Days 50-51: A day in the life and the end

Monday
What a day. We started off at 2 in the afternoon with an NLP and coaching session with Thomas O’Duffy (http://www.lifechanging.ie/).

He gave us some very awesome advice, condensed from his years of studying NLP and psychology and human performance, and distilled into what he recognises as “the best of the best”.

What I like about his approach is that he recognises that a lot of people in the NLP community are actually pretty messed up – NLP promises a lot but most of the time it fails to deliver. And those that usually model certain members of the NLP community end up as messed up as those they follow. Sounding familiar? It’s almost like the seduction Community in some ways.

Thomas gave us two very powerful pieces to implement daily.

One is a ritual of four questions, to ask ourselves on a day-to-day basis. They are:

1. What have I appreciated and enjoyed the most in the past day?
2. What have I done really exquisitely?
3. How have I improved?
4. Based on today, how can I do things better tomorrow?

He also gave us the notion of a morning ritual, which is a concept from the book The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz. In case you are wondering, here is the morning ritual I will be using post-Rockstar. It is based on the morning ritual I used to have pre-Rockstar, and modified using insights I’ve learnt along the way:

1. Wake up.
2. Drink 500mL of water.
3. Steam and essential oils.
4. Exercise and stretches. Either 15min of cardio followed by stretching or a yoga routine. Vercetti’s posture, movement and vocal projection tuning ritual.
5. Yen’s PC muscle exercises.
6. Chi packing.
7. Get changed.
8. Morning shake (use a blender). This stuff is awesome. Ingredients: 1/2 pack frozen acai, 1/2 cup frozen blueberries, 1 cup milk, 1 frozen banana, 2 tablespoons hemp protein powder, 1 teaspoon bee pollen, 1 teaspoon flax seed, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence, pinch of sea salt.
9. Circle of Excellence exercise.
10. (optional) 1 hour of business or self-development reading.
11. (optional) 30 minutes of language learning.
12. (optional) 30 minutes of neural net training in some skill.
13. Most important business task of the day.

Thomas also worked with us on individual aspects and issues that we had. For me it was better understanding my issues with emotional openness and emotional connect. What I found was that my issue is not so much emotional openness, it’s more that I tend to strip out emotions from memories very quickly, and file them away without emotions attached.

Thomas showed me how to reverse the process of emotional nullification that I use, and how to use it to open up emotions in select memories and in the present. I’ve been playing with it and it is pretty fucking cool. As with most things, this is an ability that I will craft and use over time, and get better at controlling. If there was one single thing that I walk away from Rockstar grateful for, it is this.

We spent the early evening working on some business and game tasks and then… all of a sudden, there’s a knock on my hotel door. It’s Micha. And Vishal. WTF.

He’s back. And he brought his Porsche.

We hop in and go in search of food. We end up in Leceister Square eating Mexican food, and driving to South London to drop Micha off at his girl’s house. This is where it gets weird. We were stopped just outside where we were dropping off Micha by the police (for “erratic driving”). They pulled each of us aside and started asking questions… it was pretty funny to watch. Studying social dynamics and pickup gives you a unique insight into human communication – you start to recognise things that people do in specific contexts, and how you may do similar things to others where you are navigating through an interaction. For example, the police officer kept on trying to use state break questions on us. Multiple times. Unsuccessfully. It was kinda funny to see them all talk to each other afterwards and be like “WTF we didn’t charge them for anything?”

And so ended Monday night.

Tuesday
The last official day of Project Rockstar.

We started with a morning session on inner game with Magnus. He covered a model that he created that leads to acceptance of self and alignment across multiple levels.

We then had closing talks with Mr M, Dr Yen, Bugsy and Freedom of Speech. Mr M plugged in some gaps in our phone/text game knowledge, and day 2 and SCM knowledge. Dr Yen and Freedom of Speech gave us some ideas about how to take what we had learnt in Rockstar and integrate it into our lives moving forward. Personally, I am fucking excited and can’t wait to get the chance to start sitting down and formulating my goals and plans for the next couple of years.

And of course… to end it all off, we ended up at a strip club. This was my *first ever* time to a strip club. It was actually a pretty neutral experience (as you would expect from me no less). I wasn’t overly impressed, or overly unimpressed – it just simply was. Watching Mr M, Freedom and Vishal run verbal game on the strippers though was fucking amazing. These guys are phenomenal at it, and I think it’s something I’d like to look more into in the future. I did have a huge realisation though (again, as you would expect from me). I now understand what it feels like to be on the receiving end of an interaction where the person who is talking to you is not being genuine but is saying all the right things. Over the course of Rockstar, I’ve approached multiple girls and lied through my teeth because I was vetoed into set or doing a demo or whatnot. As we got closer to the end of Rockstar, I found that I just wasn’t able to do it anymore – it really ate me up inside to approach someone and take value by delivering a fake compliment. Sitting there in the strip club, having strippers who are obviously bored, ask all the usual rapport questions and try to make conversation… it was fucking annoying, and really didn’t give me anything but a negative feeling. I am making a promise to myself to never do this to girls ever again.

And so ends Project Rockstar.

- Aaron P