Category: Goal Setting

For years I’ve heard personal development gurus say that the world we live in is truly abundant, and that all we need to do in order to live an abundant life is to just accept that abundance as it is ours for the taking.

Even though I know their heart is in the right place, I don’t believe these personal development gurus are right.

The truth is that this “physical reality” world we live in can never truly be abundant because it is only a limited reflection of our true source of abundance.

Trying to find abundance in “physical reality” only leads to disappointment, anger, frustration, unhappiness and depression.

Seeking Abundance in a World of Lack

There are many different ways in which we seek abundance in this world.

For example, we may seek abundance financially by trying to accumulate a certain amount of money, such as for example a million dollars or a hundred million dollars or more.

In reality though, no amount of money will ever make us feel totally abundant. Even if we make a billion dollars, we can always spend it or it can be taken away from us in some way. There is never any amount of money you could ever make that would make you feel abundant forever.

Many people think that if they could just make a little bit more money than they are making right now, they would feel abundant. Meaning, if they are making $4,000/month they think that if they could just make $5,000/month or $10,000/month they would feel totally abundant.

I can tell you from personal experience, that is not true.

When we make $5,000/month, we fantasize about making $10,000/month and how that would make us feel totally abundant.

Once we make $10,000/month though, we realize that it is not enough. We realize that what we were really seeking was a better lifestyle so we improve our lifestyle and our expenses go up along with that. All of a sudden, $10,000/month doesn’t seem like a lot of money at all, so now we dream of $20,000/month.

The truth is that no matter how much money we make, we can never really feel that deep feeling of total abundance because there is always something else out there that is beyond our means no matter how much money we make.

The reason for this is that we are looking for abundance in the wrong place. You can never have enough money to buy everything. There is always something out there that you won’t be able to afford, or simply won’t be for sale, and the more money you make the more you will realize this.

Let’s use another example – health.

There is no such thing as having an abundance of health in this physical world we live in. It doesn’t matter how healthy you eat, how fit you are, how much you pamper your body, ultimately one day your body will die.

You can spend your entire life trying to prevent that inevitable fact, but all it will lead to is feelings of disappointment, anger, frustration, unhappiness and depression.

The truth is that no amount of financial resources will ever make you feel truly abundant.

Also, no matter how much energy you devote to keeping your body healthy, you will never feel truly abundant health wise either because deep down we all know that in this physical reality our bodies don’t last forever.
How to Find Abundance

The only real way to truly live a life feeling connected to abundance is to stop trying to seek it in the physical world.

No amount of money will ever make you feel truly abundant.

No amount of health will ever make you feel truly abundant.

No amount of love from someone else will ever make you feel truly abundant.

No amount of attention from others will ever make you feel truly abundant.

No amount of anything in this physical reality we live in will ever make us feel truly abundant.

The only true way to connect to true abundance is to stop seeking it from a non-abundant source.

The physical reality world we live in is not truly abundant. It is just a shadow, limited reflection of true abundance.

That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news though…

We can connect to true abundance if we seek it from the right source, and the only true source of unlimited abundance is Source / God / Universe or whatever name you wish to call it. I’ll call it “Source” in this article, but you can substitute whatever name you wish based on your spiritual beliefs.

By connecting to Source we connect to total abundance.

Source energy is unlimited. We can’t drain it dry. We can’t spend all of it, and it will never die.

Source is infinity.

No matter how much you take away from infinity, it is still infinity. Well, that’s not entirely true. The only thing you could ever take away from infinity to make it less than infinity, is infinity itself.

Luckily, our conscious awareness of who we are, meaning the part of us that seeks to feel abundant is finite. As such, no matter how much that part of ourselves could ever seek to “take away” from the infinite supply of Source, there would still be an infinite supply left over.

That is the only true way for us to feel totally abundant – by seeking it from an infinitely abundant source. We won’t find that in physical reality.
Why We Don’t Need Infinite Abundance as Humans

As human beings, we are finite beings. To find fulfillment or happiness, finite beings don’t need an infinite supply of abundance.

That is just an illusion.

For example, let’s take something like Vitamin C. Our bodies need Vitamin C to function properly and to be healthy.

Let’s just say that you could magically manifest an infinitely abundant supply of Vitamin C. Would that really be useful?

Could you ever eat 100 lbs of Vitamin C? Or could you ever eat 1,000 lbs of Vitamin C?

No, that would be ridiculous right?

The reality is that as finite human beings there is a finite limit as to how much we really “need” in our lives in order to feel fully fulfilled / happy.

Our body could be perfectly happy with just 0.5 – 5 grams of Vitamin C per day. That really isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things.

There is only so much food that our bodies need to fulfill our needs.

There is only so much money that we need in order to fulfill our needs.

When we don’t have food, we crave it and we think that we could eat forever, but once we have access to food we realize that it doesn’t really take that much to reach the point of feeling fulfilled/satiated.

Money is no different. When we don’t have any money we crave total financial abundance, and we dream of winning 50 million dollars in a lottery. But in reality, there is probably a much smaller amount of money we would totally feel fulfilled/satiated with.

However, that is only true if we don’t mistakenly try to seek that feeling of “connection to true abundance” from food or money.

I remember when I was younger I always dreamed of all the things I would buy once I made some good money. Then I started to make some pretty good money and I bought myself some of the toys I always dreamed of.

Then, one day I remember walking into a Future Shop / BestBuy electronics store with money in my bank account that I could spend on whatever I wanted and I walked around for about an hour and walked out with nothing.

I already had a TV I liked, why bother buying another? I already had a good home theater sound system, did I need another? I already had an XBox and a dozen games I hadn’t even played at home, did I need to buy more?

I remember walking out of that store feeling a bit depressed because there was nothing I could buy from that store that would have made me feel any more abundant than when I walked in. That’s because at that time I was still seeking that feeling of abundance from the toys / things I owned.
It’s OK to Live a Rich Life

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we should have no desires / wants.

