How to Be Comfortable Being Alone

Most people on the planet today are terrified of being alone.

And yet, there are multiple benefits that come to the leader who carries the wisdom of being alone more often in this noisy world:

1. It is in solitude that you build intimacy with your gifts plus talents.

2. It is in quietude that we can do the deep inner-work that allows us to bring our finest games to our marketplaces (and communities).

3. It is when we are alone that we receive the opportunity to build a relationship with who we truly are.

4. Great geniuses leverage serenity to capture the insights that allow them to disrupt their fields and make history.

I'm so very excited to share this fresh episode of The Mastery Sessions with you, as I know it will bring some super valuable ideas to the way you work, as well as the way you live.

Please don't allow yourself to be busy being busy. And please appreciate the awesome value of spending more time alone in this society of business and fragmented attention.

Your fan always,

We’re also happy to provide you the transcription at no cost:

How to Be Comfortable Being Alone

Hi, it's Robin Sharma, and welcome to this Mastery Session, and here is my opening question: how good are you being alone? 

If you look at the great geniuses, you look at the great women and men of the world, you look at the most creative people, you look at people who are building great businesses, they all have one thing in common: they spend a lot of time thinking. You will never get your best insights in a noisy restaurant or being surrounded by your best friends. 

We live in a world that in many ways says, "Well, if you want to be liked and if you want to fit in, make sure you have a lot of people around you, and your life is layered with lots of complexity, and shiny toys, and bells and whistles." Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, said something I've never forgotten. He said, "Most of man's miseries derive by his inability to sit quietly in a room by himself." 

Tranquility is the new luxury. I'm going to repeat that again, because it's so important. Tranquility is the new luxury. Most people in the world right now are so addicted to distraction, there's so much going on. They're exhausted. One of the single best moves you can do to get your best thinking done, to get your best insights, to be more intentional as you go through your days, to amplify your productivity, creativity, and prosperity is this: make more time to be alone, and to go even deeper, make the time and develop the ability to like yourself more.

You know, you are the only person who will be with you your entire lifetime. We're going to lose loved ones. People come and go. You are the only person that will be with you as long as you are alive, and so why not build intimacy and fluency with you?

Your relationship with yourself sets up your relationship with your spouse, the rest of your family. Your relationship with yourself is really what drives your relationship with your teammates and coworkers. Your relationship with yourself sets up your relationship with money because you will never have a higher income than your self identity. Your relationship with yourself drives your performance and your career. Your relationship with yourself sets up your entire relationship with your world. 

The doorway to success then, swings inward, not outward. As you build that relationship with your finest self, as you build the relationship with your values, as you build the relationship with your gifts and your talents, as you meditate and contemplate, and reflect on your true wisdom, what starts to happen is you peel away your ego, which is simply the voice of your fear, and you get to know that inner warrior, and that primal genius that lurks within every human heart. You have it, but is your ego screaming more loudly than your inner hero? And if that's the case, then you're not intimate with who you truly are.

Life's greatest betrayal is not knowing who you truly are, so where do you get to know your best self? In the twilight of quiet. It is in the tranquility of the early morning hours, or maybe those quiet hours before you go to sleep, where you can pull out a journal and write about the person you've always wanted to be. It might be where you meditate on the person you want to become. You might want to pray in your quiet hours alone about what you want your life to stand for. 

I spend a lot of time early in the morning with my eyes closed visualizing the life I want to create. All I know is my best thinking, my greatest self-excavation, my highest personal growth doesn't happen when I'm in a room full of people, it happens when I have carved out the time to be alone. That's when I can hear the silent whispers of my greatest self. 

Well, you can't be alone, and you won't make time to be tranquil if you're scared of yourself. You see, I believe a lot of people, the reason why they're on their phones all day long, or watching TV all day long, or busy being busy, or addicted to alcohol, or medication, or gossiping, those are simply flights and escapes from intimacy with who they truly are. 

You see, what I'm really saying is most people have all this pain and self-hatred deep within them, so because they've never processed through that pain, they need to structure their life to be busy where they're always doing things, because they're scared of being alone, because when you're alone, you not only start thinking, you start feeling. I'm going to repeat that again, because it's so fundamentally important. When you are alone, all your deepest feelings that you've been resisting come up.

Well, is that hard and uncomfortable? It is, but that's where your growth is. There's a concept I teach not only mindset, which everyone's talking about, there's a word I've introduced for the past few years in my work called heartset, and also healthset and soulset, but on the heartset point, when you start to feel that pain and get to know that pain, you release that pain. The way to heal a wound is to feel a wound, and trust me, every single human being on the planet, unless you're enlightened, has wounds and associated pain. 

In the quiet times, yes, you can read, and yes, you can meditate, and yes, you can think, and yes, you can grow, but you can also go into your heartset and start processing through the toxic emotions that are actually limiting your performance, your creativity, productivity, prosperity, and impact on humanity. 

So I just want to remind you, a great life has times out in the world, and periods alone in the wilderness, and if you want to be thoughtful, if you want to be a heavyweight on the planet, you want to dominate your domain, if you want to rise to legendary, if you want to live a beautiful lifestyle, it starts with getting to know who you truly are; your gifts, your talents, your ego voices, your weakness. It's about being alone so you know your values, how you want to live, what your Mighty Mission is, what your high value targets are, and ultimately, it's about connecting -- I'm going to get a little dangerous here -- but being alone is about pondering and reflecting on your mortality. 

You see, the more you think about how you will have wished you will have lived when you're no longer here, the more intimacy and fluency you build with the shortness of life and your mortality, and if you do it every day alone, each day will then be a platform to get closer to how you will have wished you will have lived at the end. That's called an intentional life, a clear life, a heroic life, and a leadership life, and that's my great wish for you.

So make the time to be alone a lot more often, and get comfortable being alone, and then do the work required so you excavate who you truly are, and bring that light, talent, genius, and love to a world absolutely aching for true heroes.

Source: The Robin Sharma Mastery Sessions, Robin Sharma