Category: Misc.

Tomorrow I’m heading down to Seattle to attend this weekend’s Lifestyle Awareness seminar.

Lifestyle Awareness is the latest in a series of experiences I’ve had in my life that has totally blown my mind.

I first heard about Lifestyle Awareness from a friend, an intuitive/healer friend of mine, who started playing with the modality after watching some YouTube videos on it about a year ago.

My friend is a very talented psychic & energy healer who already blew my mind when I did some intuitive coaching with him last year, but that was nothing compared to when I actually met him in person this December.

Before I go into what happened in December, let me back up a few months to about summer 2010 when my friend first told me about Lifestyle Awareness.

He told me he watched some Mark Johnson (the creator of Lifestyle Awareness) videos on YouTube and then tried out the technique with some friends and it worked for him.

I went on YouTube, watched the same videos and didn’t get it.

Watching Mark Johnson doing the Two-Point Technique (one of the staples of Lifestyle Awareness) just looked weird to me.

Essentially he places his hands on two points on someone’s body, such as the left and right shoulder, and then “something” happens.

The technique (if you can call it that) can also be done without touching at all, and what happens is different for everyone – some people start laughing, other people lose their balance, others collapse entirely. Some experience nothing physical that can be seen with the eyes, but feel a shift internally.

When this happens, people have experienced some amazing transformations and healing in their lives.

Back in the summer of 2010 that didn’t really sit very well with me and my rational mind.

My “opinion” of Lifestyle Awareness back then was basically “Ok, so this guy picks two points on someones body and then either touches them or just holds out his hands and then something happens. Huh?”

In the videos I saw some people start laughing uncontrollably when this happened, or start falling forward or bending backwards. It just looked weird.

Because I respect my friend’s opinion though I decided to buy the Lifestyle Awareness book to see if maybe I could figure out what all this “stuff” was before passing judgement based solely on what I saw in the YouTube videos.

After reading about half of the book my rational mind was really getting mad at me. I just didn’t “get it”. Especially when I got to the section in the book where Mark Johnson describes how to do the Two Point Technique.

I tried doing it and it just seemed ridiculous. It didn’t feel like anything was happening.

I guess it would be the equivalent to trying to do Reiki healing with your hands without knowing how to do Reiki or being attuned to Reiki energy. You’d just be standing there hovering your hands over someone with nothing happening.

That’s what trying to do the Two Point Technique felt like to me…. nothing is happening!

Anyway, I just got frustrated with it and since I was busy with so many other things I put it aside. I figured I’d wait until I meet Chris in person to see if he can demo it for me.

Secretly my rational mind was thinking “This is BS. Hogwash. I don’t get it. How do people fall for this stuff?”

At the same time another part of me was thinking “Isn’t that exactly what you thought about Law of Attraction, psychic abilities, Reiki, muscle testing, lifestyle etc. at first? Now that you’ve actually experienced them, they make sense.”

Anyway, I kind of just tucked Lifestyle Awareness away in my mind as something I’ll look into in the future – most likely when I met Chris.

Playing With Lifestyle Awareness

Mark Johnson states that Lifestyle Awareness has an energy field that anyone can tap into instantly from anywhere in the world.

The easiest way to tap into it is to attend one his seminars, but it is not the only way. Some people are able to tap right into it just by watching his videos on YouTube, or by reading his books.

That is what happened to my friend. He’s never been to a seminar. He just watched a video on YouTube and was instantly able to do it.

Like I said, Chris is such a naturally talented healer / intuitive, he just picks this stuff up so easily.

In December of last year I flew out to where my wife was staying while training with to develop her intuitive/healing abilities as well.

I finally met my friend in person and he wanted to play with some of the Lifestyle Awareness stuff he learned.

He basically told me to stand in front of him, facing away form him, while he stood about 3 feet away from me and placed the palms of his hands near my shoulders.

Within a few seconds I felt the weirdest sensation. Almost as if Chris’s hands had turned into super powerful magnets that were pulling back on my shoulder blades.