All I’m saying is that no matter how big they may be, our true human desires / wants are finite. There is a limit to them. That’s the good news.

If your body wants Vitamin C – give it Vitamin C! I’m not saying to deprive yourself.

If you want to make and spend millions of dollars, go for it!

If you want to eat healthy and exercise and keep your body in tip-top shape, go for it!

Live life to it’s fullest.

BUT, realize that life here in this physical reality will never fully “make” you feel truly abundant, as that is not the purpose of it.

Feeling abundant comes from your connection to Source – the only true source of infinite abundance.

What’s even more paradoxical is that the less we seek that feeling of abundance from physical reality and instead seek more of it from Source, the more abundant our physical reality actually gets.

For example, the more connected we become to the infinitely abundant feeling of love from Source, the less we seek it from others in this world – and of course as soon as that happens, we automatically receive more love from others as well!

“Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.” – Matthew 13:12

This quote from the Bible has always stuck out to me. It’s an interesting quote because it kind of makes us think “Hey, wait a minute, that’s not fair!”

Fairness has nothing to do with reality. If you want more financial abundance in your life, first connect to the true source of infinite financial abundance – Source energy.

If you want more health, first connect to the true source of infinite health abundance – Source energy.

When you connect to Source, you will feel more financially abundant and you will make more money and even more will be given to you.

It’s just like going to the bank. When you have money, they can’t wait to lend you even more. When you don’t have any money, they refuse to lend you anything

I also talked about how nothing in this world will ever be enough for us if we seek abundance from it.

So what does this mean though?

Does this mean we should stop trying to live a better life? Should we stop trying to build wealth? Should we shed ourselves of all our material possessions? Should we stop trying to improve our health?

Should we just wait for some higher power to make our lives better?

No, absolutely not!

I’m all for living the largest life that you possibly can.

In order to do that though, you need to tap into the true source of abundance and that is not anything you’ll find in this physical reality.

What does that mean?

Well, this Blog post is a prime example. As I type these words, the source of them is not coming from anything you’ll find in this physical reality. Meaning, this sentence I am writing right now does not yet exist in physical reality until I write it. Now it exists, but just a few moments ago it didn’t exist until I typed it out.

Every word on this Blog comes from my consciousness which goes beyond this physical world. By Blogging I am transforming “Consciousness Energy” into something “tangible” in this physical reality. As soon as I transform the ideas and concepts in my mind into a Blog post, I give birth to a new construct in this physical reality which can now bring value to those people who read it.

In this way, Blogging is like alchemy. I am transforming concepts and ideas which come to me from Source energy into tangible physical constructs in this physical reality and by doing so I create something of value for others to read.

As more and more people find value in these constructs, my Blog gets more traffic and I make more money. Here’s what this looks like:

Source Energy -> Ideas / Concepts Given to Me -> Blog Post Written -> Value Created -> $$$

Do you see what I mean?

The source of everything I write on this Blog post comes from Source Energy. That is the real source of my abundance.

Even if I made just $1 per Blog post I write, if I wanted to make $10,000 all I would have to do is write 10,000 blog posts. How would I do that? By writing those things that come to me from Source Energy.

Let’s use another example.

Let’s use an artist who paints pictures. How do these artists make money?

Well, they go to the store and they buy a canvas, some paint brushes and some paints. Let’s say that all those supplies add up to $20. If that is the “value” of those supplies, then how is it that some artists can sell paintings for $100,000 or more? Where does that “value” come from?

If an artist takes $20 worth of supplies and goes into his studio and then five hours later walks out with a painting worth $100,000, where did that extra $99,980 worth of value come from?

It didn’t come from anywhere in this physical reality! It came directly from Source Energy.
True Sources of Abundance

True sources of abundance come from Source Energy.

They are free for us to use.

They are infinite in nature.

They can never be “used up”.

In fact, the more we use them, the more we have.

Think about those qualifies for a minute. Can you think of anything in this physical reality that has those qualities? Does money have these qualities? No, money is not free. It is not infinite. It can be used up.

What about real estate? Nope, it’s not free, it’s not infinite.

What about a stock portfolio? Nope.

What about a business? Nope, it’s neither free, nor infinite.

So what kind of things do exhibit these kinds of qualities?

Here’s one example: Ideas.

Ideas come to us from Source Energy. They are free. They are infinite. They can never be used up. If you give someone an idea, you don’t lose it yourself.

For example, here’s an idea for hanging doors I had which I used to easily hang a door.

When hanging a door there are usually two or three hinges that hold a door up and which screw into the door frame. When trying to hang a door, you have to align the door in such a way that it aligns with the hinges.

Since doors usually “hang” slightly above ground so as not to drag on the floor when we open and close them, in order to hang a door you have to hold it up about half an inch above ground. This usually means you need a second person to hold the door for you while you hang it, but even then it’s not easy to hold it exactly level.

So while hanging this door I had the idea to take some books and put them under the door. All you need is a book that’s thicker than the gap required under the door. You stick the book under the door, and you see how the hinges align. If the door is too high, you simply open the book up to the desired page which allows you regulate the height of the door.

Meaning, if the book you have is twice as thick as you need it to be, simply open up the book half way and place the door on top of it. If it’s still too high, only use one quarter of the thickness of the book.

In this way you can use a book (or books) to raise the door to any height you want. Once the hinges are screwed in, you just pull the book out.

There, I just shared an idea with you which I had for hanging doors. If you ever need to hang a door, you can use it if you wish.

Now, by sharing this idea with you, I transferred the concept of it from my consciousness to your consciousness. However, during that transfer did I lose the idea? No, the idea duplicates itself every time I share it with someone.

