No Other Life Podcast

The first of today’s pair of complementary models of change is one of the most straightforward to recognize. The Prerequisite model is most often seen in academia, where you enter into a cycle of changes, wherein you entrust the next chapter in your life to some adjudicating body who will use standards to bring you to a required level of development in some facet of life. At that point you can withdraw or reenter the cycle for another level. Some people thrive with this sort of care and oversight. The Credential model appeals to that part of us that wants to improve our position, status, standing, and seek to learn what is necessary to get that level of education, skill. The goal may be a certificate or promotion, but may also be more internal, for our own desires of fulfillment.

Are you the type of person who thinks that you peaked at some point in your life and do not need to learn more, discover more, or are you consistently bettering yourself?

The first episode to consider a pair of complementary models of change opens with the Epiphany model, which for many people is the first thing they think of when asked to focus on “new beginnings”. This is a model about realizing that in the present you are unfulfilled. It may have been exactly as you planned, you might be good at it, you might even be praised for it, but for some reason you simply are unfulfilled, it’s just not doing it for you.

If you were truly alone in the world (impossible), you could just shift your focus immediately, and move on with life. But, given that we have those whom we hold dear, this is a very complicated situation. Those people will find themselves in a challenge of Unity, because your life is about to change and they reciprocally hold you dear.

What happens next is unique to each relationship, to be sure. The person on the receiving end of this news must decide if they are “for”, “against”, or if there is a delicate combination of the two.

In this inaugural episode of the podcast that accompanies the larger project called “No Other Life”, I offer an overview of the philosophy, and my goals for the podcast series in general.

We then begin to think about the theme of the first season, “New Beginnings”. Because of a lot of very difficult, hard to believe, even, occurrences this year, I’ve had occasion to sit down with the concept of change and “discovered” the obvious truisms that there are many types of change and that at any given time, we are responding to change in others even more than we are experiencing our own change.

There seem to be great overlap in the rudiments of individual change. I have come up with a group of eight which seem to encompass the majority of changes I have seen recently.

The basic definition of a “new beginning” is that an antecedent “project” that is already in production gives way to a project which causes a shift in our focus. It’s about to get real, see you in episode 2.

Over the course of the upcoming episodes, we will dig into the eight models, each paired with its complementary model.