I had to turn around several times to look because it really felt like he had grabbed a hold of my sweatshirt and was pulling backwards on it.

However that wouldn’t have made sense because if he had done that, I would have felt my shirt pushing on me from the front. Meaning, if you grab someone’s shirt from behind and you pull on it, the shirt pushes up against your chest in the front and pulls you backwards – it doesn’t pull from the back.

This felt like he was pulling me from the back, but the thing is he wasn’t even touching me. He was standing several feet away and his hands weren’t touching my shoulders or back.

That was just the start of it.

As my rational mind stopped even trying to keep up with what was happening, things got even more fun.

About 30 minutes later, my friend and I were really starting to have fun with this thing. My friend was able to stand there and just by moving his hands around in front of me, he was able to “make” my body move/lean in different directions.

It’s a really weird sensation that’s very difficult to describe. At any point I still had total control over my body, but if I just relax and try to stand still my body would want to move. Sometimes it would just be my neck that would move, almost like it needed stretching. Other times it would be my whole upper body that would lean to the left or right or forward / backwards.

At the same time it felt as if my body was really light, almost as if it was suspended by strings or something.

I know, sounds really weird right?

What was really cool though, is that after my mind opened up to the possibility that this stuff *IS* real and that reality isn’t going to come crumbling down around me just because this Lifestyle Awareness thing does actually do something, I actually was able to do the same thing myself as well.

At the level of physical reality, my friend didn’t actually teach me anything, in terms of like telling me what to do or how to do it or anything. Just by being in his presence and having him demonstrate the process to me, somehow I instantly knew how to do it myself.

I was now able to do the same thing he was doing.

I could stand behind him, about three or four feet away, lift my arms up around shoulder level and it’s as if my arms just kind of started moving on their own. Simultaneously he would feel shifts in his body and it would start to move as well.

It was kind of funny, because my wife was sitting on the couch and just watching us from a distance as we played around with this “thing” as if it’s some kind of new toy or something.

It was so much fun.

The next day I drove down to the Chapters book store in and bought Mark Johnson’s second book called. I couldn’t put the book down.

My mind was on a mission to understand / explain what I had just experienced first hand.

I have to admit that if I hadn’t experienced what happened with Chris, I probably wouldn’t have liked the book as much as I did.

In the book, Mark Johnson writes about the science/physics behind Lifestyle Awareness and other modalities similar to it.

However, much like Mark’s first book, I don’t think that reading this book will “prove” anything to anyone who doesn’t already believe in Lifestyle Awareness or who hasn’t experienced it.

I believe the intention behind this book is to just shine a light or open the doorway to a new level of understanding once you’ve already experienced Lifestyle Awareness for yourself.

The book does not contain all the answers to everything. Instead it’s like a starting point from which you can expand your understanding or research if you wish.

For me it was just about trying to understand something about what I had just experienced.

Was It Even Lifestyle Awareness?

The crazy thing is that by the time I got back home from my trip, I didn’t even really know what it was that I experienced.

I know I had learned something from my friend, and I know he learned it by watching Mark Johnson’s videos on YouTube and it definitely feels like the descriptions of Lifestyle Awareness I read in the books, but honestly I don’t know what it is that my friend and I were doing.

I think it’s some glimpse of the Lifestyle Awareness Two Point Process, but it could just as easily be some form of energy running or Reiki or something. I have no idea.

Taking It To The Next Level

When I got back I connected with a couple Lifestyle Awareness practitioners locally here on Facebook and described my experience and they told me that it sounds like Lifestyle Awareness.

I also bought “The Lifestyle Awareness Experience” which is a 6 CD / 1 DVD / Study Guide and 41 Card set which is the next best thing to going to a real seminar.

I listened to it and watched the DVD. It all pretty much made sense to me.

It’s really wacky, weird stuff that’s really “out there” for a rational minded thinking guy like me, but there’s nothing I could disagree with. Everything Mark Johnson talks about in that set just made sense to me.