In fact, it could be that thousands of people might learn this idea from reading this Blog post. They might then share it with thousands of other people as well. However, regardless how many times this idea is shared, it doesn’t diminish in value for me.

Meaning, just because thousands of people now can use this idea to hang a door, it doesn’t make the idea any less valuable to me when I hang a door, right?

Do you see how ideas exhibit the abundance qualities I described above?

Well, what else has these qualities?

How about love?

When I express love towards something or someone, does that love get used up? Is there any less love in Source Energy after I use some of it? No! The supply is infinite.

How about inspiration?

When I inspire someone to take care of their health, or to make money online, does the process of sharing that inspiration with someone decrease the amount of inspiration I have? No, in fact the more people I inspire the more I get inspired myself.
Transforming True Abundance into Physical World “Abundance”

As I said before, nothing in this physical world is truly abundant. However, since our human lives are finite in nature themselves we can live lives which approximate abundance within the limits of physical reality.

For example, no amount of money in your bank account will ever be infinite. However, within the scope of our human lives and needs, there is an amount of money which we could accumulate which would be more than enough for us to live the lives we want and so it would approximate an infinite supply.

For example, if we had 50 million dollars as an example, that might be enough for us to never worry about money ever again. It’s not technically infinite, and it is possible to spend that kind of money if we don’t manage it properly, but for most people that would be an amount of money that would approximate total financial abundance.

How do we do this though? How do we “make” 50 million dollars?

Well, we don’t. You can’t really “make” 50 million dollars, unless you’re the US mint or something.

What we have to do is we have to transform value from a truly abundant source (Source Energy) into something valuable in this physical reality, and exchange it for 50 million dollars.

Mark Zuckerberg transformed an idea he had for Facebook, into a multi-billion dollar company.

Bill Gates did it with Microsoft.

Creating abundance in this physical world requires the ability to make something out of nothing. To take something worth “x” and transform it into something worth “10x” or “1,000x” or “1,000,000x” or more.

Remember, ideas are just one type of Source Energy. Not everyone in this world transforms idea energy into abundance.

For example, nurses take care of people in hospitals. They don’t necessary tap into idea energy as their source of abundance. They might tap into compassion, love, and healing energy as a way of transforming Source Energy into value in this physical world.

When a nurse expresses compassion towards a patient, the amount of compassion available in Source Energy doesn’t get used up. It’s infinite.

Fitness trainers tap into the Source Energies of ideas, compassion, inspiration and discipline to help their clients. When a fitness trainer inspires someone to transform their body, they are transforming the Source Energy of inspiration into value for the client.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you do, the true source of all the abundance in your life comes from Source Energy. The trick is to become aware of that, so that we feel connected to this true abundance.

When we feel connected to Source Energy and the infinite abundance that it provides, our consciousness begins to vibrate at a totally different frequency compared to when we are focused on the lack we see in this physical world. When that happens, we begin to attract and manifest abundance in this physical world as well.

This physical world acts like a mirror for what’s going on in our consciousness. If you have poverty consciousness, you will live a poverty reality.

If you have an abundance consciousness, you will live an abundance reality.

Sometimes people ask me “How can I feel abundant when I’m broke, in debt and constantly stressed out about my finances? It’s easy for people to say that we need to feel abundant, but that’s because they have money. I don’t have money, so how am I supposed to feel abundant?”

The truth is that those people who now have money, once were in the same spot you were in. They don’t feel abundant because they have money – they have money because they feel abundant.

I’ll repeat that again – they don’t feel abundant because they have money, they have money because they feel abundant.

Feeling abundant comes first. Money comes second.

How do you feel abundant if you have no money? Awaken to all the abundance that you do have in your life even without money or any physical possessions.

Do you have the sense of sight? How much money is that worth?

Do you have the ability to speak? How much is that worth?

Look around your life and see what you already have, instead of focusing on what you lack. Do you have the ability to form ideas? How much is that worth?

Do you have the ability to learn new things? How much is that worth?

Do you have someone who loves you? How much is that worth?

Do you have the ability to love someone? How much is that worth?

Awaken to the fact that we are all born with billions of dollars worth of “gifts”, and have a direct connection to billions of dollars worth of Source Energy every single day.

Feel the abundance of that fact.

When you can do that, your vibration will shift, and you will begin to attract abundance in this physical world as well.

And you deserve it. All of it.

The toys, the money, the houses, the vacations, the healthy body, the friends, the lovers and all the wonderful thing we can have in this world. However, none of those things will ever make you feel as abundant as your connection to Source Energy.

That is not what they were designed for. They are just reflections, or trophies to celebrate a milestone.

Think of them like having a black belt in a marital art. Anyone can walk into a martial arts supply store and buy a black belt. But wearing that black belt isn’t going to make you feel safe if you didn’t earn it right?

When we say “I want a black belt in a martial art”, really what we are saying is that we want the knowledge and experience that comes with earning a black belt, and not the black belt itself.

We want to be able to defend ourselves or to learn the physical discipline required to earn a black belt. It’s not the block black belt we want, it’s the meaning behind it that we want.

If you earned a black belt in a martial art, and then someone broke into your house and stole your black belt, would you be any less of a black belt than you were before?

No, because the black belt is not really the source of your power. It’s just a symbol, a trophy.

Don’t confuse physical world symbols / trophies for the energy they represent.

Money is just a symbol. It’s a trophy. It’s not the real source of financial abundance. The real source of financial abundance is Source Energy.

The more you learn to connect to that as your source of power, the more money will flow into your life as well.

Take the gifts that Source Energy is giving you for free, and transform them into tangible value for others.

That is the way to experience abundance in this physical world.

We all indulge in negative thinking from time to time.

Something in our lives doesn’t go as planned, we get frustrated and negative thoughts start to creep up.

