Have a look at the desire essay again. What kind of game can you design and play, with the objective being to experience or acquire that desire which you currently are not experiencing yourself as having?

1. This desire is going to be your game for the rest of the course.

2. Establish what winning means. For example, if you’re choosing to have more intimacy in your life, what factors will indicate that you’ve succeeded? What does your life look like when you win the game? Try to make these mostly experiential descriptions and minimally physical, if you can.

3. Create a plan A and plan B strategy for how you can win the game. Determine actions and exercises that you’ll need to achieve in order to succeed

4. Acknowledge and note any predictable beliefs, behavioral patterns, which you know predictably could potentially disrupt the game, or cause you to fail.

5. Create a plan A and plan B strategy for preventing those predictables, and if they are beliefs, you’ll either need to choose to let go of that belief through denouncement of it, or playing this game becomes self sabotage, and that creates a cognitive precedence that has the danger of becoming a belief that you are incapable. So you’ll have to either give it up, or play a different game because if you’re not willing to give it up, then you don’t actually want the thing you say you desire and the game is futile. Think about ways that you are habituated to be predictably self defeatist. Do fear inventory on the fear that has you resist disrupting those habits. Observe any preferences in your life that keep you from experiencing yourself as already having that desire fulfilled. What are your addictions, habits, preferences, aversions, and beliefs that could predictably get in the way. Are you willing to give those up?

6. Check your authenticity and integrity quotient. Are you attached to ways of being that are coping mechanisms for fears or trauma? Are you attached to ways of being that don’t align with your true nature? If your desire is to have sustainable peace in your life, for example, and you’re choosing to live in ways that foster chaos and drama, well you’re going to have to get off that stuff. If your desire is to be free, are you settling for defiance, or creating restrictions in your life, because you don’t trust that true freedom is an actual thing?

7. Agree to work your plan no matter what. If you can’t do that, then your game is futile. Agree what you’re willing to give up in order to have what you aim to win. In our example of more intimacy, that could mean challenging your current relationships to be more connected, or it could mean redirecting your focus and putting more attention into specific relationships that clearly nourish and support you acquiring access to that desire, and this could cause some of those relationship dynamics to change or even end. Remember that the game you’re playing is for a higher self desire, and if you can’t commit to it as worth letting go of the compensatory things you have, then you don’t really want it very badly, or you’re allowing fear, perception of lack, or self doubt get in the way. Don’t allow the beliefs you identified in step 5 drive you. Or come up with another game you can actually dedicate yourself to fully. And by this point you should have thoroughly uncovered a desire worth putting a lot on the line for.

8. Agree to your invincibility, meaning play this game like an invincible beast, as if you cannot be crushed, as if losing the game cannot destroy you. Play as if it’s the only game, but also as if when it’s over, you know it’s JUST one game, and you can perhaps design a better game based on what you learned from playing the one that you perceive as a failure. Let's not even call them failures. Let’s just call them incomplete, and leave the opening for the idea that a game just simply ain’t over until you say so. Make that pact with yourself so that no matter what happens you’ve committed to get back up and go back to the drawing board to figure out what you may have missed, and what you can learn to create progress on your path to mastery. And again, if at this point you still aren’t sure if you’re all-in in this way, you still need to fine tune your desire discernment. Go back. You really need to go back and take these lessons a bit more seriously.

9. Work your plan, play your game. Be compassionate towards the people in your life who may struggle with the way that you’re playing the game. Allow them the space to adjust, but if you’re clear this is a game that is essential to your life’s journey, then you’ll have to risk facing disapproval. Be compassionate toward yourself. You will make some plays that don’t serve you or set you back. The game ain’t over until it’s over. Get up, dust yourself off, restore integrity where you need to do so, and keep going.

10. You may be confronted with some false trophies along the way. Don’t be fooled by superficial or compensatory substitutes for what you determined winning looks like. If, for example, winning means deeply meaningful and intimate relationships then don’t settle for less than that, no matter how tempting or how tired you are of the game. Play it to the end you’ve defined. The best games are sometimes infinite.