Author: admin

A few days ago I used a couple of tools I mentioned in my post about finding Your Values to determine what my values have been for the last three to four years.

Since then I’ve been spending some time thinking about my life and what changes I would like to make, and how my values would play a role in those changes.

Values play a huge role in our lives.

When we choose to value something in our lives, or when we raise its importance in relation to other values, it affects everything in our lives.

Values affect our goals, they affect our energy, they affect who and what we attract into our lives and ultimately they affect the kind of results we produce in our lives.
My Former List of Values

Getting clear on what my values have been in the last four years, revealed this hierarchy of values:

Spirituality (Intuition, Inspiration, Spiritual Connection)
Peace (Tranquility, Stillness, Presence)
Wisdom (Awareness, Understanding, Intuition)
Health (Fitness, Diet, Environment)
Abundance (Freedom, Financial Independence, Legacy)
Joy (Passion, Competition, Lightheartedness)
Love (Connection, Authenticity, Oneness)

This made total sense to me because if I looked at my life in the last four years, I could see that I have accomplished so much in the top values (spirituality, peace, wisdom) and definitely less in the bottom set of values (health, abundance, joy and love).

What makes sense about these values is that they also represent the biggest voids I had in life prior to four years ago.

I felt spiritually disconnected in my life. Peace / Stillness / Tranquility were not a big part of my life at the time.

I also didn’t feel connected to my true source of wisdom. I had a lot of knowledge in my mind from the thousands of books I’ve read over the last 15 years, but there were a lot of conflicting ideas. By tapping into my inner wisdom, my intuition, I was able to connect with the truth that was best for me.

Four years later I no longer feel a void in those three values of Spirituality, Peace and Wisdom.

So, it is now time for me to re-shuffle my values and work on my next set of voids.

Voids Create Values

One of the main things to understand about values it that they are driven by what we perceive to be “voids” in our life. A void is simply something that is missing.

For example, Spirituality has been at the top of my values list in the last four years because I felt a void there. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t at all spiritually connected, or that I was less spiritually connected than someone else.

Voids have nothing to do with someone else. What it meant is that I perceived my spiritual connection to not be where I wanted it to be according to my own standards.

I knew a lot about spirituality, but I wasn’t being spiritual. My career path at the time especially didn’t align with my spiritual beliefs. What I do now as a Blogger, and Internet Marketer aligns with my spiritual beliefs way more than what I used to do.

So, the tricky thing with identifying your values is that it’s not so much about identifying what you think is important in life in general, but rather where you are perceiving a void in your life right now.

Anywhere we have a void in our lives, it simply means we haven’t valued that part of our life enough recently to expand energy and effort into improving it.

By changing the hierarchy of our values, we can completely change our lives.

My New Hierarchy of Values

Making the conscious choice to change your values is not easy. It is natural to identify with our current values. However, we must understand that we are not our values. We are much more than our values.

The easy thing to do is to just keep clinging onto the current set of values we have in our lives, and resist change. However, that will just create a bigger and bigger void in our lives in the areas we don’t value.

So, one of the first things I asked myself is “What is the most important value that I feel I need to focus on right now?”

Health vs Financial Abundance

Health and Financial Abundance were the first two that popped into my mind.

I then tried to think about which of these two is more important to me right now in my life.

Health seemed like the more obvious and logical choice, but I had to really think about it realistically. One thing I have learned over the years is that stress and worry can literally kill you. What good is eating healthy and exercising regularly, if your finances are in such a mess that you’re constantly stressed out and worried about how you’re going to pay rent the next month?

On the other hand, if I put abundance and financial independence above health on my hierarchy list, then I will always put making money ahead of my health. If for example I had a project to work on which was going to make me money, but it would mean I would have to miss one of my workouts, I would most likely choose working on the project.

This wasn’t an easy choice for me. I have never had health as one of my top values. It has always been somewhere near the bottom or middle of my list. This is mostly because I’ve been pretty healthy most of my life and I’ve never felt a void of “health”. However, now I’m getting into my mid 30′s and I know that if don’t start taking care of my body right now, it’s just a matter of time before my body starts to show symptoms of some sort of disease.