Even some of the most happy, vibrant, always-smiling type people have periods of time in their lives when they start thinking negative thoughts and get depressed or angry.

It’s part of being human. We all do it from time to time.

Why does this happen though? Why are we all susceptible to negativity and how does it affect our lives?

Dealing with Contrast

As human beings we live in a world of duality. Light and dark, good and evil, right and wrong, etc.

As we live out our lives we are exposed to experiences and situations which provide contrast for us.

Contrast helps us to gain clarity in life.

Without contrast we wouldn’t know what we want. Without contrast, everything would be equal and boring.

How could we value something like peace without seeing examples of war in our reality to provide us contrast?

How could we value abundance without experiencing lack in our reality?

How could we value health without experiencing disease in our reality?

Knowing what we want is tied directly to knowing what we don’t want.

Everyone Experiences Contrast

We all experience contrast as human beings. Contrast is good. It can help us to learn and grow.

However, it is how we interpret contrast and what meaning we associate to it which determines whether the event or circumstance is labeled as a positive or negative experience.

For example, let’s say that we work at a job which we no longer like. However, we’re too lazy to look for alternatives. So we keep coming in to work, even though we’re not really happy there.

One day we come into work and our boss jumps down our throat about some kind of problem that the company is having, but which has nothing to do with us.

We try to explain that it wasn’t our fault that this problem arose, but the boss doesn’t want to hear it.

We walk out of the meeting with the boss, steaming.

Now, that type of event is what I am referring to when I say the word “Contrast”.

Although the event provides us with a lot of contrast to consider in our lives, it isn’t inherently a positive or negative event – it’s neutral.

However, how we choose to interpret the event is what decides if it was a “negative” or “positive” event for us.

For example, if this type of event happened to me I may choose to think “I don’t like my job” or “I don’t want to work here anymore” and that would be one way of interpreting the situation.

Another way I could interpret it is to think “I want a better job” or “I want to start my own business“.

Now, when we look at those different ways of looking at the situation, they appear to be very similar.

In one instance I’m thinking about not liking my job, and not wanting to work there anymore, and in the other situation I’m talking about wanting a better job or wanting to start my own business.

The differences are subtle, but the repercussions of how those subtle differences affect our reality are huge.

Let me ‘splain.

The Subconscious Mind – Powerful Ally or Worst Enemy

Our subconscious mind is one our most amazing gifts. Without it, we would literally be dead – instantly.

Our subconscious mind has the power to help us manifest anything we could possibly want in our reality.

However, if used improperly, it can also be our worst enemy.

In order to utilize our subconscious mind to it’s full potential to help us, we must first understand how it works.

Even though everyone from scientists to marketing experts have been trying to figure out how the subconscious mind works for a very long time, we only have a very small idea of it’s inner workings so far.

However, there are some things that we do know about the subconscious mind that are very useful to us.

For example, we do know that the subconscious mind is not a logical/rational mind. It does not think in linear terms – instead it is a parallel processor.

Although the number is not exactly known, it is said that the subconscious mind can process more than 40 billion bits of information per second.

Our conscious mind can only process between 7-20 bits of information per second in contrast to that.

One of the things we also know about the subconscious mind is that it does not understand negative modifiers in language.

Meaning, if we say the words “I don’t like my job”, the subconscious mind does not understand the word “don’t”. So when you say the words “I don’t like my job”, the subconscious mind hears “I don’t like my job.”

When we say “I don’t want to work here” the subconscious mind hears “I don’t want to work here”.

When we say “I am not happy with my life” the subconscious mind hears “I am not happy with my life”.

Do you see the challenge that this presents?

Essentially, every time you say or think a statement with a negative modifier in it, you are programming the subconscious mind to believe the exact opposite.

You’re essentially programming your subconscious mind to work against you!

The Real Problem With Negativity

Some people say that negative people should just be happy with their lives. They should just be grateful for what life brings them.

If they hate their job, they should just be happy that they have a job in the first place.

I say that’s bullshit.

If you want a better job, or to start your own business, then that’s OK! That is NOT being negative.

If you want to lose weight because you want to look better, that’s OK too! That is NOT being negative.

These types of situations and events that we create in our lives, which provide us with the contrast to see what we don’t want in order for us to choose what we do want are POSITIVE events.

If you’re at a job you hate, but are too lazy to find something to do which you’d enjoy more, you WILL attract circumstances which will bring about contrast for you.

Your boss will probably call you into a meeting and rip a strip off of you for doing something wrong which you probably didn’t even do.

You will attract a customer who will piss you off so much you’ll want to quit your job right there on the spot.

These types of contrasting situations WILL come up for you – and that is AWESOME. You want that.

However, we have to realize that those situations show us what we DON’T want, in order for us to become crystal clear on what we DO want.

If we are too lazy to choose what we DO want, however, then we will simply just continue to focus on what we DON’T want and will continue to manifest that.

As trivial as it may sound, the words that we use to describe the situation in our minds and in our spoken words make a huge difference in what we manifest.

“I don’t want to work here” and “I want to work somewhere else” may sound like the same thing to your conscious mind, but they are opposites to the subconscious mind.

Remember that the subconscious mind does not understand negative modifiers so it hears “I want to work here” instead of “I don’t want to work here”.

So the real problem with negativity is NOT that we experience a contrasting situation and decide that we want something else instead.

That is not the problem. It is fine to want something more, something better in our lives.

However, how we interpret the contrasting situation using negative vocabulary, then we set ourselves up for failure.

The Subconscious Mind is a Drive-Thru Window

Here’s another way to think about it.

Imagine that you have two favorite burgers at McDonalds. The Big Mac and the McChicken burgers. Those are your all-time favorites that you’ve loved for years.

Now, imagine if you were driving through the McDonalds drive through, and wanted to order a burger. Since the last time you ordered a Big Mac you decide that you don’t want that again.

