Stalking yourself is the process of hunting, following and observing your habits, beliefs, thoughts, routines, strengths and weaknesses for the purpose of seeing who you are. It is using the mind to see all aspects of yourself in action.
In this guide, you’ll learn techniques to stalk your inner dialogue, habits, and energy fluctuations. Let’s dive in.
Table of Content
In stalking yourself, you want to see not only what and how you are thinking, but to identify your central beliefs, those core beliefs that cause you to act in certain ways. The fact is that our mind makes decisions for us and directs us in all aspects of our life, and if we remain unaware of this process, we can lose control of our lives. For indeed the mind is a great servant, but a terrible master.
Most of us remain totally unconscious of this internal process. We fail to see how our beliefs influence our choices, or how our inadequacies and hurts cause us to lash out in anger or withdraw into self-pity, according to our nature. Or we fail to see how certain habits like procrastination or lack of imagination keep us stuck in situations that do not serve our best needs.
In many ways we don’t see ourselves at all because we are too busy thinking and doing without noticing what we are thinking or why we are doing what we are doing.
Stalking ourselves is a novel concept because we assume we know and see ourselves well. In fact, we reason, nobody knows ourselves better than we do. But in this reasoning we are woefully wrong. It is an important turning point in each of our lives when we are confronted with and fully grasp how much of who we are is unconscious, and how these unconscious parts of us have agendas and make decisions for us. Not only that, but if we are not careful and diligent, these unconscious parts of us can take over our thinking without our even being aware it has happened. Each of us is a unique mixture of strengths and weaknesses of conscious and unconscious patterns and beliefs. We are totally unconscious in some areas of our life (usually those areas where we are having problems and difficulty), and hyperconscious and aware in others. No two of us is alike, and so no two strategies will be alike. Each of us must design a strategy that fits our unique situation. But to do this we must first see and understand ourselves without illusion.
To be effective in our life we need to be adept at three distinct processes.
Seeing: seeing ourselves and our present situation without illusion.
Knowing: having the insight and wisdom to make empowering decisions according to what we see.
Doing it: overcoming procrastination and fear and mastering the dharma of action.
Until you can see yourself, you cannot see your present circumstances, much less the choices and options available to you. Stalking is the process of allowing us to see. We stalk ourselves the way we would stalk a wild animal. To successfully stalk a wild animal you must know its habits and routines. Is it nocturnal, or does it hunt during the day? What does it like to eat? Where does it sleep? What attracts it and what scares it away? Hunters will patiently study their prey and come to know its habits and routines.
We take the same attitude. We stalk ourselves as if we are stalking something or someone we don’t know. We stalk ourselves without judgment or attachment to what we find. This is important, perhaps the most important key to stalking – no judgment.
Stalking Yourself – Rules of the Game
1. Do Not Judge
If a part of you feels judged by the process, your mind will find a way to sabotage the process. So agreement number one with yourself is, “No judgment about what I find.” When you find something revealing you simply say, “That’s interesting.” Not judging allows parts of ourselves to be revealed to us without fear.
2. Do Not Fix
The second agreement is to not act immediately upon what you see. When we discover something about ourselves that we don’t like, our first instinct is to blame ourselves, and our second is to try to fix it right away. In stalking you are asked to do neither. There will be plenty of time to discern appropriate action, but only after seeing yourself clearly, without illusion. In stalking yourself, you are asked to neither blame nor fix. Simply to see it. Not once or twice, but to see it many times so you can discern patterns.
3. Stay Emotionally Neutral
The third agreement is to stalk without self-importance or self-pity. Each of us is inclined one way or the other, and both self-importance and self-pity will distort our seeing, each in its own way.
4. Drop Your Expectations
The fourth agreement is to have no preferences as to what you find. Don’t stalk with agendas, fears or hopes. Stalk with curiosity and a burning desire to see and know yourself, in all your complexity and contradictions. Don’t assume you know already what you will find. I can assure you there is much you do not know or understand about yourself.
Stalking Inner Dialogue
To start, I would like you to stalk your internal dialogue. Like a hunter listens for sounds in the bush, listen to what your internal dialogue is saying.
For some of you, it will be a total revelation that you have an internal dialogue. I’m not talking about the thoughts you are actively thinking, but the inner chatter beyond thought that comments and has opinions about everything. Stop and listen to it. You might begin by watching and listening to your thoughts, and then noticing that there is also a judge, a critic, a commentator alongside the thoughts. This is the internal dialogue I am speaking of. Stalk and listen to it. What is it saying? Is it positive or negative? What are its favorite topics or themes? Is it critical of you or others? What sets it off?
Then, at the end of each day, spend fine minutes journaling about the main themes of your internal dialogue that day. After one month, if you stalk diligently, you should be able to see and know something about yourself that has previously been unknown to you. Don’t judge or act upon what you see yet. That will come later.