I struggled with this decision. Remember, I wasn’t trying to decide whether or not I wanted to value Health. I was trying to decide if I wanted to value Health above everything else on my values list.

Ultimately, I came up with a simple set of questions I could ask myself to compare values. I asked myself which of these two scenarios I would feel more comfortable with:

If the amount of financial abundance I feel in my life decreased by 10%, but the amount of health I feel in my life increased by 90%, or;
If the amount of health I feel in my life decreased by 10%, but the amount of abundance I feel in my life increased by 90%.

Of course, since I have both of those values at the top of my list, chances are that both of them will increase but I was talking about worst case scenarios. Which of these two choices would I be more happy / fulfilled with?

I realized that if the amount of financial abundance I feel in my life decreased a bit, but my health improved a lot I would be happier than the other way around.

I can’t afford for my health to get worst by 10%, but I can afford for my financial abundance levels to go down by 10%. Of course I don’t want either of them to happen, but I’d rather take a financial hit than a hit to my health.

So, after some deliberation and really getting clear on what is important to ME, I have decided to put Health as my #1 value.

I know this may seem like a trivial decision, but I assure you it’s not. This is going to completely change who I am in the next five years.

Fun vs Love

With Health now occupying the first spot, and Financial Abundance in the second spot on my values hierarchy, the next two values I had to struggle with were Fun and Love.

Both are something that I want to create more of in my life. But which one would make more sense for me to put first?

At first I was thinking about putting Love ahead of Fun. It would kind of make sense. My definition of Love as a value is the feeling of oneness, authenticity and connection with others.

Judging purely from a “should” point of view, I really “should” put Love ahead of fun. But that would be injecting someone else’s (like society’s) values onto my life.

I decided to explore further. Why should I put love ahead of fun as something I focus on?

I define Fun as the feelings of passion, adventure and competition.

I asked myself “Where do I feel a greater void? Lack of love in my life, or lack of fun in my life?”

Immediately the first thing that popped into my mind was “Fun.”

But then I struggled with this a bit because Fun is also a value that I have never really had near the top of my list. What would my life be like if I put it up top, even above love!?

Well, in short, my life would be more FUN!

🙂

Once again I used my questioning method to ask myself which of these two scenarios would I prefer:

If the amount of love I feel in my life decreased by 10%, but the amount of fun I feel in my life increased by 90%, or;
If the amount of fun I feel in my life decreased by 10%, but the amount of love I feel in my life increased by 90%.

Again, I came up with the same thing. I am not scared to have 10% less love in my life if it means 90% more fun. On the other hand, I haven’t really had a lot of fun in the last four years of my life, so lowering that by 10% seemed like a big no-no, even if it meant 90% more love.

What’s interesting here is that I realized very quickly that moving Fun ahead of Love scared me. How would that play out in my life?

Then I asked myself “What are you afraid of?“, and I realized that one of the things that kept popping into my head was that people were going to judge me.

Most of the people in my life don’t have a very high value for Fun (or Health for that matter 🙂 ), but I do know that a lot of them value Love.

Even if it’s not at the top of their list, they definitely value Love higher than Fun!

This is the process we must go through though when deciding on our values. We must take a stand and choose what’s important to US, and not what the other people in our lives say we should value.

Because of this, even though I know it’s not going to be a popular choice amongst the people in my life, I decided to put Fun high up on my values list – even above Love. I’m really curious how this is going to shape my life.

People Drag

Whenever you change your values in life, it is going to cause waves across your entire life.

Chances are, the people who you have attracted into your life right now align with your current set of values. Four years ago, when Spirituality wasn’t one of my highest values I didn’t hang around a lot of people who had Spirituality at the top of their list of values. Since then I have made many friends in the Spiritual field who also value Spirituality very highly.

Whenever you change your values, you also change the types of people who you attract into your life and who you hang out with.

This is especially true for non-immediate family members. When it comes to your spouse or immediately family, we usually still maintain a connection with them even if our values don’t align exactly, but usually with acquaintances or business type relationships we tend to be attracted to people with similar values.

When we sit down to go through our values it can be tempting to take other people’s opinions into the equation when trying to decide on our values.

