Writing in a foreign language is a new experience for me, but for some reason, my mind kept drifting towards writing in English.

This is not natural for me, all my previous articles were written in german. Its a challenge. This isn't an easy decision for me. Let's take a trip back to those old, rusty school days that nobody wants to talk about, but we all lived through.

In school we learn many different things for different reasons - I bet some of that knowledge, is even without a reason. That's fine. During my English classes, I was one of the students who excelled at learning new words and grasped grammar concepts quite easily.

But then moments appear, where you have to speak. To be clear, my spoken English isn't the worst out there, but I struggle with pronouncing the "th" sound - or as I call it, "Tea Age." My grades in English class were none of my best.

So overall, why am I doing this right now?

The art of surrender.

At the end of last year, I read the book "The Surrender Experiment" by Michael Singer, where I first learned about the art of surrender. And so, my own journey of surrender began.

Mr. Singer is a very succesful person - both in business and spiritual life. And he praises all of his biggest achievements is due to the practice of surrender.

Surrender is not used to tap inside a fight of your favorite martial arts. And because I could not say it any better - I will borrow Mickeys words for this one:

But surrender did give me clarity in one essential area: my personal preferences of like and dislike were not going to guide my life. By surrendering the hold those powerful forces had on me, I was allowing my life to be guided by a much more powerful force, life itself.

Essentially this means you should forget about your own preferences and just follow the flow of life, let it guide you down the path it unfolds for you. You cant have a better plan than than life has for you.

Today, about 3 months later I can really tell you - its a funny experiment you should try for yourself someday. And maybe Someday is Today - another great book to read, which will help you to get started.. with anything.

What am I doing here?

In the last days I was thinking heavily about if I should join the WriteOfPassage cohort or not. This is a online course for becoming writers / authors. And as far as I know, its one of the best ways to learn or accelerate your writing skills. Since you will join a community, who will also take their own journey - you will get a lot of feedback & help from there. And actually, its really expensive - so it really should be worth the money.

Overall, I believe that investing money in yourself is by far the best investment you can make in your life. So I was quickly accepting that I want to join that course - no matter the price. Yes, it took me a while to accept that price anyway.

But, lets be clear about one thing - I did not join the course.The registration period ended a week ago.

This is really hard to understand for now with all that praise, so please bear with me and lets return to the starting point.

2023 - starting again.

While reading this book I quickly wanted to give that act of surrender a try for myself. Because if life has planned anything for me, why not check what is planned for me?

Usually we all make plans, to-do lists and dream about what we could achieve one day. Some of us want to keep their dreams in their head for their whole life - because this way there is always unfulfilled potential for us. Thanks to this we have excuses in our head like "if I just tried / If I just had the time for that, my life would have been a whole lot different".

And while I think we can fulfill our dreams in any direction we choose, its non-sense to just keep this in our head. Most are afraid of actually doing the crazy ideas, because we all can fail on our way.

Its better to have a broken dream, than to never chase it.

In the last weeks of 2022 I just started to chase after one of my dreams: to write. Actually I still have the dream to publish a book one day - even if I dont know what it should be about right now. Funny enough, I just realized that I need to take action on my 30th birthday.

So, lets give you clear guidance on how to write a book:

Step 1You need to write.

Yes! Thats all. If you want to be an author - you need to write. Since I was not ready to start writing on a book, I have chosen to start by practicing. To practice writing, you need to write - so I started my personal blog.

Actually, I got that feeling that we all dont feel ready for something. The best thing I can recommend so far - is to do it anyways. Living on the edge of fear can give you much space to grow.

And now lets get back to the art of surrender. Since I'm a shy guy sometimes, I never told anybody about my new blog. Just my wife and my best friends have heard about that secret.

Surrender for the first time.

But, actually I knew that I need more feedback to develop my writing skills. And overall some people, who are interested in my articles would be even better than talking into the void. Around that time I surrendered for the first time (without accident).

I was giving some of my personal stuff outside into the world. The world in that moment was 100 people big for me, I was posting about my blog inside our companys news channel. You cant imagine my fear, which started to rise in this moment. I had to do it anyway. But It took me some minutes to finally push that button to send the message. In those moments I try to ask myself: "Whats the worst thing that could happen?". Usually the answers are not as bad as your fear wants to tell you.