Stalking takes vigilance, patience, cunning and willpower. Our internal dialogue is one of our chief tyrants, keeping us unconscious and unaware, and we will not see it or know it without stalking. Interested? Curious? Up to the challenge? Well then begin today, and we will continue this topic next month.
Stalking Habits
Most of you won’t stalk and journal daily, I know that. How do I know that? Because I’ve trained and taught people for thirty years and I know the power of inertia and procrastination. I know the snares, bad habits and illusions we all struggle with. I know because I know myself. I have stalked myself. I can “see” myself. What I want is for you too to know and “see” yourself.
When a month goes by and you realize you didn’t do it, ask yourself: “why not?” Don’t answer right away. Savor the chase as you stalk the answer to this question. Yes there are the obvious answers that leap to the mind – too busy, lazy, forgot, not interested – and these are all on one level valid, but beyond these reasons there lies something deeper. I will stalk it for you because I know this territory.
Each of us struggles with our inability to execute our best intentions. It is easier to think than do. We fool ourselves by believing that our best intentions count for something. We feel proud and satisfied when we make promises to ourselves, as if we have done something great. Let me share with you a secret. Our best intentions count for nothing, because most of them don’t happen. Harsh but true. If you’re truly honest and stalk your life, you will “see“ this for yourself.
Looking closely (stalking), you will find some areas of your life where you perform and execute flawlessly, and other areas where you fail again and again. We usually settle into this routine. We accept it as life and dismiss it as unimportant. Besides, we tell ourselves, we are too busy making a living, raising children, going to school, meeting deadlines. You choose the reasons (all valid and true) you give yourself for not doing what you intended to do. But not executing on our intentions is a dangerous habit to have entrenched, and for most of us it is entrenched, and we don’t even realize it.
So without your doing any stalking whatsoever I have stalked for you, and have revealed something for you to “see.” Because that is the purpose of stalking – to see ourselves without illusion.
Now I would like you to think about what areas of your life consistently go unattended. In what areas of your life do you repeatedly make promises, and then fail to execute on them? Remember one of the agreements in stalking is no judgments. Don’t judge yourself, blame yourself or make up reasons why you fail to make changes in those areas of your life, just notice it. When you truly see this, own it and accept it. This is powerful. It is not resignation but realization. You are “seeing” yourself without illusion. It is only after seeing yourself that you can design a strategy to move beyond this ‘stuck’ area in your life. Don’t be naïve and think yet another good intention will be enough. It never has been in the past so why would it in the future? Know your habits. Know your routines. Know the excuses you give yourself. Know what trips you up again and again. This is stalking. It is only after knowing and seeing that you can make lasting positive changes.
There are three areas of your life that I suggest you stalk: your internal dialogue, your habits, and your energy fluctuations.
Let’s examine our habits and routines. All of us are creatures of habit, and our habits are more entrenched than you would suspect. Sleeping habits, eating habits, working habits, leisure habits, thinking habits. It can be quite startling to realize how much of our life is on remote control, powered by our habits. Some are obvious, such as drinking coffee, watching TV in the evening, working too hard, being lazy. We all have our own particular habits. But others are more subtle, like our internal dialogue habits, but then you wouldn’t know that because you didn’t stalk yourself last month (You can always go back and try again.).
Habits and routines, while necessary in some circumstances, can have a numbing effect on our life. We tend to forget that they are only habits and routines, no more or less, and they are not our life. Let your choices make your life, not your habits and routines.
In fact, a very powerful awakening technique is to choose a habit and break it for no other reason than to show yourself it can be done. Try it this month. Oh yeah, I forgot, you’re too busy, lazy, not interested etc. But this one is easier than last month’s. Pick something symbolic, something you won’t miss, something that has become a habit and you’ve been meaning to change anyway, and do it. Change one tiny habit in your life for this month and notice every time you don’t do it. You will find yourself about to do it, (because it is habit) but by stalking yourself you can catch yourself and make the choice not to do it.
Or maybe it is to do something that you’re in the habit of not doing. Habits can be not doing as well as doing. The key is to change your routine in one small aspect of your life. What difference will it make? More than you would suspect. Up for the challenge? Ready to be creative? Ready to start altering your life one step at a time? Remember that your intention is only an intention and of no value unless actualized through daily stalking and action. You actually have to do it. Do you have it in you to change one tiny habit? This month and this month only? Don’t answer with words. Answer with action.
Stalking Energy Fluctuations
To briefly review, stalking yourself is the practice of learning to “see” yourself and your life without illusion. Sounds simple enough, and we assume we already see and know what is happening in our life. But we quite often live in an illusion and therefore miss important aspects of what is happening. Miss is the wrong word. Misinterpret is more accurate. We interpret what is happening to us in ways that match our beliefs and assumptions, a process that often doesn’t give an accurate picture. Stalking ourselves allows us to see accurately, and then, from what we see we can design a strategy to change what we don’t like, or augment what we do like.