For example, when I was trying to decide whether I should value “Fun” higher than “Love” one of the first things that popped into my head was “What will my wife think of this?”

In the same token I could also say the same thing about Health being higher than Financial Abundance.

I mean, if I look at the survey I did which you guys filled out a few weeks ago, the voting showed that you guys as my audience were mostly interested in learning about Personal Development and Making Money Online. By making Health my #1 value, I know some of you are not going to be happy with that because it means I’m going to be writing health and fitness articles and not just money related ones. With Fun high up my list as well, I’ll probably be blogging a lot more about fun stuff as well.

Here’s my advice for working on your values.

Do NOT create your values hierarchy based on what you think is going to make OTHERS happy. These are not their values, they are yours.

You have to trust that your Higher Self / Intuition will guide you in the right direction. Right now, mine is telling me to focus on Health first, Financial Abundance second, Fun third and Love fourth.

I have to trust that having them in that order will bring more fulfillment into my life, as opposed to just doing what those around me think I should be doing.

Don’t let the drag of social pressure and your current social circles keep you stuck within a set of values that isn’t serving your highest good anymore.

When you change your values, those around you will either adapt and also be inspired to change their values to be more similar to yours, or you will attract other people into your life whose values are more aligned with yours.
The Complete List

I have given you guys a few examples of how I was able to compare between different values on my list to figure out my Top 4 values. I also went through and compared them to each other in different combinations just to make sure I had the hierarchy in the right order.

Once I got the Top 4 finished I moved onto the next set of values and my final list looks like this:

Health (Diet, Fitness, Environment)
Financial Abundance (Financial Independence, Contribution, Freedom)
Fun (Passion, Adventure, Competition)
Love (Connection, Authenticity, Oneness)
Wisdom (Awareness, Understanding, Intuition)
Spirituality (Spiritual Connection, Intuition, Inspiration)
Peace (Tranquility, Presence, Stillness)

I highly recommend going through the process of first getting clear on your current set of values, and then going through and deciding if your current hierarchy of values is serving your highest needs.

A recent Blog post inspired me to get clear on and to update my values.

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten really clear on what my values are, and I was really curious to see how they may have changed in the last five years.

Now, when it comes to values there are two slightly different schools of thought I’ve learned about them.

Tony Robbins Definition of Values

The first person I ever learned anything about values from was Tony Robbins.

I’m pretty sure he didn’t originate the concept, but he was the first person I learned it from so I’ll refer to his definition first.

Robbin’s defines life values simply as things that we value and hold dear in our lives.

He then further references means and ends values. Means values are simply values that are means to an end, whereas ends values are the ends themselves.

For example, let’s say that you value money. That is a means value, because money is really just a means to an end.

If you ask yourself “What does money mean to me?“, the answer you may come up with could be “security”, or perhaps “freedom”.

Security and freedom are ends values because they represent the final emotional state you are really seeking when you value a means value.

In other words, if you sit down and make a list of things that you value most in your life, you may come up with something like:

my marriage
my house
my business
money
health
passion
fun
friends
etc.

However, by looking at this list you can start to see that a lot of these values are not ends values, such as for example your marriage, your house, business, money or even friends. You have to go further and ask yourself what these values mean to you and what emotional states they produce in your life.

For example, your business may really represent the value of freedom to you. Your marriage may mean love, or security. Your friends may mean fun or joy, etc.

Once you make a list of your values, and you find out what the ends value behind each means value is, you have your list of values.

The next step in the process is to become clear on the hierarchy of your values. We all have a values hierarchy, and the hierarchy of your values makes a huge difference in your life.

For example, let’s say you have two people who both value “freedom” and “security”. However, Person A values freedom as his #1 highest value, and security is #10 on his list, while Person B values security as his #1 highest value, with freedom being #10. Based on this set of values, these people’s lives will most likely be drastically different even though they both value the same two values.

For example, which of these two people would be more likely to take a “secure” government job, and which one do you think would be more likely to get involved with a start-up company which offers a flexible schedule and the “freedom” to work however many hours you want per week?

Dr. DeMartini Definition of values

Dr. DeMartini’s definition of values is slightly different from Tony Robbins.