But that river wanted to go down there, so lets surrender.

The responses were very friendly and lovely - thats why I love to work here. Even if I felt like naked, maybe most did not even clicked on the link. Some did, some told me its great that I took my courage to present this to the world. Some of them even joined my newsletter.

Some of them will be pretty surprised to see me texting in english.

Around the same time, I was joining the twitter world, too. Thats where I was using english as main language from day one. Funny enough - I really did not make this choice after all. In these days I even thought there would be no german folks using twitter. Overall twitter felt dead to me.

Then I realized I was wrong - Its not dead, it never was.

But its kind of a sure bet, that I needed to go for english language, since I wanted some of you guys to be able to read my quick thoughts and tipps.

The first days, weeks and months of my twitter life were a bit lonely. But overall I am so happy. I found some new friends there. It did not take long for the first real connection, that suprised me. If you are not using twitter - maybe you cant imagine, but in the world wide web you will feel people that are kind of your folks, your own tribe.

These people have similiar dreams, think about the same stuff like you do and if you want to help other people - you will find people helping you. Thats the power of a community.

Later on I made some new friends along that way. And one of them told me, he was visiting the website, which I put inside my twitter biography. Unfortunately he could not read or understand a word of my articles.

Now - you can, Sensei!

This is a good time to give him a follow on Twitter:Profil / Twitter

New opportunities arise

Some days later I read a book about a storytelling technique, which was written by two guys I have met at a work related talk. The book contains nice information about the hero journey. But thats a topic for another day. The reason to bring this up now is, that inside the book you get really motivated to schedule a free session with one of them. My mind told me it is just part of the sales process, so it created a small barrier. I dont like to think of myself as being stupid enough to fall for this trick. In these days, I decided to just dont listen to my preferences, to my smart monkey mind and signed up for a session with them.

And, surprise: It was a very funny and relaxed meeting Bernie and me had together. I even think I really found some nice human behind the curtain of me as a prospect for the companies offer.

That could be fun enough, but thats not the end of the story. Some days later I posted something on LinkedIn and he suggested to create a podcast episode with one friend of him. By that time those were enough signals for me to really start another podcast, which adds some audio and personal stories to the startup world and methods I usually write about. But it would also take a lot of time and effort..

Nah, thats personal preference, lets see where this guides me.

Surrender, one more time.

So, all in all there still is the big thing called WriteOfPassage. It would mean to write articles in english. It took me some time, but actually - is there any reason to not try it?

Yes - unfortunately there are lots of good reasons to dont do this - for now.

We had quite a stressful life for the last months, our cats experienced tough times - which made us experience tough times, too. I dont want to complain here, so lets quickly summarize this: They both went through some health issues, mental stress and fights with a neighbour cat and to make it perfect - they ended up projecting the issues with each other. So we seperated them to reduce the mental stress for them. We also needed to reduce the mental stress for our personal life, since we just spent our free time clearing pee up or talking about how to process with our cat issue.

In those weeks we started to catify our house more and learned a lot about cat behaviour. So now, we feel finally ready to re-introduce our cats. This will be tough days again, most of you cant imagine.

So even if I would love to join the course, its not what life has planned for me - right now.Time to surrender again.

There will be another cohort later this year, for sure. There is always time to start things slowly.

Lets sum things up.

So, we had a nice time for now. Its time to sum things up and give you a small teaser for what great things happened after my first acts of surrender.

Actually the biggest benefit from this is:

My life got really exciting - because nobody knows what comes next. Not even myself.

Almost everyday there comes an opportunity. And those are really unexpected. Some days you just get a small thank you from around the world, on other days - you will be invited to join a podcast. Life turned a bit upside down. It feels like Im attracting new, crazy ideas more into my life - since I started to just accept what life gives me.

Other days its really scary, since I dont know what happens. I mean - its really scary.

To close this: Im not an expert in surrendering. I try to level up my mind and during sports. Yoga is good for surrendering to what the poses will give you in that moment. Maybe this is just a time-boxed experiment. Maybe it isn't.

I dont know. I dont want to know..

👋

Whats your experience with the flow of life?