Now, imagine if that drive through window had a microphone that you speak into, but the microphone was installed with a state-of-the-art “negative modifier filtration add-on” which automatically filtered out any negative modifiers.

So, now imagine sitting in the drive through and the drive-thru person coming onto the speaker and saying “May I take your order?”, and in response to that you say “Yes, I don’t want a Big Mac.”

What do you think would happen next?

Since the microphone automatically deleted the negative modifier “don’t”, your order was heard as “Yes, I want a Big Mac.” So guess what the drive-thru person will give you?

He’ll give you a Big Mac. Exactly what you DIDN’T want.

Now, that would obviously be a ridiculous thing for McDonalds to install such a filter on their microphones, but that is exactly how our subconscious mind works.

But even if that filter wasn’t there, let’s say that the drive thru person did actually hear you say “Yes, I don’t want a Big Mac.”

Would that be any better? Not really, right?

How would that person know what you DO want, just by you telling them what you DON’T want.

Inside your conscious mind, it may be an obvious thing since you only like those two burgers and you have decided that you don’t want the Big Mac this time. In YOUR mind it is very clear that you in fact want to order the McChicken burger, but the drive thru clerk can’t deduce that from you simply saying “I don’t want a Big Mac.”

How would they know whether you want the McChicken, or a Cheeseburger. Or maybe you want a salad!

The only way to make it clear to the drive-thru person what it is that you want to order is by telling them what you DO want, not what you DON’T want, right?

Well, our subconscious mind works the same way.

We must learn to speak to it in terms of what we DO want, not what we DON’T want. We must tell it what we DO like/prefer, not what we DON’T like/prefer.

It is this distinction which makes negative thinking so dangerous.

Our subconscious mind hears every thought we have. We must learn to speak to it like we would speak to a waiter at a restaurant. We need to tell it what we WOULD like to order, and not what we WOULDN’T like to order.

Conscious growth doesn’t come from settling for a life less than what we desire. It is not about avoiding contrasting situations. It is not about learning to just be happy with what we’ve got.

Conscious growth comes from embracing those contrasting situations and learning from them – but THEN we have to become crystal clear on what we DO want, and what we DO prefer in response to the situation, instead of programming our subconscious mind to further attract exactly what we don’t want.

Let me explain with an example.

Just over a week ago I went in to see my dentist. I’ve had a loose crown on a tooth for about a year now and I’ve been procrastinating going in to see the dentist because I knew it would require an extraction.

It’s a tooth that I originally had problems with 15 years ago and which I managed to be able to save for 15 years, but which now needed to be extracted and replaced with an implant or bridge.

Finally last week I decided to go in and see the dentist and finally get it pulled.

After getting the tooth pulled, the dentist prescribed me an antibiotic to treat the small infection that has begun to take place around the gum surrounding the tooth and a pain killer to deal with the pain from the extraction.

Ok, so what does my visit to the dentist have to do with beliefs?

Well, here’s the thing… I am a believer in alternative medicine and I believe in energy healing.

So when the dentist gave me the prescription for the antibiotics, I had to ask myself whether or not I should take them or if I should just use energy healing to deal with the situation. After all, I am a Reiki practitioner and have done healing work on myself, my friends and family members.

While on my way home from the dentist I had to decide whether or not to get the prescription filled or not. For anyone who has taken antibiotics before, you probably know that you’re not supposed to start a run of antibiotics if you don’t plan to finish it as that can cause problems with the infection. So I had to decide whether or not to take them. It’s my body so it was my choice.

I thought about it for a few minutes and then decided to get the prescription filled.

Why would I do that? If I believe in Reiki and energy healing, why would I get my antibiotic prescription filled?

Well, the reason is that I have not yet had the necessity or opportunity to work on my subconscious beliefs relating to Reiki and how well it works for healing a tooth/gum infection. So I couldn’t say with 100% certainty that I believed that me using Reiki healing would deal with the infection.

My subconscious beliefs were not yet ready to trust in Reiki as an alternative to antibiotics. So, acting according to my ACTUAL subconscious beliefs, I filled the prescription and took the antibiotics.

This is what I mean by acting in accordance to your actual beliefs.

Do I want to believe that I can just use my Reiki healing as an alternative to antibiotics in a situation like this? Yes, of course. Why would I want to take antibiotics unnecessarily? But the truth is that deep down in my subconscious I don’t yet believe it to be so with certainty.

So, I chose to go with a method of solving the problem (the infection) that I *do* believe in – antibiotics. I’ve had an infection like this in the past, actually much worse, and antibiotics worked for me so I already have a belief that they work.

Now, the second part of the prescription was for a strong pain killer that I could take if the pain got too unbearable after the freezing wore off. I also filled that prescription but decided to “play” a little with the situation.

Instead of taking the prescribed pain killer, I took Advil instead, just because I had no idea how bad it would hurt after the freezing wore off. Considering this was a molar and there was a big hole in my jaw where the tooth used to be and lots of blood, and swelling, it was a safe bet that there would be some pain.

So, I took an Advil, and I decided to play around with Reiki as a way of relieving the pain. I have had many instances where I have used Reiki to relieve pain, so I already had some beliefs around that reality.

When I went to bed that night, I did a self-Reiki healing session focusing on my jaw, and neck area. I could definitely feel the Reiki energy flowing through my hands, and after a while it slowly dissipated and I fell asleep.

I had a glass of water and an Advil on standby just in case I woke up in the middle of the night in pain, but that never happened.

I woke up in the morning and saw that my jaw was healing really nicely. There was still some swelling, so I took an Advil for the swelling but around lunch time I wanted to experiment and see if I could go completely without any pain killers moving forward. So I stopped taking Advil and I never touched the stronger pain killers the dentist prescribed.

When I went to see the dentist a few days ago she confirmed that the jaw was healing up really nicely.