In a way they are very similar, but Dr. DeMartini defines things such as “wealth”, “relationships”, “socializing” and even “beauty / attractiveness” as values a person could have, whereas Tony Robbins would define those as means values which need to be further refined towards the ends values hiding behind them.

If for example “socializing” represents a feeling of connection to you, then really the value you are seeking is “connection” and not “socializing”. Socializing is just a means for you to achieve a feeling of connection. For someone else, however, maybe “socializing” brings about a feeling of joy, or maybe even excitement.

In the end, it really doesn’t matter which system you use. I kind of prefer getting clear on both.

I could start with a list of DeMartini type values, and then ask myself what each of the values represents to me in terms of emotions and feelings to determine the ends values as Tony Robbins defines them.
How to Determine Your Values

There are number of different ways to determine what your values are.

A few years ago I wrote an article on how to determine what your values are. It’s a good place to start.

While digging through Steve’s site I also found a link to a cool online tool written by Douglas Wagoner which you can use to identify your values and then automatically rank them by answering a series of questions. You can find this values tool here.

Finally, if you prefer the DeMartini method of values, you can learn how to determine them here.

What My Values Revealed

Personally, I prefer the Tony Robbins values system because I find it more meaningful to me at a deeper level, but really I kind of use both.

What I ended up doing is I started off by just writing down what I thought my values might be off the top of my head based on the last four years of my life, and then I used Douglas Wagoner’s tool to rank my vales. I then further combined certain values to create seven main value groups.

In the end, I kind of arrived in the same place as if I went through the DeMartini method so really I think all roads lead to the same place.

My hierarchy of values for the last four years has been:

Spirituality (Intuition, Inspiration, Spiritual Connection)
Peace (Tranquility, Stillness, Presence)
Wisdom (Awareness, Understanding, Intuition)
Health (Fitness, Diet, Environment)
Abundance (Freedom, Financial Independence, Legacy)
Joy (Passion, Competition, Lightheartedness)
Love (Connection, Authenticity, Oneness)

When I started looking at this list, it became very clear to me why my life has been unfolding the way it has been in the last four years.

For example, when I look at the fact that Spirituality has been my #1 highest value, it makes a LOT of sense.

Four years ago, if you asked me where Spirituality was on my list of values it probably would have been around #5 or #6 or so. Even though I have always had a strong intuitive connection, I used to only use it in life and death situations.

Today, I feel a very strong spiritual connection to my higher self. Today I feel very inspired by what I do. Today I feel a very deep connection to my intuition, and I actually listen to what it’s telling me!

I have no doubt that Spirituality has been my highest value in the last four years.

I can say the same thing with Peace. My life is way more peaceful than it was four years ago. I have significantly increased the amount of energy and time I devote to fostering tranquility and stillness in my environment. Compared to where I was four years ago, I am way more present in the moment. I feel tranquility, stillness and presence.

The same thing with Wisdom. I feel that by fostering a spiritual connection to my intuition, I have evolved from a place of knowledge to a place of wisdom.

What’s interesting to me is that I have made huge progress in the Top 3 values, but not as much progress in the last four values.

For example, speaking purely from a financial point of view I was making more money four years ago than I did in the last year, so technically speaking you could say that I was closer to financial independence four years ago than I am today. However, if you look at financial independence as being in a place in your life where you do things because you love doing them, instead of doing them for money, then I’m more financially independent today than I was four years ago.

I definitely see that I’ve put a lot of energy into making sure the first three values have been met in my life in the last four years.

Now what I want to do is to start putting more energy into the remaining four values.

If you look at my weight loss challenge, for example, that connects with my values of Health (diet, fitness) as well as Joy (competition, lightheartedness), while also at the same time bringing more Wisdom (Awareness, Understanding) to the nutritional information I learned during my nutrition studies.

Just going through this exercise has brought a lot of new awareness into my life. It’s like a lightbulb that goes off in your head that makes you realize “Ahhh, that’s why I keep doing things this way!”

If you haven’t gone through your values list for over six-months (if ever), I highly recommend you spend the time getting clear on what your values really are. Doing so will bring a new perspective on your life.

In this article I’m going to dispel one of the biggest myths that I sometimes see guru’s trying to shove down their client’s throats.

