What does it mean to 'read this book about you'?

by John Patrick Morgan

13/Dec/2021

This morning a member of my team asked me how I "read this book about you", as Steve suggests.

I hadn't considered this might be a question on people's minds. In hindsight, because I've spent years Being With Steve inside the context of his stories about himself and his world as an expression of my own possibility and being.

Not only this, but my entire life has been one of emulation and modeling.

It's something I believe we all do naturally as children, but that we unlearn.

The cultural aspiration for individualism, especially in the West, contains the erroneous ideal that our uniqueness is founded in not only a difference untraceable to influences but that it somehow emerges from a source beyond the forms we come across in the world.

I don't know how or why I escaped falling into this trap, but in simple terms, I've always made it my mission to copy greatness wherever I have seen it.

When I got into real estate in my twenties, I hung out with the top agents and simply tried talking like they talked. As I got older and my understanding of human dynamics matured, I looked for the deeper essence of those I admired - I looked to who they were being.

In my first session with Steve, I told him the story of how when the founders of NLP, Richard Bandler & John Grinder, presented their modelling of the greatest hypnotherapist of all time, Milton Erickson, Erickson famously said:

"They took the shell and left the nut."

Erickson was not only using language to produce a dual meaning - being comical with the word 'nut' was a great example of his mastery of creation through language - but primarily, I believe, he was pointing to how you can model or copy what a person says or does without capturing the essence of it.

After telling Steve the story, I said to him, "I'm not here for the shell. I'm here for the nut."

Whilst I enjoyed the same comedic double entendre, this was a declaration for myself more than anything.

It was a declaration that beyond being 'coached', I was there to model and emulate. And not only that, but that I was there to not model or emulate the way Steve talks, walks, or shouts...but the essence of his Being.

Being is the nut.

More than anyone I've ever met, Steve gets how impersonal a personality is. He is so clear on who he is whilst at the same time having no claim to that as his alone.

If he could download his Being onto a thumb drive and jam it in your ear and give it to you, he's spend all his money having thumb drives made and jam them in the ears of everyone he met.

He is this un-precious about his individuality and this paradoxically is one of the many qualities that make him unique.

I have, and continue, to emulate this. The more clear on my uniqueness I am, the happier I am for it to be replicated.

None of this stuff is what we actually are. We are larger than form. We are greater than Being. And BEING is a beautiful thing.

What does it mean to you to "read this book about you"?

Loving you, JPM