Tag Archives: Personal Guidance System

My Intuitive Glasses ~

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At the moment I’m editing in Sydney (my new Facing Fear film) – and coming back to Mudgee on the weekends.

Last week, as I was about to leave home, I looked over at my spare reading glasses and I got a strong intuitive PGS hit that I should take these glasses with me.

Just to explain: I need glasses to read.
I can’t read without my glasses now.
I simply can’t.

But I went nah. I don’t need to take a spare pair of glasses. I have my main pair, which I love, and that’s enough. So I left home without taking my spare pair of glasses.

CUT TO:

I lost my glasses.
I could not find them anywhere.
I’d been watching telly with my son at his place, I’d settled down to read before I went to sleep, and I could not find my glasses anywhere.

I turned the place upside down. I searched everywhere. It was crazy. I’d brought them into the house. They had to be somewhere. But do you think I could find them?

I found them, finally.
They’d slipped under a sofa.
It took me over an hour to find them.

While searching I kept thinking I should have brought my back-up pair.

CUT TO:

Next day, I’m in the editing suite with Rishi, my editor.
I needed to read a script I’d written.
I needed my glasses.
I couldn’t find them. Again.

To put this into context. I never lose my glasses.
Like, never.
And I’d now lost them twice in two days.
(yeah yeah, I know, I found them the previous night)

Again, I searched everywhere. Rishi searched everywhere. I called my son, who was working from home, and asked him to look for them.

He searched everywhere.
My bedroom, the kitchen, even where I’d parked.
No sign of the glasses.

I searched the car. Maybe they’d slipped down the side of the seat. Rishi came out and helped me. Judith, a friend who’d stopped by, searched too. None of us could find the glasses.

I was facing the prospect of five days where I couldn’t read – or indeed write because I needed my glasses for writing too.

If only I’d brought my spare back-up glasses.

Several hours later, Rishi came into the editing room proudly brandishing my glasses. Evidently they’d slipped out of my pocket while I was walking along a laneway from the carpark to the entrance to the editing facility.

A tradesman had picked them up and very kindly dropped them at the reception desk of the editing facility – Rishi had seen them there and had figured they were mine.

So I got my glasses back. And fortunately no one had driven up that laneway and driven over my glasses – and indeed they were completely undamaged.

SO WHAT HAPPENED HERE?

The way I see it, my intuition (my PGS – Personal Guidance System) – had told me I should take my spare reading glasses to Sydney.

I ignored that advice.

So then my PGS manoevered circumstances so that I would wish that I’d listened to the advice and acted upon it. For me, it was a reminder that I should not ignore my intuition.

It was a lesson.

You might not agree. You might think I’m a loon.

Watch my movie – PGS Intuition is your Personal Guidance System. It’s now on iTunes and Google Play worldwide. Watch that and you might see things a little differently.



Intuition yesterday at Woolies ~

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I drove into the Woolies carpark – Saturday 11:15am. Peak time.

The carpark was chockers. Not a space anywhere. Plus I had five cars ahead of me cruising to pounce on a spot.

I was anxious. Because at midday I was to be interviewed on a major US podcast show. Mentors & Moguls, by Heather Stone. I wasn’t sure which category I fitted into – whether I was a mentor or a mogul. But whatever – it was an important podcast, I didn’t want to be late and I had to do the week’s shopping.

But first, I had to find a park, and there was nothing free.

So I went into my PGS mode – I put out the intention that I would find the perfect parking spot, and I would find it quickly.

So I drove slowly behind the line of five cars, and as I passed each row of cars I saw that there were no free spaces to be had in any of these rows, and no one was walking to a car from Woolies about to hop in and drive off. There was no movement at all.

So here’s what I did – I turned into the row that was closest to the entrance to Woolies. The row that would provide me the ideal parking spot. But the row was completely full, and there was no one in their vehicle about to pull out.

The cars in front of me kept going – they saw too that the row was full. They kept cruising. But I drove into this completely full row. I drove towards the entrance – to the end of the row. The closer I got to the end of the row, and to the entrance to the shopping centre, the more perfect the parking spot would be – but it was full.

And then I saw taillights turn red. Someone was in a car in the most perfect spot possible. And then their reverse lights came on. And then they slowly backed out, providing me the parking spot that I wanted – the ideal parking spot right by the front entrance.

