Why “Presence Training” Is The Highest ROI Lever (On All Levels)
Cheat code alert
A couple weeks ago I quote RT’d this tweet from Greg O’Gallagher aka Kinobody:
And said:
But I didn’t explain why.
This, in return, led to a few DMs asking:
“How is awakening to presence the highest ROI action?”
And it’s a fair question.
So inside today’s email, I wanted to run you through why this is true not only for my life, but your life. And then in a future email I’ll outline the simple practices you can leverage to actualize presence more fully (so your own experience becomes the living proof of everything I say).
Coolio?
If so, let’s begin by jotting down all the levels aka areas that exist inside the video game of life. Then, I’ll take it one area at a time and show you what presence training makes possible (hopefully this demystifies everything and brings it back into practical land).
Here’s the areas (at a high level):
Relationships
Wealth
Health
Adventures
Spirituality
If you check off the invisible boxes inside each of these areas, then you live a pretty epic life.
No denying that.
But where there’s usually more confusion is when you try to point to presence being the greatest unlock for all of these areas. This is where you lose most people (especially business folks).
I don’t want to lose you, so let me now explain how presence applies to each and every area.
Starting with relationships….
What’s attractive to a man?
Generally speaking: A warm, bubbly, sweet, innocent, joyful female presence.
What’s attractive to a woman?
Generally speaking: A grounded, confident, decisive, spontaneous, kind masculine presence.
All these “qualities” are qualities of presence.
In short:
The more tapped in you are to presence, the more attractive you are to the opposite sex.
Issues arise in relationships because:
Most people get disconnected from presence (to no fault of their own) and experience a conditioned identity.
So instead of the man being grounded, confident, decisive, spontaneous, and kind (which is a man in his natural state)…
He becomes:
Indecisive, weak, boring, undisciplined, nice and anxious (all these are emotional reactions that arise when one is disconnected from the qualities of presence).
This is obviously unattractive to the woman because the man has slipped out of presence and into conditioning.
(What’s unattractive is not the man, but conditioning.)
On the flip side:
Instead of the woman being warm, bubbly, sweet, innocent and joyful (which is a woman in her natural state).
She becomes:
Naggy, controlling, bitchy, worried and tough (all these are emotional reactions that arise when one is disconnected from the qualities of presence).
This is obviously unattractive to the man because the woman has slipped out of presence and into conditioning.
(What’s unattractive is not the woman, but conditioning.)
And this isn’t something you got to blindly believe either.
Look at your current or last relationship and you’ll see when things were going well, you were tapped into presence. When issues arose in the relationship, it’s usually because one of you (usually the guy in the beginning) lost presence and slipped into conditioning.
Even more:
Whenever your girl is mad at you (i.e. for not doing what you said), she’s usually not mad about the thing itself (it’s kind of irrelevant).
She’s usually mad about something deeper aka you lost presence which then disconnected her and made her feel unsafe, ungrounded, unfeminine.
This is the root cause of dysfunction (and is unconscious, but once you become conscious of it… it starts to change your relationships).
Heck…
A “shit test” (a phrase borrowed from the dating world) is nothing more than your woman testing your presence.
The difference between a man and a boy is that a man doesn’t lose presence regardless of how difficult life becomes (this is extremely attractive). A boy, on the other hand, loses presence (this is extremely unattractive).
Basically a girl wants to know:
Are you rooted in circumstances (transitory) or presence (eternal)?
If you’re rooted in circumstances, she won’t be able to relax around you and will only come around when your life is going well. When your life goes to shit, she’ll leave you because you’ve lost presence.
Most people blame the girl…
“Look at this gold digging h**!”
And I get it (there can be girls like that). But I always saw things a little differently:
When you lost millions of dollars and your girl left you, she didn’t really leave you because you lost millions of dollars.
She left you because you lost presence (and became a shadow of a shadow of yourself).
I know many great men who lost everything, but never their woman because they never lost presence.
Presence was always deeper than circumstances.
So this is why presence training is crucial for relationships. Not only for initial attraction, but also for keeping the relationship alive and fruitful (relationships get stale and boring when you let responsibilities and the duties of the day disconnect you from presence. Yes, responsibilities and duties are important. But presence is infinitely more important. Not just in the start of the relationship when everything is fun and new and exciting, but for the duration of the relationship and especially when/if you have kids).
In the dating world, they call this:
“Frame control”
But that always felt too heavy and serious to me.
I just see it as your ability to maintain and embody presence.
Moving onto the next area…
Wealth building & money making
How is presence training relevant here?
In order to make big money, you (usually) have to change your sense of self.
What does this actually mean?
It means disidentifying from your conditioned identity (full of lack, frustration, inconsistency, limitations) and aligning with your true identity (full of joy, consistency, love, gratitude) and taking action from that deeper/newer state of being.
In manifestation circles, they call this:
“FEELING IS THE SECRET”
But it’s not really “feeling” that is the secret.
The secret is “what” you’re feeling.
In the former example, what you’re feeling is your conditioning (this is heavy/burdensome/draining/limiting). This makes it difficult to even fathom that you could make big money because you don’t actually see reality for what it is, but through the heavy filters of the past.
(When you feel your conditioning, you feel contraction.)
In the latter example, what you’re feeling is your presence (this is light, buoyant, alive, dynamic, creative, and free). This makes it infinitely easier to take action and bring your ideal life into existence because you are free from the constraints of your familiar personality.
(When you feel your presence, you feel possibilities.)
But that’s not the only way presence training is relevant.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
DEEP WORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK.
Deep work is nothing more than actualizing flow state.
What is flow? Time spent in presence.
