Start With Where You Are

You can’t steer from someone else’s map. Start from yours.

I woke up this morning behind.

Not behind on email. Not behind on a deadline. Behind in the way that feels like your own life got a head start without you. You know the feeling – the ambient low-grade “meh” that lands on you before your feet hit the floor.

Most people try to push through it. White-knuckle their way to productivity. Fake a higher gear.

I used to do the same thing. Call it being a “Beast of Burden.”

I’ll never be your beast of burden

My back is broad, but it’s a-hurting

– Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Rolling Stones, Beast of Burden, Some Girls album, 1978

That was my operating system for years. Take whatever state life threw at me as a given. Immutable. My cross to bear – and, trust me, I made sure everyone knew I was carrying it.

Then I learned something that changed how I show up every single day.

Your state is not a sentence. It’s a starting point.

The Map You’ve Never Seen – But Are Always On

David R. Hawkins spent decades as a psychiatrist mapping something most of us feel but can’t name: the energetic topology of human consciousness.

His Map of Consciousness – detailed in Power vs. Force and The Map of Consciousness Explained – is a logarithmic scale of emotional states and vibration frequencies, from Shame and Humiliation at the bottom (20) all the way to Enlightenment at the top (700+). In between: Guilt. Apathy. Grief. Fear. Anger. Pride. Courage. Willingness. Acceptance. Reason. Love. Joy. Peace.

Here’s the part that matters: Hawkins calibrated the scale based on the measurable impact each state has on the world around you.

States below 200 – Shame, Humiliation, Guilt, Apathy, Fear – are all net-negative. They literally consume more energy than they produce.

States above 200 – Courage and higher – are net-positive. They generate more energy than they take.

The line between 199 and 200 isn’t just a number.

It’s a threshold.

Below it, the nervous system is in contraction. Above it, it opens.

This morning, I was somewhere around Apathy. Maybe 75. Definitely not on the upper floors of this elevator ride.

I don’t see “meh” on the Map of Consciousness, but I have a feeling it calibrates somewhere well below “Joy” – lower third of the chart, if we’re being generous.

But here’s what I did differently than the old me would have: I didn’t try to rocket from Apathy to Joy.

That’s not a state change – that’s a fantasy.

Instead, I looked at the map. And I asked: What’s one or two floors up from where I was at – one that I can actually reach?

The answer for me today was Willingness.

Meh Is a Flow Trigger. No, Really.

Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal mapped the neuroscience of optimal performance with surgical precision in Stealing Fire and The Art of Impossible. One of their core insights is that flow is not a constant. It’s a cycle.

The four stages: Struggle. Release. Flow. Recovery.

That’s right – the cycle begins with struggle. The neurochemistry of it is specific: cortisol and norepinephrine spike. Your brain registers a challenge. Discomfort rises. Most people interpret this signal as “something is wrong.”

But the signal doesn’t mean something is wrong. It means something is starting.

This morning’s meh was Struggle for sure. The spike in cortisol wasn’t a malfunction. It was my brain loading the runway.

When I stopped fighting the low state and started working with it – acknowledging it, naming it, recalibrating toward a reachable target – something shifted. The struggle metabolized into release. Nitric oxide (your brain’s natural vasodilator) replaced the cortisol. Resistance loosened.

The gateway opened.

That’s the counterintuitive move: don’t try to skip the struggle phase. You can’t. Your nervous system won’t let you. But you can move through it faster when you stop treating it like an enemy.

Waffles, my Golden Doodle, didn’t get the memo about my low state this morning. He showed up at my desk with his full-body enthusiasm – tail going, eyes bright, ready to walk. He wasn’t checking my emotional readiness. He was just – ready. Dogs don’t negotiate with their states. They work with whatever’s available.

There’s a lesson there.

Well, I’ve been kicked by the wind

Robbed by the sleet

Had my head stoved in

But I’m still on my feet

And I’m still… willin’

– Lowell George, Willin’, Little Feat, Waiting for Columbus album, 1978

Willingness isn’t resignation. It’s a precision instrument.

The Three-Letter Word That Changes Everything

Here’s where Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset becomes practical in a way most people miss.

Dweck’s core insight: ability is not fixed. Neither is state.

Her tool for navigating the low moments is deceptively simple: add the word “yet.”

“I’m not feeling Joy … yet.”

“I haven’t reached my best state … yet.”

“I’m not where I want to be … yet.”

Those three letters do something specific neurologically: they shift the brain from a fixed-frame threat response to a temporal framing that implies movement.

The problem isn’t permanent. It’s a phase. A not yet, but soon.