I waited for the elderly lady to back out and then I drove in – and as I was parking I saw the line of five cruising cars drive slowly past – each driver glaring at me with undisguised hostility.

Or it could have been envy.

Anyway, what happened? I set my intention, I trusted and I held my belief even when it seemed impossible.

Coincidence, you might say.
I’ll say in response that yes, it might be coincidence if this happens randomly, but this now happens to me all the time. I’m serious. Anyone who has driven with me will verify this.

You know what the trick to it is?
ASK.
You have to ask.
Most people don’t ask – so they don’t get.

And then you have to
TRUST.

Watch my movie PGS – Intuition is your Personal Guidance System. It’s out now on iTunes and Google Play. Or you can read my book: PGS the Book on Amazon.

We’re coming up to Christmas. We’re going to be shopping – parking.
Try it.
It works!

“I should have followed my gut,” says Lewis Hamilton.

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At the beginning of this year, I started following Formula 1 motor racing.

This came as a big surprise to my dear wife Jennifer, to my family, and to those that I confided in – because I have largely kept it my dirty little secret, until now that is!

Why was it a surprise? Because I’m no way a rev-head. I’ve shown zero interest in motor sports until I began watching a documentary series on Netflix called Drive to Survive, which was a series following the F1 circuit for an entire season.

After watching this doco I got hooked.
And I mean obsessively hooked.

For the whole year I’ve watched every practice session, every qualifying session, every race. I listen to F1 podcasts. I keep up to date with all the latest news on the F1 app. I am a fan.

Why?
Me, who drives a sedate station wagon that’s done 250,000kms and is 12 years old.
Me, who doesn’t know how to top up the windscreen wiper fluid.
Me, who would have to call the NRMA if I got a flat tyre.

Pathetic, isn’t it?

But I’ve become fascinated with Formula 1 because it is heightened drama. The stakes each race are huge. The egos each race are huge. The margins between winning and losing are wafer thin. The technology is mind-bogglingly sophisticated.

And then there’s Lewis Hamilton.

Lewis Hamilton is seven times World Champion and this year he’s going for his eighth title. If he gets it, he will be the greatest driver in Formula 1 motor racing history.

His nemesis is a young up-and-coming Dutch driver named Max Verstappen. Hamilton drives for Mercedes and Verstappen drives for Red Bull. One makes cars and the other makes putrid energy drinks.

You can tell who I’m rooting for.

Lewis Hamilton is humble, a sweet guy, and could well become one of the world’s greatest ever elite sportsmen. It all comes down to the final few races of the season. At the moment Max Verstappen is leading him by six points.

I watched this morning a replay of last night’s Turkish Grand Prix. I won’t go into the details, but there was a crucial moment in the race when Lewis Hamilton was instructed by his race director over the team radio to pit-stop and get a new set of tyres fitted.

Hamilton didn’t want to. He wanted to keep going and finish the race on his original set of tyres. Initially, he refused to follow his race director’s instructions. He had the chance of finishing close to Verstappen.

But a few laps later when his race director insisted, Hamilton acquiesced and went into the pits, had his tyres changed, and when he came back out onto the track again his new tyres weren’t working for him and he ended up coming fifth in the race, when he could have come third.

Hamilton, unusually for him, was furious. He said over the team radio that he should have followed his gut. Read about it here…

https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.i-should-have-trusted-my-gut-hamilton-reveals-why-he-was-left-frustrated-by.3K8x7EIPlXOK3jIQocsPDx.html

You hear this often – following or trusting your gut. People call it intuition. And yes it is a form of intuition. I call it Cognitive Intuition – because it is intuition based on expert knowledge.

In making my film PGS – Intuition is your Personal Guidance System, I figured out that not all intuitions are the same. I came up with the concept that there are four types of intuition:

Survival Intuition
Cognitive Intuition
Mystical Intuition
Proxy Intuition

If you want to learn more about this, go read my book PGS, available on Amazon.
PGS the Book

Lewis Hamilton is an expert driver. He called upon his expert knowledge to make a gut call. An intuitive call. As it turned out, he was right.

Most gut decisions are…



ME time ~

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I’ve decided to gift myself some ME Time.

What’s ME Time?
(notice I capitalise me? That’s to emphasis to myself that I’m important!)

ME Time is time for me. For my nourishment, replenishment, for my growth. Because I can’t give out to others if I’m a stunted withered soul.

