings and
situation.

Deal realistically and creatively with the truth of your existence.

You’re most beloved when you’re most transparent (*)

Be present

Trust yourself to cross the bridges only when you come to them

We communicate with the intent to control (so that things happen as they
“should” or as if we were “ok”) rather then with the intent to relate.

80% of our communication is geared towards controlling things that are

beyond our control

People play it safe to avoid unwanted outcomes. (but also, at least in my

case, to prevent me from running the risk of being nasty or doing “bad” or
“unfair things”!!!)

Relating is how you get real!

Control-oriented communication is geared toward ensuring a predictable

result.

When you relate you speak your truth without knowing how this truth will be
received. It is a risk, but you’ve got to trust that whatever happens will be
ok.

To really experience true contact with another person, you must enter a
realm of uncertainty together.

1. Experiencing what is

Your body, your mind, your environment.

2. Being transparent

It’s harder to fool yourself when you go public about what you are!

3. Noticing your intent

Relate more and control less.

 4. Welcoming feedback

Verbal and non-verbal, to help you perceive your behavior.

5. Asserting what you want and don’t want

Affirms your write to want what you want!

6. Taking back projections

The mirror the others hold for us.

7. Revising an earlier statement

It’s ok to change your mind and feelings and it helps forgiveness.

8. Holding differences

Ability to have your own viewpoint AND hear and consider others at
the same time

9. Sharing mixed emotions

We are all contradicting! It’s ok! Share it!

10.Embracing the silence

The connection to the Source!

When you express what you’re honestly thinking, feeling and wanting, with
the intention of relating, you learn to participate in life, instead of control it!

Chapter 2 – Experience What Is

Feel it! Fu***ng feel it!!!

As long as you avoid experiencing whatever is calling out to be experienced,

you will not heal. A part of you will be lost.

The difference between “what is” and “what you imagine is”… Do not jump
to conclusions… State what happened and what was your interpretation of
what happened. Experience rather than interpret.

Automatically responding to your worst internal fear is a common control

pattern. Your buttons are pushed and you react. This pattern keeps you in
familiar emotional territory, where you don’t have to risk learning anything
about yourself. You don’t have to change.

Notice versus imagining exercise to:

• Distinct what your senses receive and what your mind does with the
information. Take responsibility to your mind’s machination!
 • Let other people have their interpretation about you – and noticing
how you feel about them.

Practice it and let people know about it, so that they’ll take your
interpretations more likely.

Be a “noticer”, not a “reactor”.

In difficult times, it’s more comfortable to focus on what you think should be
happening, then in what is really happening.

Experiencing the pain, as it really is, can make it hurt worse, but entering it
fully can lead you through it to the other side.

Reactive imagination (as with skeptical minded) supports the illusion that
one knows what is going on.

A button is a belief gone mad!

Once you have tried testing reality a few times and found out something
that you didn’t know (relating), you will learn that it actually feels better
then pretending or assuming that you already know (controlling).

To compare our present state to some wished-for and often unattainable

state is often a control pattern to avoid experiencing how you really are!

Chapter 3 – Being transparent

To relate is to know and be known by the other.

When you communicate with the intent to relate, you will naturally become
more transparent, that is, easier to know.

Being specific on the feedback helps both parties connect to your felt
experience instead of to your interpretation.

The first and most important part of being transparent is seeing yourself
without praise or blame. Observation, not evaluation.

Name your fears.

Exercise (Location 1035) – see apendix 1

Acceptance doesn’t equal approval or agreement, but rather a willingness to

stay engaged.

Ver “Getting Real Card Game”

The Unfinished biz exercise (Location 1161)

The R&A practice

Reveal resentments is an act of making yourself vulnerable. We may fear
that our resentments will appear selfish or petty or unenlightened and that
it is a risk to reveal them.

Spiritual freedom comes from the practice of the moment-by-moment flow

of life, not by getting things to be just right once and for all.

Once people accept the formerly taboo feelings, they take them more lightly
and not as personally. They learn the joy and relaxation that comes with
being fully self-expressed.

Admitting you have a judgment is an act of revelation, liberation and

depersonalization. But don’t blame yourself for it. Everybody does it! It
actually helps you developing compassion for yourself.

Withholding feelings is a way of giving them more significance than they

actually deserve. When you express a feeling, it usually changes or
dissolves.