That’s when I decided that it was time to go to a seminar and see it for myself, so that’s what I’m doing this weekend.

Since getting back I’ve also played around with this “thing” on some unsuspecting friends.

People would come over to my house and I would just say “Hey, let’s try something ok?” and I would ask them to stand in front of me with their back towards me and I would stand 2-3 feet behind them and just do what I did with my friend.

I would lift my hands up and instantly I would feel them kind of start moving on their own almost as if they wanted to move in a certain direction. It kind of looks like doing Tai-Chi or something where the hands just smoothly move around.

I’ve done this with about six different people and except with one or two of them, none of them knew what I was doing. Meaning, I didn’t tell them what would happen, what I was doing, or anything like that. I just asked them to stand there while I “Try something.”

By the way if you ever want to see a weird look one someone’s face, ask them to stand in front of you with their back towards you and tell them you just want to try something. It’s fun!

Since my friends know I am a Reiki practitioner, I think they assumed I was doing Reiki or something but since they were facing away from me they had no idea what I was doing.

In every case, pretty much the same thing would happen. My hands began to do their thing, subtly moving around and I would notice my friend’s body’s start moving.

It’s as if they were being pushed or pulled in a direction and I could see them trying to keep their balance.

Pretty much every single one of them reported feeling as if I was pushing or pulling on them even though I was nowhere near them. A few of them spun their heads around saying something like “Are you pushing on my back?!”

Their eyes got really big when they realized I was nowhere near them.

When I did this with my sister a week ago, something even more strange happened. I don’t know why, but I was intuitively drawn to focus on her tattoo on her back. She has a tattoo on her upper back / lower neck with the eye of horus and I was just drawn to focus on the eye while doing the “Lifestyle Awareness thing” with my arms.

It was really weird because my arms got really animated while working with her and it felt as if I was somehow opening up her Chakra or something.

She reported feeling really weird as if she was expanding, and as if I was opening up her 8th Chakra and at one point when my arms were really really wide apart (as far apart as they would go) she said she started seeing some clairvoyant things, including the carpet in my living room starting to “melt”.

What I thought was really interesting about that is that in his Lifestyle Awareness books, Mark Johnson sometimes jokes around saying that when you get around his energy field, don’t be surprised if the carpet starts to melt in front of you. My sister didn’t know that when she said that though.

Weird huh?

Anyway, like I said above. I have no idea what I’m doing. I think me and Chris have tapped into something interesting. I *think* it’s Lifestyle Awareness, but I won’t know until I attend this seminar on the weekend.

All I know is that I’ve already experienced some weird mind-bending stuff and that’s just from being around Chris who learned it off YouTube and from reading Richard’s books, and listening to his audio CD’s and DVD’s.

I hope the seminar this weekend takes things to the next level for us, and I hope to get some validation that what me and Chris are doing is in fact the Lifestyle Awareness Two Point Technique.

Has any else heard of Lifestyle Awareness, had a Lifestyle Awareness session with a practitioner or attended a seminar?

If so, what was your experience?

Last night around 10pm we got back from our trip to Seattle where we attended the Lifestyle Awareness Level 1 & 2 training seminar.

My wife and I were so fried from the seminar that we just went to bed and passed out.

My mind is still trying to integrate everything we learned during the seminar – hahahah, good luck…

What is Lifestyle Awareness?

Lifestyle Awareness is a difficult thing to define.

One of the reasons for that is because Mark Johnson specifically created it to be a consciousness technology that does not require exclusivity.

In fact it is quite the opposite of that. It is an inclusive technology that encompasses whatever modalities and teaching / coaching / healing / personal development systems you may already know and utilize.

For example, I am a Reiki healer. Lifestyle Awareness doesn’t require me to stop using Reiki healing in order to “do” Lifestyle Awareness.

In fact, if anything, it amplifies and makes my Reiki healing abilities more effective for as long as I choose to use them and find them useful.

