Steve Chandler - Crazy Good: A Book of CHOICES

Table of Contents

Crazy Good: A Book of CHOICES

Copyright 2015 by Steve Chandler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Maurice Bassett

P.O. Box 839

Anna Maria, FL 34216-0839

Contact the publisher:

www.MauriceBassett.com

Contact the author:

www.SteveChandler.com

Editing by Kathryn McCormick and Chris Nelson
Cover design by Carrie Brito

ISBN: 978-1-60025-035-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015914814

First Edition

To Kathy

Come do a little life with me...

~ Mo Pitney

The CHOICES

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

~ Robert Frost

FIRST CHOICE

Crazy good vs. Hard knock

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
with one hand waving free,
silhouetted by the sea...

~ Bob Dylan
Mr. Tambourine Man

A flash goes up and down the spine

T here is bad and there is good... And then there is crazy good.

Crazy good is something that goes so far beyond expectation that youve got goosebumps on your arms when you see it.

So imagine what it feels like to live it.

Most people (myself included, for most of my life) just ping-pong between bad and good. We are bad at something, and then we are good at something. And when we ping-pong over to good, it isnt even that good. We see it as fairly good, and most often its just barely good enough.

But it never wakes the world up.

The world wakes up from something so much better than it needs to be. Thats when the flash of astonishment goes up and down our spine.

I hesitate to give examples because you may not precisely agree with them. But youll probably get the idea. (You can find your own versions of these once you get the idea.) These examples are my personal ones:

The Stones were good but the Beatles were crazy good. A spring rain is good, but a thunderstorm is crazy good. Ringling Brothers was good, but Cirque du Soleil is crazy good.

Mobile telephones were good, but when Steve Jobs created the iPhone it was so much better than it had to be, so much cooler and more creative, that it was crazy good. Monet was good, but Van Gogh was crazy good. Elizabeth Bishop was good but Emily Dickinson was crazy good. Jack Nicholsons Joker was good, but Heath Ledgers was crazy... good. And so on.

Crazy good goes out beyond what anyone has anticipated. Like unexpected showers falling on a dried-out land. No one is really ready for the joy it brings.

The most interesting question ever

N ow for the most interesting question ever. Here it is: Can your whole life become crazy good?

No matter who you are?

The answer I have found is almost too good to put into words.

Einstein said that the only question he really needed to know the answer to was: Is the universe friendly? He discovered (and his research had tremendous reach to it, no?) that it was. Others, too, have made the same discovery. When such an awakening came to G.K. Chesterton he described it as absurd good news.

So how do we find that awakening ourselves? How do we get there?

I began my work as a coach by teaching people how to prevent going in the opposite direction of crazy good. I called it victim thinking. People who were able to identify and drop victim thinking made great gains in their lives.

But it wasnt until I was well into my fifties that I found out a person can do even better than that.

Certainly moving away from the victim mindset was always reliably refreshing and energizing. But the real magic happened as I began to realize there was no upper limit to the life one could experience, or the creativity one could bring to this planet. And I mean anyone. As in everyone.

The path to that life, the crazy-good life, was a series of simple, clean and clear choices. They were choices that were hidden to most people, but once they were uncovered, anyoneyou, even Icould easily make them.

Its a hard-knock life for me

F or decades I thought I had experienced a hard-knock life. When I entered psychotherapy, I had it confirmed for me.

They gave me a soft bat to whack my parents with. Then they set out pillows for me to hit. One pillow was my mom and one was my dad.

It was kind of like a martial arts class. It cultivated my anger. Was that the objective? To make me more angry? To honor that feeling of anger?

I wasnt an orphan, exactly, like Annie, but I had two alcoholic parents. Thats as many as you can have at any one time. Then, after I got married, my wife, the mother of my children, suffered from a severe mental disorder that institutionalized her and left me with full custody of four kids.

Not just kids, either. But wild and free little animals with rebellious spirits and bizarre forms of creativity that required some assistance from law enforcement for me to keep them whole. (Oh, I loved them. Almost too much. They taught me everything.)

Im not finished here. With my victim story. I was an alcoholic myself! I forgot to tell you that. Victim of my parents genes? Or maybe just a learned family tradition.

But fortunately I found recovery before any of the kids were born. I still go to Twelve-Step meetings with one of my children.

What am I leaving out? Oh yes, bankruptcy. That, too. Twenty-five years ago, but it still rings in my ears. Like tinnitus. Which I also have.

So, okay, that was my basis for thinking I was a victim. I nurtured and reinforced my victim mindset in adulthood. It was a hard-knock life, and I never learned to be happy.

Until I did.

And thats what led to my profession. Now I teach others, through coaching, how to drop the victim act and get on an evolutionary path. The journey of the human spirit. The road less travelled.

And one might ask, given my startling lack of success as a human being most of my life, why I am making a good living at this. I think its because people realize that if I can do this, they certainly can. They easily can! So they hire me and I coach them. Our objective? A life that leaves the victim mindset behind, and then spirals up, flourishing, evolving, toward crazy good.

A lonely cell, my only hell

P art of my own path was to look back and see that everything I used to complain about in my past was actually there for my benefit. That rather than thinking I had a hard victims life, I now realized that I had a fulfilling, encouraging adventure full of challengesright out of the adventure comics and books I used to escape into so I wouldnt have to face life. I thought I was a victim of real life, so I escaped into fantasy life, reading about Superman and Robin Hood. If I had been one of those comic book characters they would have called me Victim Hood.

Most people, including those I coach, have painted a similar hard-knock life inside their own minds.

The song Its the Hard-Knock Life from the musical Annie refers to the tough situations and circumstances that the little orphans were up against. Later Jay-Z rapped out a hip-hop version of the same song in a more adult context. Featuring what he thought he was up against. (Fleein the murder scene, you know me well, from nightmares of a lonely cell, my only hell.)

Seeing life as full of hard knocks is the most common and widespread perception of life. I referred to it as victim thinking in an earlier book, and that whole book circled around just how automatic victim thinking had become for most people on this planet. (People believing they were lost and afraid in a world they never made.)