So now, I have an even stronger level of belief in Reiki as (1) a form of energy healing that aids in recovery / healing and (2) a form of energy healing that naturally alleviates pain.

Those are my beliefs as of right now. I’m aware of that and so I act according to them.

The mistake I see people making relating to beliefs is that they try to act according to beliefs they WISH they had, instead of the beliefs that they DO have.

Meaning, we have to be really honest with ourselves. Just because you have taken Reiki courses, it doesn’t mean that you fully believe in it yet as a solution to ALL forms of medical problems.

If you break your leg, for example, and you don’t really believe that Reiki can heal that – the for heaven’s sake GO TO A HOSPITAL! Don’t sit there in pain thinking that you are somehow betraying some kind of “Reiki Code” by going to a hospital.

Another example I sometimes see is people who have zero belief in making money online, who just decide to quit their jobs and then they call me for advice as to how they will pay for rent the following week.

If you don’t truly believe you can make money online yet, work on THAT BELIEF first. Don’t pretend you believe it’s possible, and start acting according to some set of beliefs you WISH you had. That is a recipe for disaster!

Take action based on your true beliefs.

Take action based on your true beliefs.

One more thing…

Take action based on your true beliefs.

Are you trying to take action based on beliefs you don’t yet believe in? If so, I’m sorry but you’re being an idiot.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about the next thing…
Play With Expanding Your Beliefs

Now, even though I advocate taking action according to your true beliefs, there is a second thing I highly recommend you do…

Play with expanding your beliefs!

Last week I realized that I did not yet believe that my personal Reiki healing abilities were at the level where I could fully 100% trust them to treat a tooth infection. So I took the antibiotic treatment, but it got me thinking about working on those beliefs.

As “luck” would have it, about three days after my tooth extraction I woke up with a case of what I believe to have been pink-eye. Pink-eye is an inflammation of the membrane covering the whites of the eyes as well as the inside of the eye lids.

I’ve had pink-eye before and it’s a nasty thing that really sucks. It’s usually caused by a virus which means that antibiotics don’t work against it but I have had eye drops prescribed for it before and I know they work.

Due to the success of the my “anti-pain” efforts with Reiki I wondered if my beliefs were strong enough to use Reiki to deal with my case of pink-eye. I did a quick belief test to see if my subconscious mind believed Reiki could deal with the problem and I got a yes.

However, I also got the intuitive message to add in two extra “alternative” treatment options on top of the Reiki. One was to use make-up remover pads to “wash” my eye lids, which is something I learned from my optometrist 20 years ago when I first got pink-eye. He recommended I keep a box of these individually wrapped make-up remover pads at home that you rip open and they are pre-soaked in a mild soap solution that you can use to clean the eye lid around the eye.

They’re designed for women to remove make-up from their eyes, but he told me they work wonders in keeping the eye-lids clean, especially the area where your eyelashes grow.

So before going to bed that night, I washed my eyes using those make-up remover pads. Then, I also put a warm tea-bag over each eye – which is something I learned from my parents growing up in Poland. And then, I also did a Reiki healing session focusing on my eyes.

When I woke up the next morning, there was almost no evidence of pink-eye. My eyes were a little bit red still, but about 95% better. For anyone who has had pink-eye before, it doesn’t go away that fast. It’s a nasty thing that just gets worse until you go in and get some form of anti-viral eye drops or whatever they use to treat it.

Did I actually have pink-eye? I don’t know. I believe I did. I can’t really prove it, but I don’t need to. All I was interested in was in expanding my beliefs around my self-healing Reiki abilities and that is what I did. My belief levels around Reiki continue to expand all the time.

However, I don’t try to use it to the exclusion of other treatments that I already believe in. I use it on top of those treatments.

I did the same thing with making money online. I proved to myself that I could make a full time income working from home first while I still worked full time, and then I quit my job once I already believed it was possible.

Acting Within Your Beliefs

When I used to work within the corporate sector with some very successful people who weren’t exactly people who would label themselves as “Lightworkers”, one thing I noticed that they did very successfully is that they believed in their model of reality.

If they didn’t believe in the Law of Attraction for example, they acted in accordance to their beliefs, and they saw success. From my current perspective, it took a lot of unnecessary effort on their part to do accomplish things that way, but they still accomplished things.

In the Lightworker community I constantly see people who try to live outside of the frame of their true beliefs, and they accomplish nothing!

When I first learned about Muscle Testing for example, I thought it was complete hogwash, so I didn’t use it in my life.

When I went to my basic training course last year I had one agenda – to either prove to myself that muscle testing works to the point that I believe it 100% or drop it as a modality altogether.

There is a balance we learned that claims to cause your arms to move by themselves during the process of balancing out a belief statement. To be totally honest, this seemed totally ridiculous to me when I first heard about it. How can your arms move by themselves. It makes no sense.

When it came time to experience the process, I stood there with my eyes closed and my arms out to my sides and waited for something to happen. Then… nothing happened.

I was standing there for what seemed like an eternity. I felt stupid standing there in front of my partner, eyes closed, with my arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross, especially since by this time they had begun to shake from the fact that they were held up for so long.

I began to feel guilty as well since I was the first to go and there may not have been enough time for my partner to try the technique herself. My Ego wanted me to give up and just not say anything or just pretend that the technique worked.

That’s when I had one of those defining moments in life where you make a decision that changes everything. Instead of giving up I decided that I will stand there, and not care if I look like a buffoon even if it takes 10 hours for the technique to work. I would either stand there until this supposed technique actually worked and made my arms move by themselves, or my arms fell off, or the instructor came in the room and stopped me – in which case I would have packed up my stuff and went home – because there is no point in me learning a modality I don’t believe in.

So I stood there, eyes closed, arms outstretched and shaking and starting to sweat.

