My secret ingredient. A willingness to bear discomfort has been the key, the secret to the success I've had making progress with love intentionally. That couldn't begin until I got so desperately miserable it made wisdom speak from deep inside me, and I worked out a way to get practical guidance from inside myself. My discomfort started out with a bang: leaving my marriage was by far the most uncomfortable thing I'd ever done. It took me most of a year to gin up the courage to move out. But moving out was absolutely essential. That uncomfortable act made it possible for me to begin a new life in which making progress with love is the goal that everything centers around and supports. Leaving my miserably comfortable marriage was the single most valuable intentional action I've ever taken. All the progress I've made began with that act.
Turning to face discomfort. Leaving my marriage was an absolutely critical step, but to get ready to take that step I had to do a lot of internal work. I had to face the situation in my ruined marriage internally and let it act on me. I had to turn to it so I could really see and feel what it was doing to me, how badly it was oppressing me. I had to grasp that staying in my marriage was pushing me into psychological misery and spiritual death. In the years since then I've applied that principle literally thousands of times: if something hurts, physically or otherwise, I need to turn and face it rather than trying to make the pain go away. Pain, whether it is physical, psychological, or spiritual, is important guidance I should never ignore or try to evade. In related news, making progress is never comfortable.