It’s like what they tell you as you’re about to take off on a flight –
(remember those times?)
Grab the oxygen mask and use it yourself before you look to share it with others.

Same deal with ME Time.

We have this perfect opportunity right now during this pandemic. Many of us here in Australia are in lockdown, or we’re working from home, or for whatever reason we find that we have more disposable time on our hands than we’ve ever had before.

It’s a perfect opportunity to grab some ME Time.

So what is ME Time?

For me I’ve decided to institute a daily routine of yoga and meditation, every day without fail. 20 minutes of yoga minimum, 20 minutes of meditation minimum. That’s not too onerous, right? I can find 40 mins at the beginning of each day. And that then sets me up for the rest of the day.

What I’m finding though is that the 20 minutes yoga often becomes 30-40 minutes because I get into it. Same with the meditation. I end up doing 30 minutes or more. And that’s great. But bare minimum, 20/20.

That’s me – my thing. Your thing might be gardening. Or sewing. Or getting out on a bike. Or cooking. Whatever it is that gives you pleasure, and nourishes your soul. Simply getting out into nature is good ME Time.

This whole pandemic has made me reassess what’s important. And yes family is important. Of course. And those that I love.

But I’m also important.
My health.
My well being.
My mental state.

This is not selfishness, this is not narcissism.
This is survival.

And like I say, I can’t hope to give out to others if I’m depleted.
Physically, mentally, emotionally.

I’ve been watching this show on telly called Alone. In Australia it’s on SBS on Demand. It’s a reality tv show where ten people are dropped off into remote wilderness and they have to survive for as long as possible. And the last man, or woman, standing wins $500,000. The unique twist to this is that there’s no crew. They film themselves. So they are totally alone.

I’ve never watched a reality tv show before. I’m serious. Never. They’ve always seemed too contrived and manipulative for my tastes. But there’s something very real and authentic about this show. And what’s interesting about it is that as the days click by and as it gets tougher and tougher, these people become more inward looking, and dare I say it, spiritual.

And invariably, what causes them to tap out and ask to be picked up and taken back to civilisation is often not because they’re starving, or they’re scared of bears or cougars or whatever, but because they miss their loved ones, or because they break mentally.

Interestingly. so far with the seasons I’ve watched, none of them meditate.

But I mention this in relation to ME Time because we can so easily forget that we need to look after ourselves. In the past we have so often defined ourselves by our work, by what we do, that’s who we are. But this pandemic has forced many of us to redefine ourselves outside of our work, because we’ve either lost our jobs or our jobs have changed or we’ve realised that perhaps there are other more significant ways to consider ourselves, other than through work.

For many of us, the work ethos that we thought was crucial we’ve discovered isn’t that crucial anymore.

What’s crucial is ME Time.

Where do Your Ideas come from?

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I get asked this question quite a lot – often when I launch a new film or book.
Where do your ideas come from?
And I always give the same answer –

I dunno.

And I don’t.
I don’t have a bloody clue.
I’m just thankful the ideas do come.
But I’m often disappointed that the ideas aren’t better.

I often seem to be given those shop-soiled heavily-discounted
last-season ideas that must have been dragged from the bottom
of the remainders bin near to the express check-out in the
Cheap Ideas SupaStore, you know, the one in that part of town
where you risk getting mugged.

Why can’t I get better ideas?
Why can’t I get ideas from the Oscar-winning, Palm d’Or-winning,
Booker-winning stores that the people I admire shop at?

These elite stores are inaccessible to me, it seems.
When they see me coming they flip the sign on their
front door from OPEN to CLOSED.
They close the shutters and put out the garbage.
If I pound on the door and insist they open up they call security.

Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to be happy with my
last season heavily discounted shop soiled ideas.

I’ll put lipstick on them.

Anyway, back to Where do Your Ideas come from?

I was listening to a podcast the other day and this woman was talking about a book she’d just written, and she proudly announced that she had channelled it.

Like that made it special.
Like that made her special.

Give me a bloody break.
Get over yourself sweetheart, as Caroline Myss would say.
Get off your pretentious self-serving high horse.

EVERYTHING is channelled.
ALL ideas are channelled.
Except most of us don’t know it,
or recognise it, or acknowledge it.

We all get ideas all the time, we just don’t value them. Or we don’t trust them. Or we don’t know what to do with them. We haven’t developed the skills to do something with them, or we don’t wish to develop those skills.