Then, something crazy happened. My arms moved by themselves. It was as if some invisible force took control over my arms and moved them together. It was beautiful. My conscious mind did not move my arms. I know that. I can’t prove it to anyone, but I know it for myself. THAT is why I believe in, because I’ve experienced it.

When I do muscle testing, I know it works because I actually believe in it. I don’t just pretend to believe in it. If I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t use it.

I also believe in the Law of Attraction. Not because it sounds cool, or fun, but because I spent a lot of energy and time proving to myself that it works beyond a shadow of doubt.

If, however I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t use it. If I didn’t believe in I wouldn’t use it either.

I use it because I believe in it, not the other way around.

You know that saying “I’ll believe it when I see it”?

I live my life according to the belief that “I’ll see it when I believe it”.

Constantly work on expanding your beliefs, and be flexible in what you’re willing to believe, but take action and live life according to your current beliefs. Not the beliefs you wish you believed in.

When we see a success story of a person that inspires us in life, we often want to learn how that person has achieved the success that they enjoy.

In the corporate world, the strategy a company uses to achieve results is often highly guarded as an intellectual property secret.

Employee’s sign non-disclosure agreements to keep “what works” under lock and key. Even with non-disclosure agreements in place, often times employees are only told what they need to know to do their jobs and the rest is kept secret from them.

That’s just the way it works in the corporate world.

Your competitive advantage / strategy is what keeps you alive in the business world and able to keep the lights on.

As a former participant in the corporate world, both at the private and publicly traded company levels I was very much involved in doing business this way.

There was no such thing as reading your competitor’s Blog to find out what they were going to do next to compete with you. Figuring out what your next move was going to be, often depended on what your competitor’s next move was going to be, and learning how to observe and anticipate the moves of your competitors was a hugely beneficial skill.

Also, when competitors succeeded in areas you were not doing very well, learning how to observe and identify what it was that they did to produce a result was also very beneficial.

Having the ability to observe, analyze and anticipate your competitor’s next moves wasn’t just beneficial to your business, it was often the only way to stay in business long term.

I feel that I was always good at this part of business in the corporate world.

Enter The Gurus

Shifting my focus to the online world of blogging, affiliate marketing and making money online in general was a very interesting contrast for me.

Bloggers were making money online, and sharing how they were doing it with their readers.

Internet marketers were making millions, and then creating courses to teach others how to make money online as well. Even though they charged for these courses, they were still very inexpensive compared to the potential payoff if what they taught worked.

At first I didn’t really understand why someone would do that.

I mean, if you’re making $500k/month doing something, why teach everyone else the exact strategies you’re using to do so. In the traditional corporate world that would be like suicide.

As I started reading more and more Blogs related to making money online, I started seeing more and more people sharing blogging income reports and giving away all the “secrets” to how they are making their money.

At first I thought this was a very foreign concept, much different from the competitive point of view typically seen in the corporate world, but I really liked it.

The idea of a society where everyone shares everything with everyone freely (not necessarily for free) was very appealing and I really liked it.

As I started to implement what the “Gurus” taught, all of it made perfectly logical sense.

I saw no harm in trying so I followed what they said.

After months and months of frustration though, I was not able to produce the same results they were producing. Not even close.

That’s when I made a shift in my thinking.

Putting My Competitive Goggles Back On

After spending 15+ years reading hundreds of personal development books and studying successful people, there is one thing that I learned along the way that was a huge paradigm shift for me.

The thing I learned is that most successful people don’t know what made/makes them successful.

Actually I would say that is the case with all people, not just successful people.

As human beings we are absolutely horrible at identifying the factors that make us successful.

In the majority of most cases, what makes people successful is not what they think it is.

So, even though I left the competitive style nature of the corporate world and entered the world of Blogging, and Internet marketing, and starting getting around people who are much more into the “co-operative” model of reality, rather than the “competitive” model of reality, at the end of the day I realized that nobody is going to hand you the secret to success on a silver platter.

You have to figure it out on your own, for yourself.

Are you willing to accept that?

I hope so.

Finding Success

The way I was finally able to achieve results online was to think about making money online through the same goggles I used to wear in the corporate world.

When I wanted to learn how to make money as a Blogger, I started studying successful Bloggers.

I didn’t listen to what they were WRITING on their Blogs, I watched and paid attention to what they were DOING.

For example, if a particular Blogger wrote a post about 10 awesome free WordPress theme sites, but at the same time they were having a custom theme designed for $1,500, guess what I did?

Did I go and try to find a free WordPress theme on one of those sites they wrote a post about? No.

I did what they did. I invested in a premium WordPress theme.

If I read an article by a Blogger who was writing about how they achieved a certain result, I assumed that was only half of the story. I investigated further to find out what else was happening.

That is the way to find success.

Find someone you’re inspired by and then model and emulate what they DO and HOW they do it, not what they SAY they do how they SAY they do it.

If there is some kind of result that I have achieved, that you would like to achieve, don’t listen to a word I say – because I may have no clue what I’m talking about. Instead, pay attention to what I’m actually doing and the “secrets” will be revealed to you.

Why Gurus Lie

Some of the most successful, warm-hearted, nicest people in the world are lying to you.

It is not because they mean to. It’s not because they want to lie, or to teach you the ‘wrong’ way to do things, or because they want to see you fail.

In almost all cases, most of the “gurus” teaching anything, genuinely want to help people to succeed.

However, the challenge is that they don’t know what actually made them successful, so they teach what they think made them successful.

And a lot of times what they teach is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing.

Examples of Not Knowing What Works

One example of not knowing what makes people successful that has been popping up for me lately is related to marketing.

Because people come to me for marketing advice, one of the first questions I always ask people is what works for them right now.

I’ll ask people “How are you getting clients right now?” and they’ll typically give me an answer right away.