It’s also something I see well-meaning parents and teachers trying to teach kids as well.

What I’m referring to here is the limiting belief that in order to be successful in life you must focus / specialize in one thing and stick to it.

As a blogger, just the idea of that makes me want to throw up.

Origins of Specialization

Up until about 60 years ago, a “well rounded” person was admired by our North American society.

People who knew how to take care of most of the basic things in life, whether it be doing their own taxes, or fixing a leaky faucet, or taking care of a simple cold their kids caught were considered normal people.

For a boy to become a man he had to not only know how to catch a fish, he also had to know how to rebuild a carburetor.

By the mid 1950′s though, everything changed.

Russia launched Sputnik into space, which was the first ever satellite to be launched into space. Overnight, American values changed.

The “well rounded” person was no longer seen as the standard to strive for. The age of the specialist was born.

People who specialized in sciences and technology became our honored heroes. Olympic athletes who spent their entire lives training for the gold medal in the Olympics became the people we were proud of the most.

The Mother who raised six children and juggled a dozen roles in the household, or the Father who juggled a dozen different jobs to make ends meet became irrelevant.

Jack-of-all-Trades became a put-down instead of something to be proud of.

Where has this mad race to “beat the Russians” led us?

I mean, what kind of world do we live in right now where our schooling system doesn’t even teach kids the difference between broccoli and cauliflower?

How is it that high-school graduates know how the computerized fuel injector works in their car, but they can’t even change a tire?

Anyway, I’m digressing. Let’s “focus” back on success.

Success Without Single-Minded Focus

All Your Eggs in One Basket?

Is it possible to be successful in life, without single-minded focus? Yes, in fact I would argue that it’s the only real way to be a truly “successful” human being.

By my definition, anyone who is ultra-successful in one area of their life, but a complete failure in all other areas, is not really successful at all.

When I watched a documentary about Mike Tyson a few months ago, I saw a prime example of this. During his prime years, when Mike Tyson was at the top of his game, the whole world saw him as this hugely successful athlete but in my opinion the Mike Tyson I saw at the end of the documentary is much more successful than the Mike Tyson who we saw when he was world champ.

Being the world champ in boxing doesn’t mean you’re the world champ in life. If you ever get a chance to watch the documentary you will see exactly what a one-sided specialist approach to life does to a human being. His life was completely unbalanced and in shambles.

You don’t have to look far to see many examples of this type of thing all around us. People who do extraordinary things in one area of their lives are admired by our society, but at the same time their lives are a total mess.

A Struggle

As a blogger, one of the things I struggle with from time to time is getting caught up in comparing myself to specialists.

Wanting to become a specialist in a world that rewards specialists can be so seductive.

For example, when I see certain Bloggers achieving great success with their Blogs because they focus on nothing but that one thing, it’s so easy for me to feel frustrated with the growth of my Blog.

When I saw how transformed his body between the first and second Twilight movies, (yes I’ve watched both of them) it’s so tempting for me to want to drop everything I’m doing in my life and just focus on nothing but eating healthy and working out all day.

When I see friends of mine playing 40 hours a week of Warcraft and leveling their characters with Epic gear, I want to drop everything and convert my home office into a Warcraft cave.

When I see Joe Vitale releasing his billionth book, I want to lock myself in a room and write books.

The challenge is that none of these things, in and of themselves define greatness for me. There is always someone else out there who’s going to be accomplishing more than you in some area of your life where you aren’t focusing as much energy right now.

In reality, I have made huge progress and strides in my life this year in many areas.

For example, earlier this year I have gotten my Shoden certificate in the of Traditional Japanese Reiki, and as my wife will attest to I have become a pretty powerful Reiki healer.

In January of this year, this Blog had about 2,000 subscribers and I had several other more “specialized” Blogs started. Since then I’ve successfully combined them all into this Blog and grown my subscriber base to well over 9,000 readers.

I’ve also made huge strides spiritually, building a much deeper and more clear connection to my intuition and intuitive abilities.

I’ve launched two YouTube channels, overcoming any fears I had of making videos and built them up to over 121,000 combined video views from over 600 subscribers and 3,000+ YouTube friends.