Similarly, I can integrate what I do as a lifestyle practitioner or a coach / mentor with Lifestyle Awareness.

While at the seminar I was struggling to figure out how I would define what Lifestyle Awareness is in this Blog post – which I knew I was going to write when I got back.

Interestingly enough, I picked up the workbook that came with “The Lifestyle Experience” set I bought a few months ago and opened it to a page where Mark Johnson defined it in a very simple way that I think encompasses it perfectly.

“Lifestyle Awareness is designed to free you from the limitations of your conscious mind. When you free your mind, you open yourself up to the limitless potential and processing power of the right brain. When the power of this unconscious awareness is tapped, you can begin to play with the universe.” ~ Mark Johnson, The Lifestyle Awareness Experience Workbook

I think that’s the best definition of Lifestyle Awareness.

The Prison of the Conscious Mind

The toughest prison to escape from is the one you don’t realize you’re in.

Our rational, left-brain mind imprisons us in a self-made prison and we don’t even know it.

The two biggest lies that our conscious mind tells us are:

That we ARE our conscious mind.
That the conscious mind is all there is.

The conscious mind defines everything in linear, logical, rational terms.

We have been sold a lie, and that lie is that all we are is “rational” beings.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I used to think that most people are rational. I used to think that I was rational as well.

That’s the illusion that our conscious mind’s sell us – that we are rational beings.

The interesting thing is that if we simply accept the fact that we are both rational and irrational beings, and stop trying to convert every experience into a rational representation of that experience, we regain our sanity.

Of course our minds would have us believe the exact opposite. Our minds try to convince us that to be rational is to be sane, and to be irrational is to be insane.

By that logic we are all insane, since we are all irrational.

For me this Lifestyle Awareness seminar was about diving even deeper into the world of letting go of my rational mind to play and experience what it feels like to escape out of that prison, and I have to say that it’s an amazing experience.

Letting go of the rational mind does NOT mean completely abandoning the logical reasoning center of the mind. It simply means not living your life under the illusion that that is all there is.

As one of those very logical people who was actually good at math and physics in school, and who used to program computer software for a living, moving out of my rational mind has not been an easy process for me.

One thing that has helped me in a big way is the realization that I don’t need to abandon my rational mind in order to embrace more of myself.

Meaning, expanding my awareness to a larger totality of who I am does not mean I have to abandon the rational part of me. I can still keep that part of me, and just accept more of who I am on top of that.

This is how I’m able to accept more of who I am (the right-brain parts of me) without diminishing the left-brained parts of me as well.

It’s not like I need to give up left brain constructs like math, physics or computer programming in order to embrace more right-brain constructs like heart centered awareness.

In fact, I believe that everything we take for granted as a rational left-brain thing right now once originated from the right-brain.

200 years ago, the idea of flying in an airplane from Europe to North America in a matter of hours was irrational thinking.

The airplane had not been invented yet, so anyone who talked of such things would have been considered to be nuts.

There is no creative power in spending your entire life within the confines of rational thinking. All great discoveries come from accessing the irrational, creative part of ourselves.

What I like about Lifestyle Awareness is that it allows us to navigate that world.
The Seminar Experience

The Lifestyle Awareness seminar we went to was broken down into three parts.

There was an introductory session on Friday night from 7pm – 9pm which was open to everyone who registered for the seminar as well as the public.

So for those who weren’t sure if this seminar was for them, they could attend the free introductory session and decide from there.

What I liked about this session was that there were a lot of demonstrations shown of what Lifestyle Awareness can do. Mark Johnson also told some stories and gave a general overview of what Lifestyle Awareness is, but mostly it was just a session to demonstrate what Lifestyle Awareness does.

In hindsight I also realize now that it was also an awesome opportunity to immerse yourself in the morphic field of Lifestyle Awareness. So even if you didn’t stay for the seminar, your right-brain / unconscious mind had the opportunity to “plug in” to this field.