Catch yourself lying, pretending or withholding and use the information.

Hiding signals there is an energy block in your system. The way out is in and
through – feel your feelings, sense your body and notice your thoughts,
fears and imaginings.

Chapter 4 – Noticing your Intent

The whole 3 paragraphs from location 1365 “Relating means revealing …”
to “… actually finding out.”

Your sense of self-worth will be based not on how things turn out, but on
whether you express what you think, know and feel in each moment.

By living in the present moment, you have a continuous feedback about the
reality. Yours and others. So you get to know the others and yourself better.

When we have the courage to show up as we are, we discover that we feel

more deeply connected to others. It’s paradoxical. When we are fully
expressing out one-of-a-kind selves, we also feel more kinship with all the
other one-of-a-kind selves in the world.

Let’s put more value on what is than on being comfortable.

The environment requires that we participate with the process of change

rather than trying to manage or control it.

Relating helps you develop a very sensitive, even telepathic resonance with
your surroundings.
When you take the controlling stance, you attempt to give yourself and
others the impression that you are at the top of the situation.

Relating gives you practice handling uncertainty and unpredictability, which

leads to self-confidence.

Exercise 1588: It’s not safe to _________________.

I have my buttons pushed when _______________. Being criticized,

abandoned, ignored, rejected, controlled, …

Pay attention on patterns of speaking. They reveal inner believes.

Chapter 5 – Welcoming Feedback

Are you open to and curious about feedbacks? Do you ever blame the
messenger?

Avoiding discomfort is dangerous.

It “clears the air” when you allow people to give feedback to you.

Pay attention to unusual things people say and use it to ask if there is
something up. It might be a good opportunity to receive feedback.

Welcoming Feedback rituals ate 1800.

Take in! When you receive a feedback, notice the sensations and feelings in
your body.

Acknowledge the other person, regardless of the content of the feedback.

People feel heard when they perceive you really received the feedback and
it touched your feelings.

Share your feelings and thoughts after the feedback.

Listening is not agreeing.

Tips for a constructive feedback on 1850

Chapter 6 – Asserting what you want

and don’t want
Difficulties here create a life of “if onlys”

Don’t shut down your feeling for fear of disapproval.

Exercise 1960 – False belief

The aim of assertion is not to get better at getting what you want. Rather, it
is to speak your truth so that you can see yourself more fully and feel
yourself more deeply.

When asserting your desires, you are going to bump up against the other
person’s boundaries and “call her out”.

2060 – The yes-no exercise

A complaint is a want is disguise.

You don’t have to answer every question.

In time, you’ll get more comfortable with other people’s discomfort with
your actions.

One of the objectives of Getting Real is to stop taking other people’s

reactions personally!

Chapter 7 – Taking back projections

Human beings are like walking, talking projections. The world reflects your
inner self. For example, if you and your business partner are disagreeing,
you may have an inner conflict around the theme of disagreement.

Things are easier when you state “I’m having a judgment about …” for the
simple fact you realize it is a judgment.

Judging is one of the ego-mind’s automatic ways of dealing with inner

conflict. Noticing theses patterns helps you des-identify from them. They do
not define who you are, but they can serve as usual signposts pointing out
how you avoid the truth of who you really are.

Listen to your inner voice and sense you body and you’re likely to see
whether you’ve been triggered.

Pay attention to your interpretations. You don’t see someone insecure. You
see their body language and interpret as insecurity. Making this clear
distinction helps you living with the anxiety of not knowing for sure what the
other person feels.

We often need others to push our buttons before we can become aware of
what our buttons are. Taking this kind of look at ourselves can be very
humbling. That’s the idea – to become more humble about our
righteousness. And noticing our projections help us do this.

2230 – “If only…” exercise – “If only you would…, I would feel…..” (Revise!)

When you take on blame and focus on how bad you are, you’re not present
and available to yourself and others, you’re unable to stay present. To get
yourself back to the present moment, confess what is going on for you as
soon as you become aware of it.
Feeling ashamed or bad is a control pattern, a familiar way of dealing with
the anxiety caused by not being in control of how another responds to you.

When someone projects anger at you, don’t assume your behavior is the
cause of it. His anger is his! But at the same time, you can learn by
observing how do you respond to his behavior.

When you assume that you know what a person should or shouldn’t do, you
are projecting. You have stopped relating and have slipped into a ego-
protective control pattern.