I finally learned and became proficient in an awesome belief changing modality called PSYCH-K®, which has helped me and several other people tremendously in the last few months.

I’ve reconnected with the fun hobby, written a book, burned my goals, lost 15lbs and successfully gained it back, found out I’m even more fat than I thought, hired a personal trainer, learned to cook better meals, lost 13lbs again, started mentoring a half-dozen really cool people, learned a crap-load of stuff about SEO and made some really great progress with several of my businesses.

Celebrating Your Successes

One of the best tools you can arm yourself as a scanner / polymath is to learn how to celebrate your successes.

Specialists have pre-established systems for celebrating their successes, but in most cases bloggers don’t.

When a specialist makes great progress in one single area of focus in their life, they get to stand on a podium and accept a gold medal.

When a blogger makes great progress in twenty areas of focus in their life, nobody even notices.

In fact until I started writing this Blog post I didn’t even realize how much stuff I’ve accomplished this year. The stuff I listed above is not even close to being all of it either.

What have you accomplished this year?

Have you celebrated your accomplishments?

If not, I highly recommend doing that.

Making Money Online as a Blogger

A lot of “make money online” courses talk about the need to find a very specific “niche” and become a specialist in that niche in order to make money.

My view on this is a little bit different.

In my opinion, to make money online you should build a Blog that portrays a whole picture of who you are, and not a Blog that just focuses on one topic.

I find single-topic, highly specialized Blogs boring to read and I don’t really find myself drawn to their content.

If I’m looking for a specific piece of advice on a highly specialized topic, I’ll typically just Google for an answer.

Single topic Blogs are like flat characters in a movie script. They seem very boring and unimaginative to me.

So my advice in terms of Blogging is to build a Blog where you can be yourself and Blog about all the different things you’re inspired to Blog about. If you happen to be a specialist with just one central focus in your life, that’s totally fine, but if you have twenty different things you’re passionate about I recommend Blogging about all of them.

Where You Should Focus

Where I do recommend focusing yourself on a specific niche or target customer profile is when you are creating products, services or even when writing Blog posts.

For example, when I wrote my book, my target market was people who believe in the Law of Attraction, and who have experimented with it and haven’t gotten the results they wanted yet.

My target market with that book wasn’t the people who come to my Blog to videos or even those looking for weight loss tips.

When I write Blog posts, I focus on a small, narrow niche. For example, this Blog post is mostly targeting bloggers. People who are looking for fitness or related content probably won’t read this post, and that’s totally fine with me. They aren’t my target for this post.

When I create products, I do the same thing. I focus on a very narrow and specific niche and ideally I only try to solve one problem at a time.

So once again, the thing I would recommend is to build a multi-topic Blog which explores all of the different passions you have in life and your target audience will be as varied as the passions you have in your life, but at the same time only focus on one target profile at a time when writing posts or creating products.

Think of it like a family doctor. On any given day a family doctor might see fifty different patients with fifty different conditions the doctor helps them with, but at any one time the doctor is only focusing on one patient with one condition.

You don’t see doctors going into the waiting room and dispensing group advice, right? It would be silly for a doctor to give a cough syrup prescription to someone with a sprained ankle.

As a Blogger, you don’t have to focus on just one topic, but you should focus on one topic at a time.

This is also true when creating products / services. Focus on solving just one problem at a time.

The next time you hear someone telling you that in order to succeed you need to “focus”, all they really mean is that you need to focus/be present in the moment when you’re doing something. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can only focus on one thing all the time.

That will just create unbalance and frustration in your life.

A couple of minutes ago I took out a piece of paper and wrote down every goal I have ever wanted for my life which I haven’t yet accomplished. Anything I could possibly remember ever wanting.

And then I crumpled up the piece of paper and burned it.

As I’ve mentioned a few times in previous posts, I’ve had a lot of alone time since my wife went on her trip across Atlantic Canada last month and I’ve been doing a lot of meditating and inner work.

In my last post I wrote about going through what I called a business flu, and I now believe it was a releasing process of letting go of an old version of me that isn’t me anymore. I believe I’ve gone through some kind of expansion process and I’m still trying to wrap my brain around what’s happening.