An idea can change your life.
It can change the lives of others.
It can change the world.

But where do your ideas come from?

Source.



I watch the news ~

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I watch the news.
I not only watch the news, I listen to the news.
And I read news from a variety of sources.

I live in a small country town outside of Sydney yet each day I read the Washington Post, the New York Times, the BBC World service (off their app), the Sydney Morning Herald, and Wired magazine. I get emailed newsletters from them all too.

In the morning while I have my shower I listen to the breakfast show on Radio National on the ABC, or the ABC’s radio current affairs show AM. Of an evening I watch the first half of SBS news. It gives me a global perspective. 

I don’t watch Fox news, commercial television news, I don’t read any Murdoch newspapers. And I don’t get my news from social media, or from Google.

Now, you might say that I live in a left wing echo chamber and you might be right. So what? I believe I’m capable of discerning between what’s news and what’s commentary.

I was trained as a journalist.

I studied journalism at university before getting a cadetship at the ABC. I completed my three year cadetship and then joined the ABC’s flagship current affairs show This Day Tonight. For a brief period I worked on Four Corners before moving from current affairs to documentaries. After twelve years working as a journalist and documentarian I moved into independent filmmaking.

Why am I telling you this?

Because the world is going through a time of unparalleled change, and I believe it’s critically important that I keep up with things, to know what’s going on and why, so that I can make informed decisions that affect not only me but my loved ones, my country and the world.

Also, how can I ever hope to contribute creatively if I don’t have any social or political context?

I don’t understand people who say they don’t watch the news.

There’s a lot of so-called new-age people who say that. They think this somehow protects them from all the negative energy that they perceive to be out there.

What a load of crap.

It’s like saying you’re going to cross the road with your eyes shut because you don’t want to get hit by a car.

Burying your head in the sand isn’t going to change things. What’s going to change things is action based on informed choice. 

There’s many who say they don’t believe the mainstream media. They talk about fake news. I’ve worked as a journalist and what I know is this – good journalists are driven by a strong desire to expose contradiction and hypocrisy. That’s what gets them out of bed each day.

The media conglomerates might have their agendas, such as the Murdoch empire, but if you are selective in what news you ingest, you can remain factually informed.

History is happening around us every day, and it’s being chronicled by the news. I saw floods in subways in New York the other night. It looked straight out of a disaster movie. This is climate change in action.

Like all the bushfires.
Like the destruction of the magnificent Barrier Reef.

I saw the storming of the Capital in Washington, live on TV as it was happening. Who would ever have thought that was possible?

America got out of the Vietnam war because of the TV coverage. The visual news reporting, and the reporting of the My Lai massacre were instrumental in creating a groundswell movement stateside that forced political change.

I read somewhere recently that democracy is under threat because it requires diligence and effort to maintain democratic ideals, and a lot of people aren’t prepared to put in the effort.

If they watched the news maybe they would…

Would you regard your life a success?

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I had a birthday the other day, and as most of you know, I’m no spring chicken. But I started to wonder – has my life been a success?

Now, I must admit I don’t feel entirely comfortable using the past tense here because I’ve still got some gas left in the tank – I hope!

But it made me think – what constitutes success in a life?

If someone has an expensive car and a luxurious house by the harbour, would you say that person is a success?

You probably would, right?

What if they have a massive stock or property portfolio, or a beautiful holiday home by the sea, or a swanky mountain retreat – would you say that person is a success?

Again, you probably would.

Supposing that same person has several failed marriages. And a brood of children that hate his or her guts. And supposing that person got their wealth through greed and deceit. Would you still regard that person a success?

I wouldn’t.
Material wealth and possessions aren’t, in my view, an indicator of success.

In the work I do, as a filmmaker and author, success can be marked by awards. But I know plenty of people who have done great work that’s had a major impact on culture and they’ve never won an award.

Good critical reviews for a creative work could be seen to be a marker of success – but again history shows us that what we regard as masterpieces now were often dismissed or even vilified at the time when these works were first released and critiqued.

In the creative industries, if you make a lot of money you’re regarded as being a success.

But what you make, or do, could be ugly and hurtful.

If someone for instance became wealthy by making pornography, would you regard that person a success? Or if they created works that were exploitative or incited hatred or violence – is that a successful life?

For me, morals and ethics hold way more sway than material displays of success.