A person with a Fixed Mindset meets a low state and concludes: “This is who I am today.”

A person with a Growth Mindset meets the same low state and concludes: “This is where I am right now.”

Big difference. Enormous difference.

This morning, I didn’t lower my goals. To borrow from Jesse Itzler: “I didn’t negotiate with my goals.”

What I adjusted was the intermediate state – the next floor up the elevator ride – I was operating from – and gave myself permission to do excellent work from Willingness rather than forcing myself to perform from a state I hadn’t reached yet.

There’s serious authenticity in recognizing what state you are currently in.

Optimizing from that state often takes courage.

Moving from that state takes willingness – willingness to take a risk, especially you don’t particularly feel like it.

The Impact Mindset Doesn’t Wait for Perfect Conditions

Here’s what was actually at stake this morning.

The Impact Mindset – the belief that what you do has the potential to matter beyond you, beyond today, beyond the transaction or task staring you in the face – is not a fair-weather philosophy. It’s a practice under pressure.

The people who make the biggest impact in the world don’t always operate from peak states. They operate from whatever state is available to them – and they work it. With all they got.

Viktor Frankl, who survived four Nazi concentration camps, identified what separated those who endured psychologically intact from those who didn’t. It wasn’t luck. It wasn’t strength. It was the capacity to find meaning in the present moment, regardless of the present conditions.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

– Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

That’s state management as a high-performance strategy.

What kept me going this morning wasn’t inspiration. It was the clarity of my commitments – to my clients, my writing, my readers. The people I was showing up for didn’t need me to arrive in Joy. They needed me to arrive mentally and get to work.

From Willingness, I got to work.

And here’s what happened: as I moved – as the pen (metaphorically) started moving across the page – the states available to me expanded.

Willingness became Understanding.

Understanding opened into Compassion.

Compassion fueled something closer to Love.

Not because I was focused on the result. For the process. For the fact that I had shown up for the work – willing to take it on with all I had, and the work was showing up for me.

Flow researchers call this the principle of progressive neurochemical loading: each small act of forward motion releases a dopamine reward that makes the next step more available. The momentum is real. The biochemistry is real.

You don’t wait for the right state to start. You start, and the state changes. What’s available to you changes.

Willingness Is A Coat To Wear As Needed, Not A Destination

There’s a reason I keep coming back to this word.

Willingness sits at a precise location on Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness – a frequency calibrated at 310. It’s the first of the higher-consciousness states that doesn’t require exceptional circumstances for people to access. You can reach Willingness even on a hard morning. Even in the middle of a complicated week.

Some days, Willingness is peak performance – perhaps something that was seemingly impossible when you started.

Other days, Willingness is not just an admirable starting point, but a springboard to higher and higher levels of performance, energy, and consciousness.

Think of Willingness as the warm coat you put on before stepping outside on cool, crisp day. You have a feeling you won’t need the coat later in the day, but that’s not the point … you don’t need to live in the coat all day long.

But you need it to get moving – to both brace for and embrace the cold.

As the morning wore on, the coat Willingness became optional, and then not needed anymore. The sun came out. I shed it.

Willingness was the threshold, not the ceiling.

Jimmy Dean had the geometry of state management exactly right:

“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”

– Jimmy Dean

The destination was never in question. The sail adjustment was everything.

The Ampersand of Starting Where You’re At

The old story says: either you’re in the right state, or you’re not. Either the conditions are good, or they’re not. Either you’re ready, or you’re not.

The Ampersand Mindset rejects the premise.

You can feel the low of a hard morning & refuse to let it set the ceiling for the day.

You can recognize your state is not where you want it to be & not lower your goals by a single inch.

You can operate from Willingness & watch more and more higher states become available as you move.

You can start from where you are & arrive somewhere you couldn’t have predicted when you woke up.

The map was never the problem. The insistence on starting from the top floor was.

Meh is not a diagnosis. It’s data.

Use it.

By the end of today, I wasn’t in the same state I woke up in. I was somewhere I couldn’t have forced my way to at 5 a.m. But I could work my way there – one floor at a time, with Willingness as my first stop.

Now I feel complete.

Start where you are. Not where you wish you were.

The elevator can move.

You just have to press the right button.

In possibility,

Scott Kratzer

Author, Coach, and Optimist

For more inspiration on another plane, please check out my Flow For Writers colleagues, Michelle Terrill Heath’s Substack, Kelli Etheridge, Tony Dina, and David Ricci, and also my friends Jessica Jaksha, who writes the in between: the messy middle, and Veronica “V” Wiley, who writes the Corpse Pose Yoga Substack. All of these writers are doing the real work.

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