Substitute “You shouldn’t…” by “I am…” like in “You shouldn’t blame me”

by “I am blaming myself”. You may discover that when a person blames
you, you start to feel very self-blaming in reaction. If so, his action may have
helped you to take a look at one of your own control patterns.

When you blame another person for your pain, it clouds the truth and makes
corrective actions less likely.

Blaming helps you feel wronged but righteous.

The decisions about my life need to be made based on my experiences, not

on a wish or a should about someone else.

Chapter 8 – Revising an early

statement
Don’t criticize yourself to not to be right the first time. Allow yourself to
restate your words.

Each time you speak your truth, you get to see it in a new light, which
generally leads to revaluating it, noticing that there is more to it (or less to
it) then you thought.

Stating your truth is like pealing the onion. Each time you disclosure present
foreground, a new, formerly unconscious foreground emerges.

Fear may be just a sign that you are moving into unknown territory, which,
in turn, is the domain of discovery and the breeding ground for self-trust.

4 steps to take when revising, location 2500

Chapter 9 – Holding Differences

At some point in life we learn to fear differences. We got the idea that if you
see one thing and I see something else, one of us must be wrong; or if you
want one thing and I want something else, one of us must loose.

It takes more than one blind man to see the whole elephant! (in relation to
the Sufi story).
We need to recognize both the inevitability of disagreement between people
and the possibility of harmony through approaching conflict as an
opportunity to see more of what is really going on.

Our unique angle and perspective of the world is our contribution to the
human story. It’s what we have to teach and learn from one another.

All views are part of a unified whole when seen with enough perspectives
and need not pose a threat to one another.

When you hold differences between seemingly opposite poles or positions,

your consciousness actually expands and you become a “bigger” person.

Active listening is the best tool I know for developing the ability to hold
differences. Example “Holding differences at work”, location 2650

If you can stay in the impasse for enough time, allowing the difference to
exist, rather than rushing prematurely to a resolution, you will be changed
by the experience.

Let yourself simply hang out with uncertainty.

Really paying attention to the other builds a sense of intimacy or

connection, even if the disagreement still exists.

Chapter 10 – Sharing mixed emotions

If you have mixed emotions, express both and the inner conflict they are
causing.

When an unpleasant situation comes, take your time to identify and feel
your feelings, instead of focusing so much on what he wished he would do
different.

The way out of confusion is not to fight it, but to allow one of your several
feelings to float to the foreground and be expressed, even if you also feel
something else in the background.

It’s ok to be confused.

When expressing two conflicting statements, use AND instead of BUT, so

that both are valid at the same time.

Do not assume that one feeling cancels the other. Both (or all) can be truth.

After communicating something that you imagine is difficult to receive, stay

enough long enough to hear and deal with the other person’s response.

Chapter 11 – Embracing the silence

of not knowing
The belief that knowing is better than not knowing is one of the fundamental
dysfunctional beliefs of our culture.

Silence in human interactions allows for feelings to be fully experienced!

Pause before speaking. Take a few seconds of silence. It helps you to
connect with the other person.

Every human interaction entails a large measure of uncertainty. Each time

you express yourself, you take a step into the unknown, into “empty space”.

Allow the sense of connection to build. Don’t speak and then immediately
disconnect as soon as you have spoken. Stay with the energy of connection
for a while.

In a conversation, if you are attached to the outcome, it will be difficult for

you to embrace silence. You may feel compelled to feel in the empty space
between your expression and her response with more words of your own.

Do you tell or do you ask about people? Do you take space or do you make
space?

Human communication is an alive, ever changing creation. It is creates, re-

created, and co-created in each moment. And creation requires patience:
the ability to tolerate emptiness.

Trusting the silence exercise. Location 3130

The willingness to just be with another person, not knowing the outcome,
opens up vast mew possibilities.

When you’re feeling uncertain or unsure about what’s coming next, you can
be pretty sure that you are in touch with present reality.

Practices to support embracing silence: Word fasting, partying without

words, free association and meditation.

Chapter 12 – Serenity, Presence and

Compassion
When you are open to experiencing and learning everything – every
disappointment, every surprise and every piece of feedback, whether
laudatory or critical – then you cannot be threatened.

Be the notice or witness.

Be compassionate and embrace your judgment, your ego-centered mind

chatter, your inner critic, your attachments, taboo thoughts and feelings,
etc.