So far we have stalked our internal dialogue and our habits. This month we will stalk our energy fluctuations. By energy fluctuations I mean your sense of “aliveness.” Your life force, your energy. Sometimes we feel full of energy, alert, ready to take on any task with vigor, excitement and enthusiasm. Other times we feel sluggish, lethargic, unable to muster much motivation to do anything. Why do we feel the way we do each day? Are these energy fluctuations cyclical? Do they happen by chance, or are there causes behind them? Stalking your energy fluctuations will give you your answers.
I have stalked my own energy patterns and I would like to share with you what I have found out about myself.
Mornings for me are high-energy times. I am most creative and productive in the mornings. My father was also a morning person. One of his favorite sayings was, “One morning is worth two afternoons.” He was a salesman for the Yellow Pages. He would get to work at 6 a.m. while the other salesmen would come in at 9 a.m. But he also would quit at noon. I never saw my father work an afternoon in his life, and yet he was always in the top 10% of the sales team.
My wife on the other hand is an evening person. She finds she’s most creative and productive in the evening, especially the early hours of the morning. When she’s working on a project she loves the 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. cycle.
Each of us is different, and if we want to be highly efficient we must know how to increase our energy.
How and what I eat also affects my energy fluctuations. I like to eat good nutritious whole food. I’m not a fanatic about it, and eat just about everything, but I notice that what I eat affects how I feel. This really became apparent to me when I began doing a lot of touring. At home you can cook and control your eating much more easily than when you’re eating at restaurants. I noticed (back then I didn’t call it stalking) that eating junk food on a regular basis made me feel sluggish. I wasn’t alert, sharp and full of energy. Now I love burger and fries, potato chips and ice cream as much as anyone, and still eat them occasionally. But while touring, if I ate fast food three, four days in a row, I noticed a huge difference in my energy (anyone see Super Size Me – a remarkable film on fast food?).
On a speaking tour, you need your energy and to be in top form. And junk food was so easy, fast, convenient, and dare I say, tasty. But it always lowered my energy. So I was forced daily to make decisions about what to eat. Because my energy was so important to me – I was committed to performing at my top level – I made a conscious decision to not eat fast food. Now note why I made this decision. It had nothing to do with eating healthy. It was simply a choice about energy, and once I “saw,” how fast food affected me, the decision to avoid it was an easy one. I loved high energy more than convenience and taste.
Another aspect of food I have noticed is that overeating makes one feel sluggish for several hours afterwards. Not once in a while, not most times, but one hundred percent of the time, eating a large meal lowered my energy. Eating light- to moderate-sized meals upped my energy. What is a large meal? Each of us must stalk and decide that for ourselves.
So the decision on what to eat and how much to eat transcends health. It is a matter of choices concerning how I want to feel and how to up my energy so that I can perform at maximum efficiency.
The next question to ask yourself is what thoughts nourish and uplift you, and which thoughts diminish your energy. In my talks and CDs I tell the story of how one day I gave up worrying. Why? Because I realized it is always counterproductive. Worry is Mind Power in reverse. So by worrying (which is focusing on what you don’t want), you actually help to manifest that which you’re worrying about. Why would anyone want to do that? Also, worrying depletes your energy. A half hour of worrying drains you for hours. So from a stalking of energy perspective, I realized it was making me less effective, and there was therefore no value in it whatsoever. Since then I have never worried. Oh, I have my moments of concern, and I evaluate crisis situations and try to make appropriate decisions, but worry for hours at a time – I don’t believe in it.
Also criticism: I find that when I am critical of others in either thought or word, I feel weakened and drained. When I praise and acknowledge others in thought or with words, I am empowered and uplifted.
When I think negative thoughts my energy goes down. When I think positive thoughts my energy is recharged. Negative thinking leaks energy and leaves me depleted. Being positive and inspired charges me with energy. This is not a theory with me. I have stalked my energy fluctuations and know it is true.
There are countless other ways both to increase and decrease your energy. Make a personal inventory of what is happening in your personal life. Be aware of your energy.
Stalking your energy patterns is a process of noticing over a number of months what ups your energy and what lowers it. When we know this, we can then make conscious choices in our life from an energy perspective. When our energy is increased, it flows into all aspects of our being. We become more astute and clear, able to function at a higher level.
When we are “in the flow,” feeling and performing well, it is usually an indication that our energy levels are high. Likewise, when we are feeling lethargic, bored, tired, in a rut, it is usually because our energy is low. In these cases we discover why, and then make appropriate changes.
Choose to have a high level of awareness and energy in your life. Do that by first stalking your energy patterns, and then by eliminating what depletes your energy, and by strengthening habits of thought and actions that increase your energy. Make conscious choices that maximize your energy. Do this and you will notice a tremendous difference in your life.