Some will say “Oh, most of my clients come from word-of-mouth advertising.”

Or they will say “Oh I advertise in _________“, etc.

If I dig deeper and ask them a question like “What do you think makes your word-of-mouth advertising so successful?” people will often tell me a whole story about it.

Often times a lot of these people actually go around saying things like “Word of mouth advertising is the best type of marketing” etc.

They really DO believe that their most effective form of marketing is “word of mouth“.

The interesting thing is that when we actually quantify the reality of where they are getting their customers from and why, we find that their “word of mouth” marketing sucks. The real source of their current customers is something totally different and they just don’t realize it.

I’ve worked with clients who had a huge growth in their overall revenues due to SEO efforts, but they attributed the increases to a new sales person they hired. Business people especially are always making many different changes in their businesses at the same time, but very often they attribute any successes to the sexiest ideas they implemented or the ones they came up with themselves.

Take any business that’s succeeding and thriving, and ask their programming department why the business is succeeding. All the programmers will tell you it’s because of the recent changes they made in their software.

Ask the marketing department the same question and they’ll tell you it’s because of the new marketing strategy they just implemented.

Ask the accounting department and they’ll tell you that it’s because of the right decisions the CEO is making due to the financial information that the accounting department is providing them.

Ask the janitor and they’ll tell you it’s because he switched cleaning detergents.

It’s human nature to take credit for success. And to shift blame onto someone else when things are failing.

When the were competing for the Stanley Cup this year, I would often ask people “How was the game?” since I hardly watched any of them.

It was always interesting to hear that when the won a game, people would say “We won!”, but when the lost a game, people would say “They lost.” 🙂

I guess nobody ever considers themselves a part of the team when they lose, but they do if they win.

Why Success is Hard to Figure Out

Whenever I achieve some sort of result in life, I’m always inspired to share it with others.

I really honestly look back at what it is that I did in order to achieve something and then I try to teach it to others.

Because I keep a semi-daily journal of all my successes and failures, I often refer back to where I was in the past and try to compare it to my current situation to try to figure out what changed.

Once I become aware of what I think it was, I often share it with others via conversation, Blog posts, videos, or by mentoring others.

What very often happens though is that even though people make those same changes in their lives, they don’t always produce the same results.

Sometimes it’s just because they don’t even come close to emulating what I did, but sometimes they do yet it still doesn’t work.

For example, in the last 20 years whenever I have ever wanted a job I simply printed off my resume and applied for a job. I only had 3 actual jobs that I had to apply for (besides the business I ran myself), and each time I simply printed the resume off, faxed it in or brought it in in person, and I got the job.

In the last 20 years I have never applied for a job and not gotten it.

But if someone wanted to get a job and I told them to simply print off a resume and fax it in, that might not work for them.

So the advice of “Just print a resume off and fax it in.” is rather useless for most people.

What works for one person might not work for another.

What Works

So if listening to Guru’s is not the answer, then what is?

What I have found to work for me is a formula of getting your information from three sources:

Listen to what Guru’s say. Sometimes people DO know what works. They tune into the exact thing that made them successful. And often times even when they don’t know everything that made them successful, what they do communicate WILL help you out. It just might not be the full story.
Observe and model what Guru’s do. Learning to be an observer is very important. You can learn SO MUCH about how to succeed in life just by opening your eyes and watching people and modeling what they do. That doesn’t just mean watching what they do when they are doing what they do, but what are they doing in their off time. Larry Bird practiced taking shots for 4 hours a day when he was a kid – every day. Model THAT, and not just what he did on the court if you want to improve your shot percentage. Model his breathing, his physiology, his workout routine, his visualization process etc. Not just what he does on the court.
Listen to your intuition. Above all, tune in to your intuition and follow it’s advice. If a “guru” tells you that the only way to achieve X is by doing Y instead of Z, but your intuition is telling you that Z is the right path for you, then chances are that Z *IS* the right path for you. And even if eventually you end up doing Y, just like the “guru” said, maybe you learn a lesson by doing Z that you wouldn’t have learned if you tried to do Y. Always trust your intuition.

With the above formula you can’t go wrong. See, in the above formula, what “gurus” say only accounts for 33% of your decision making process. So even if they are wrong, because they don’t know what made them successful, or even if they are lying to you on purpose, it doesn’t really matter because your observations (2) and your intuition (3) will be there to override that decision anyways.

One Last Piece of Advice

One last piece of advice I’d like to throw in for good measure when it comes to emulating people.

When studying the success of someone, try to connect with the version of who they are which is just a few steps ahead of you, not light years ahead of you.

For example, let’s use making money as an example since it’s easily quantifiable.

Let’s say you are currently making $0/month and you want to make your first $100/m online.

If you look at someone who is making $10 million dollars online and try to emulate what they do RIGHT NOW to make their next $20 million, chances are you won’t succeed.

Instead, try to look at what they DID to make $100/m in the first place.

A lot of “guru’s” who are making a million dollars per year are learning the lessons they need to learn to make two million a year.

However, those lessons might not be the same lessons you should be learning to go from $0/m to $100/m. Make sense?

Try to emulate those who are a few steps ahead of you, or who work with people and teach people who are a few steps ahead of you.

I am much more interested in learning from people who make $1,000/m more than me from their Blogs than from people make $1 Million in one day doing a launch.

I listen to both, but the person a few steps ahead of you is the one that’s easier to emulate and produce results by emulating.

They are the closest vibrational match to who you want to be next.

I’m more interested in learning how a fat guy lost 20lbs and reduced his body fat % from 35% to 30% as an example, than how a bodybuilder who has been fit for 15 years dropped from 12% body fat to 10% body fat.

In martial arts training I’m more interested how a white belt finally committed to showing up to training every week, twice a week, than how a black belt would go about disarming someone with a gun.

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…