In other words:
It’s when you forget who you are (conditioned identity) and lose yourself completely in the task (aka become one with the moment).
In these moments, you are the most creative, intelligent, and talented version of yourself.
And by extension… you naturally do your best work (because it’s no longer coming through the heavy filters of your conditioned identity, but from the deeper and truer place of presence… that feels effortless).
This work, in return, is what leads to the fruits of your labor.
With that being said:
The more time you can spend in presence, the more time you spend in flow.
The more time you spend in flow, the better work you’ll do. The better work you’ll do, the more money you’ll make.
But again, that’s not the only way.
“Frame control” or “presence training” also applies when you’re leading a team because in order to be an effective leader, you need to be more grounded in your vision than in current circumstances/state of the market/industry you’re in. This level of conviction is needed in order to rally up the troops. Without it, you’re doomed. So the deeper your embodiment of presence, the deeper your conviction will grow and the more trust you’ll inspire.
The poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling highlights this clearly.
You can summarize the entire poem as follows:
If you can embody presence while the rest of the world loses presence, then the world is yours and everything in it.
(Not saying this is easy to do, but I am saying it’s the holy grail).
Ok. Enough about relationships and wealth building.
Let’s move onto health
How does presence training apply here?
In a lot of ways, but I’ll just talk about a couple:
The habits for good health are pretty straightforward…
Get 7-9 hours of sleep
See the sunrise
Lift weight 3x/week
Walk 10k+ steps/day
Get sunlight throughout the day (ditch the sunscreen/sunglasses)
Eat whole foods
Eat 0.8-1g of protein per body weight
Drink high quality spring water
See the sunset
But problems arise because people cannot be consistent.
Why is this? One reason is because people are usually disconnected from the ground of presence (that gives rise to consistency), but also because most people don’t live in presence, but in ego.
When you’re in ego, things internally feel heavy, dull, boring, and stale (it’s not your life that feels like that, it’s your ego)… so you naturally look outside yourself for what is new, exciting, and stimulating.
This makes it challenging to stick to your diet or to your workout plan because that is boring and familiar (to the ego), so it constantly abandons and jumps ship in search of new shiny objects.
(Most people lose presence when they come face to face with a chocolate cake.)
Contrast this to presence:
When you’re deeply rooted in presence, you feel fresh, illuminated, light, content and fully engaged… so it no longer really matters what you’re doing externally.
Heck, you can sit on your couch and be more blissed out than partying in Tokyo at 2:00 am.
This is the cause because:
The source of ALL juice comes from presence, not necessarily the experience (it’s just a permission slip).
This, in return, is relevant to health because you can consistently do the basics/fundamentals without getting bored/jumping ship because every time you do the basics is a new experience.
(So you continuously embody a beginner’s mind.)
But that’s just one way presence is impactful to health and overall wellbeing.
Other ways:
Presence keeps you out of stress/worry
Internally there is no longer a civil war being fought so the tensions in the body (bodily tensions = personality contractions) naturally relax and the body’s innate intelligence is free to do whatever is needed to keep your body in sync/balance/equilibrium
Presence is the ultimate healing agent. When people do things like Joe Dispenza meditations and heal all sorts of crazy health issues, it’s not the meditation that is doing that. It’s the healing impact of presence.
So that’s how it applies to health.
Now let’s focus on adventures and having fun…
When you think about your most funnest adventures and experiences, you’ll quickly realize that rarely did they come with an itinerary.
Instead: You were experiencing what I call “vacation energy” – meaning you’re fully landed in the here and now, following your curiosity, and engaging with the moment before you with no preconceived notions or agendas or expectations.
This, in return, gives rise to “spontaneous living” which leads to experiencing adventures and stories that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
For example:
Whenever I travel… I don’t prefer to have an itinerary.
The only time to have an itinerary is when you’re travelling with your girl… girls love itineraries and want to check off all the hot spots (nothing wrong with that), so whatever… useful then to create some sort of grounding, but if I’m by myself or with close friends…
I don’t like to have itineraries.
I just land, hop in a cab, tip the driver more than usual to create good energy for the trip, check in to the hotel, walk outside, find a cool cafe, get a coffee, and walk wherever my feet take me.
This results in some pretty cool experiences and stories.
For example, I did this in LA a while ago with a friend and we somehow ended up at Chris Brown’s birthday party and popping bottles with Swaggy P from the Lakers.
These types of experiences (got endless more stories) only happen when you have no itinerary because it forces you to leave the familiar mind (that can only create more of the same) and enter the immediacy of the Now from a place of curiosity/no expectations.
Once you do that, life is free to unfold without restriction.
So that’s one way presence enhances fun/adventure.
But it goes way beyond that.
Heck, what most people call ‘fun’ is actually just another word for presence. Meaning… when you’re having fun, you’re in presence. It’s impossible to have fun without being in presence. Literally impossible.
So presence and fun are synonymous in some ways (this is why it’s always wise to always have fun and move lightly in all your undertakings. Heaviness strips you of fun and costs you everything).
Now touching on the last area.
Spirituality
I left this section for last because this is what most people usually associate with presence, so I didn’t want to start there.
But essentially all real spiritual work is designed to shift you from:
Personality (your false self) to Presence (your true nature).
When you actualize Presence, you quite literally actualize God.
Yes, God.
And waking up to God (experientially) is obviously the HIGHEST ROI action (on all levels).
So that’s the full breakdown of what was behind my tweet.
Hopefully it was useful.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Your friend,
/tej
P.S. I wrote this email, but I don’t want to imply that I’m batting 10/10 on all these areas. I’m not. I lose presence all the time… heck just ask my girl… who was crying the other day hahaha
#SorryBabeILostPresence