It’s like my energy has shifted, but my mind still needs to catch up.

Even though I have felt most of the changes in the last few days, I think this actually started a few months ago when I attended the psychic course.

Letting Go of an Old Personal Development Paradigm

I’ve been a student of personal development for over 15 years now and I’ve got a library of well over 1,000 books on different personal development topics. Once you read that many books on any topic a set of predictable patterns emerges as there is only one truth and only so many ways to describe it.

One common theme amongst most of the books I’ve read, especially some of the more recent ones related to building wealth and spirituality / Law of Attraction is that a lot of personal development gurus teach that anything a person can believe, they can achieve.

The whole premise behind the Law of Attraction is that you can attract anything in your life if you can align your energy with the belief of having that thing.

Lack of belief is the missing element in most personal development formulas for achieving anything. All the formulas vary slightly in method, but they all revolve around the central concept of belief.

Belief is an extension of faith, which Napoleon Hill states is the “starting point of accumulation of all riches”. Napoleon Hill also states that affirmations and visualizations are the keys to creating that state we call “faith”.

Different personal development guru’s have different formulas for building belief, and many of them use some form of affirmations to accomplish this task. The bottom line is that any inspired action you take towards a goal without belief/faith isn’t going to produce the desired outcome, however by having belief and faith, even the smallest amounts of inspired action (and sometimes even no action) produces results.

Ask any guru of any system why a person isn’t getting results even if they are seemingly taking the same action steps as someone else who is getting results, and it will always boil down to one thing – lack of belief.

In the past one of the main tools I have experimented with and used myself to build belief was affirmations and visualization. This is because until I learned PSYCH-K®, I had no better tool.

Even though affirmations have worked for me in my life, in our training we were taught that they have been tested to work only 20% of the time. After reflecting on that teaching it rang true for me from direct personal experience. In some instances affirmations worked, while in others – not so much.

The promise behind is that it is a technology / process where you are able to eliminate disempowering beliefs and replace them with empowering ones using a method that is not only much more effective than affirmations, but also testable to determine if the belief has been balanced or not.

Meaning, with affirmations you simply say your affirmations and then hope that they have shifted your beliefs, whereas with you actually test to see if the process is complete. If not, you can go back and re-run the process until it is complete if it is safe and appropriate to do so at that time.

I’m not going to dive too much into, as I covered some of it in a previous post, but I now live in a totally different paradigm, where lack of belief is no longer the ultimate problem – since I now have a tool at my disposal to change any belief I want.

It took me over a month to even process that mentally, but once I realized the implications of this ability, I understood that life will never be the same again – kind of like the day when proved to myself that the Law of Attraction isn’t just some crazy hocus pocus.

With “lack of belief” no longer the central problem, I had to let go of that paradigm.

With Belief, Anything is Possible

Realizing that I couldn’t blame my lack of belief as the problem to any area of my life anymore was horrifying at first.

If you truly believed that you can have anything you want in your life, what would you want?

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a scanner, but that is such a hard question for me to answer. I get the feeling I’m not the only one with this challenge.

Enter the Planning Problem

Once I realized I could do anything and have anything I ever wanted, I started looking through my old goal lists and trying to figure out which of these goals I wanted to attack first.

This is where I ran into a lot of challenges.

When I looked at my old goal list I no longer saw a list of cool things I wanted to accomplish, I saw a list of misunderstood desires.

For example, one of the things that I have always wanted to have is a personal basketball court on my property. I wanted to be able to invite my friends over to hang out and shoot hoops on a nice sunny day. For some people it’s a swimming pool, for me it was a basketball court.

Now, I started to think about that goal and I realized a few things. First of all, on my 5 acre property I have plenty enough room to build a basketball court right now. I could level a piece of the property, and lay down an asphalt court. It probably wouldn’t even be that expensive, so why haven’t I done it yet?

Well, when I really thought about this goal, I remember initially having this desire back in high-school when I used to play basketball with my friends on a daily basis. I dreamed about one day being able to play on my own court, but that was over 15 years ago!