Did Gandhi achieve success in life?
You bet he did.
Did Mother Teresa achieve success in life?
Damn right she did.
They both had bugger all in terms of possessions.
But the impact they made on humanity was immeasurable.

We all can’t be Gandhis or Mother Teresas,
but in some small way we can put a dent in the Universe,
As Steve Jobs put it.
We were born to create.
That’s what our purpose is, I believe.
And every day we create, all of us, in one way or another.
What we create, and how we do it, is what defines us.

I was on a podcast recently hosted by an entrepreneur,
and he asked me:
What would you say has been your greatest success?

My family, I told this podcaster.

That flummoxed him.
He didn’t expected me to say that.
But I believe it absolutely.
Everything else is secondary to that.

For me, success in life is waking up each morning,
being able to do what I love doing.

That to me is a successful life.

I’m stalling ~

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First off in this newly energised blog –
I’m stalling.
It’s now 5:13am as I write this, and I got up before 4am to start writing –
But I haven’t written anything yet other than this damn blog.

I’m meant to be writing a new book.
A novel.
It’s going to be short – about 50K words – and I’m now nearly at 40K words.
Each day I hope to write between 1,200 -1,500 words.
Takes me 5-6 hrs to write that much.
Writing is an athletic endeavour.

The new book will be a real departure for me.
I haven’t shown any of it to Jennifer.
That’s unusual, because she usually reads everything I write as I go.

Not this one.

I’ll tell you the title and a little of what it’s about in later posts.
I’ve stalled enough. I now have to get back to it.
Sometime around 9am or 9:30am Jennifer will phone down asking for a coffee.
This happens every day.
I bring her coffee in bed.
Normally she’s been up for a while doing her exercises, her yoga and her meditation.
She’s very disciplined with all that.
But she can’t put three words together with any level of comprehension until she’s had coffee.

I’m Bill the Barista.

I have to stop stalling.
I have to start my writing for the day –
I have a book to write.

Here’s a nice pic for you that I took in France during that time when one could travel.

I’m not special ~

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In starting off a blog with the title ‘I’m not special,’ it kind of implies that actually I am special, and I know I’m special, and anyone who knows me must also know that I’m special, because bloody hell isn’t it obvious?

I mean, crikey – you’d have to be a total dumb arse if you knew me and weren’t in awe of how special I was.

And in writing a blog titled I’m not special I’m actually pretending to be humble, and that, in a perverse kind of way, makes me even more special.

Does that make sense?

Nah – it doesn’t make much sense to me either. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not special, because we all are special, and that makes none of us special.

I’ve made a movie on intuition, and now I’ve written a book about it too – but that doesn’t make me special. It makes me curious. It just so happens that over the past forty years I’ve developed certain skills that have enabled me to turn that curiosity into films and books. 

I heard a voice early one morning, while driving. It told me to slow down as I was approaching an intersection. A truck ran a red light and nearly killed me.

That voice saved my life. 

I was curious about that voice – so I made a movie about my search to find out what it was. 

And what I discovered was that what happened to me wasn’t so special – many many people have had similar experiences. Most of them just don’t want to talk about it – and none have made a film about it. 

Paul Allen died the other day. Paul Allen was the co-founder of Microsoft, along with Bill Gates.

Paul Allen was 65 – same age as me.  He used his years on this planet in ways different to me. And to you.

Does that make him special? More special than me, or you?

We are all special.

None of us are more or less special than anyone else. We are all part of divine energy and it’s this divine energy that’s special. 

If you want to read my book of the film PGS – Intuition is your Personal Guidance System – here is a link to its Amazon site. 

PGStheBook – Amazon




PGS the Book is now available ~

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PGS the Book is now on sale on Amazon – 

The book goes even deeper than the film into the mechanics of intuition, and details how you can use your intuition every day to make better choices, to enrich your life in ways you never thought possible.

Over the past year, the film has been playing to sell-out screenings across the US, and Australia. The film has been called a “life-changer,” and Caroline Myss described it as “truly superb.”  

The film finally goes on sale online on November 1st!

Thanks to James Terry of Arcadia Press for publishing the book!

By the way, for those of you in Australia, because Amazon still hasn’t worked out its GST issue with our country, the paperback won’t be available for another month or so. If you want one, email me on billbennett.pgs@gmail.com, and I’ll post you a copy. Cost is AU$25 + postage.