In reality, that is all it really takes to “learn” Lifestyle Awareness. You just have to connect to the field and similarly to how Neo learns “Kung Fu” in the movie “The Lifestyle” the Lifestyle Awareness “program” downloads into your unconscious mind.

I realize that makes no logical sense, but that’s how it works. In fact, my friend Chris “learned” Lifestyle Awareness just by watching one of Mark Johnson’s YouTube videos. Don’t ask me how, he just did it. I still have no idea how he did this, but I know it’s possible. It had nothing to do with what was actually shown in the video itself, it had to do with the energy embedded in the video itself.

Mark Johnson says that the same energy is embedded in the Lifestyle Awareness books, CD’s, etc. So technically you can “learn” how to do Lifestyle Awareness without ever attending a seminar. You can just read one of the books, attend the free Friday evening session or by watching one of the videos on the Lifestyle Awareness website.
People Falling Over

If you attend one of the free intro sessions before a seminar, or if you watch some of the videos on YouTube you may see this phenomenon where people “fall over” when Mark Johnson does a two-point (one of the processes taught in Lifestyle Awareness) on them.

I’ll address this now, since I think that by far this is the biggest thing that people either love or hate about Lifestyle Awareness.

From one perspective, when someone goes on stage and Mark Johnson does a two-point on them and you see a physical reaction such as someone’s body moving, or contorting in a weird Yoga posture, or someone falling over, or crawling up in a fetal position and laughing uncontrollably it’s very difficult to argue that something is happening!

For the rational mind, which experiences the world through the first five of our senses, seeing something like that is “proof” that something is happening.

For some, it’s proof that some form of transformation has happened. For others, it’s proof that this is some kind of scam or hoax.

It makes no difference to me which people believe. I’ve experienced it myself and so I know I’m not “faking it” so I know it’s real.

I don’t pretend to understand what exactly is happening in the body during a two-point, but something is definitely happening.

What did kind of bug me though is that it seemed like for a lot of the seminar attendees, they only saw a transformation when it was accompanied by a physical transformation.

Meaning, with some of the people who went up on stage Mark went through and “played” with various things that they wanted to transform in their lives and there WERE shifts that were happening to these people, but they weren’t necessarily physical in that very moment, but most of the people in the crowd didn’t seem impressed until someone fell over.

It’s kind of like if a person went up there and wanted to transform a fear pattern, and Mark Johnson helped them to go through that but there was no physical reaction then it seemed as if people were thinking “Oh nothing happened.” So then he kind of had to ask the person “What else?” or just go to some physical pattern that they wanted help with, and maybe then the person would experience a physical shift, or fall over or something and then the crowd would be like “Woaa!” and everyone would start clapping.

As a lifestyle practitioner I know that sometimes HUGE shifts in a person’s consciousness don’t display ANY physical reactions in the moment of the shift, while other times they do. So expecting a physical reaction every time is a setup for a lot of frustration.

That’s the only thing that I kind of didn’t like about the crowd. There seemed to be this expectation that if you go up there and Mark Johnson plays with you, you’ll fall over – otherwise it means “nothing happened”.

I can’t blame Mark Johnson for this, nor the other two teachers who were teaching this weekend as they were constantly trying to get that point across to people (that people don’t need to fall over in order for transformation to happen) but it just seemed like not a lot of people were hearing it.

And of course by “a lot of people” I am really referring the part of me that those people represent which still clings onto the idea that a transformation in consciousness has to result in some sort of instant physical world manifestation of that transformation in order for it to be “real” or “effective”. Within the realm of Lifestyle Awareness that is often the phenomenon of people falling over or erupting in spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter.

One thing I would say to anyone (including me) who decided to play around with Lifestyle Awareness is not to expect people to fall over as an indicator of success with the process.

In fact, from what my intuition deduced from being at the seminar, only a very narrow spectrum of healing results in instant physical phenomenon. If anything it is just a metaphor for something much greater happening beneath the surface.