In reality though, I don’t even play basketball anymore. And neither do my friends. It was a period of time in my high-school days that I really enjoyed and this goal of having my own basketball court just kind of stuck on my goal list all these years amongst many others.

Maybe one day I’ll start playing basketball again, but at this point in time in my life I’m not drawn to it at all, and if I was there wouldn’t be anything to stop me from playing. There is an elementary school with a basketball court 5 minutes away from my house so I could go and play there today if I wanted to.

As I went through my goal list from all these years I looked at each goal and I realized that behind each goal lay a secondary benefit or ulterior motive that wasn’t important to me anymore. Using the basketball goal as an example again, it wasn’t really the game of basketball that I enjoyed so much – but rather the fun of competing with my friends at something.

Years after graduating from high-school, I remember having X-Box parties where we would compete in playing Halo on a LAN. Sometimes there would be six or eight of us playing in teams and having a blast. Halo became the new “basketball” for me. Same energy, same competition, same fun, just a different “sport”.

Years later Halo got boring and then it became World of Warcraft. I remember playing for hours with a dozen of my friends. See the similarity?

Here’s my point. It’s not the basketball court I wanted, it was the energy/emotions/fun I had while playing basketball with my friends. The cool thing is that this type of energy is available to me right now, as soon as I realize it’s not wrapped up in a package called “basketball” or even “Halo” or “World of Warcraft”.

I used this basketball example because it’s so easy to understand for most people. In fact you might be thinking “Duh!” to yourself right now. Meaning, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t see this before.

Well, the thing is that it’s not just this basketball goal that I’m talking about here. It’s EVERY goal that I had on my list.

Long term goals from 15 years ago, and even short term goals I set a few months ago. I just don’t see them the same way anymore. I see through them now and realize that they are quite meaningless in themselves. The real thing I seek is the experiences, feelings, emotions, and energy behind the goals and not the goals themselves.

Coming to this realization screwed everything up, as I had to go back and try to set new goals, ones that hopefully have more meaning and aren’t simply a means to an end.

However, this turned out to be an impossible task. I’m seeing through things so much more now that it is becoming almost impossible to plan anything. I keep trying to make some kind of long term plans – even just for this week or this month, but I can’t stick to anything. The fluidity of life changes so quickly for me now that my mind can’t plan through all the possibilities.

It feels like I’m trying to play five thousand games of chess at once when I try to plan anything, because everything is interdependent on everything else.

If Not Planning, Then What?

After my Flu on Saturday, I woke up on Sunday inspired and excited. I had zero plans for that Sunday and I woke up and just started working on whatever I felt inspired to work on. I had this urge to work on a new design for my wives Blog, so I worked on that for a while. Things just flowed for me, one after another and by the end of the day I had accomplished more that I had in weeks – all without planning to do a single thing.

You’d think that I would learn something from this, but for the past couple of days I’ve regressed back to trying to plan things again – especially long term, trying to decide what I want to do with my life and what I want to work on first. This has left me frustrated, annoyed and totally unproductive.

This is when I got the intuitive idea to burn all my goals. To let them go. To release myself from my past. To allow my spirit to dictate my future, instead of trying to cling on to old misguided desires.

I had a similar vision come to me in the past with one of my coaching students, where I saw a vision of her writing down her old identity and burning it in a cleansing ceremony to let go of her old self. In my instance it was about my goals.

Burning My Goals

Deciding to follow my intuition, I wrote down all my previous goals on a piece of paper. I wrote a lot of them in shorthand, or using acronyms which I knew the meaning of so as to fit everything on one piece of paper.

I also had the intuitive feeling that I should burn the list along with some Sage. Burning Sage is an ancient purification ritual used by the Celts, Druids and Native Americans. I felt drawn to burn sage.

I also felt drawn to make a video of the ceremony and to take some pictures for my Blog as a way to remember this day when I let go of all my past goals and plans, to instead embrace a new way of following my intuition to see where it takes me.

I honestly don’t know how long I will stick to this, and if I’ll go back to setting new goals and plans as I’ve always done, but in this moment I feel so much lighter and more free that I don’t really care about what happens in the future. For the first time since I was a little kid, I don’t have any goals. It feels really weird and cool at the same time.

Now, what am I going to have for dinner now…