Days 1 and 2 – Level 1

After the introductory session on Friday evening, the next two days were devoted to learning Lifestyle Awareness Level 1.

These two days, on Saturday and Sunday, taught us the fundamentals of Lifestyle Awareness from the ground up.

Unlike the Friday intro session which was mostly just about demonstrating what Lifestyle Awareness can do, these two days were filled with the “How we think this works” and the “Why we think this works” and “Here’s how you can make it work for you” – followed by a lot of “Now go play and experiment with it yourself.”

This was not one of those seminars where you just sit and listen to a lot of theory for 8 hours and fill in the blanks in a work book.

We did receive a workbook but it was mostly just for reference after the seminar.

What we did do is learn some of the theory behind Lifestyle Awareness and then we were given the opportunity to go into the adjacent room to practice.

There were a number of facilitators walking around also helping anyone who wasn’t getting or understanding any of the techniques that were taught.

Surprisingly, it seemed like a lot of the facilitators were walking around with their hands folded behind them because it seemed like everyone was getting it.

On the first day of the Level 1 training, Mark mostly taught a lot of theory and the physics behind Lifestyle Awareness along with a lot of hilarious stories and a lot of demonstrations up on stage.

After that foundation was set, later on in the afternoon we got to actually start “playing” with this stuff, which is where I think a lot of skepticism started to dissolve.

Theory and even seeing people falling on stage is great, but nothing convinces the mind like actually experiencing it for yourself.

By the end of Day 1 I am pretty sure everyone in the room could do the basic two-point. I think Mark said that historically they have a 97% success rate at teaching people how to do it at seminars, but I have the feeling that with each seminar that number goes up.

Meaning I bet like 2 years ago that number was probably around 80% and now it’s probably more like 99.9%. I didn’t see anyone raising their hand by the last day when they asked if anyone still had trouble getting it.

Day 2 started off with a Q & A forum where people were allowed to ask any question.

Now here’s what was cool about the Q&A session… The night before, my wife, sister and I went out for dinner and we were discussing what we had learned on Day 1 and we were trying to figure some things out.

By the end of the night we had about 5 or 6 unanswered questions between the three of us which we were hoping to have answered the next morning.

What we really weird though is that during the morning session they only answered about 8 – 10 questions and all 6 of the questions we had were answered within those questions – BUT we didn’t have to ask any of them!

Some of the questions we had were pretty specific too, so it was really cool to see that.

For me it was yet another example of the fact that we are all one and that any separation between us is just an illusion.

In the afternoon, we learned more stuff, heard more stories, saw more examples, and got to practice with more stuff.

By the end of Day 2 (end of Level 1 training) we definitely had enough tools and “stuff” to take home and play with. Our minds were pretty baked.
Day 3 – Level 2

Level 2 training took everything we learned in Level 1 and just took it to another level.

I love immersion training so I thoroughly enjoyed being totally immersed in learning all this cool “stuff” throughout the weekend and I really liked how Mark Johnson kept it fun and entertaining (he’s hilarious), but by the end of Level 2 training my brain was thoroughly baked.

In fact I think my brain is still baked as I write this post. It’s just so much stuff to take in.

Keep in mind that all the stuff that is taught in Level 1 and 2 took Mark Johnson decades to discover, play with and perfect. Learning that much stuff in such a short period of time is enough to bake anyone’s brain, lol.

As far as the format of the training, it was very similar to the previous day. We started off with some questions and answers, followed by learning more stuff, seeing more demonstrations, and getting to practice with the techniques before coming back to once again learn, see and practice.

I really like this type of practical, hands-on immersion training as opposed to learning something from the theoretical point of view but having no practical context or practice with it.

The cool thing is that with this type of learning, the minute you complete the seminar and walk out the door you already know how to do it.

Of course you always get better with practice, but at least you’re not just leaving with a bunch of theory and no practical experience with it.
Integration

The next step in the process for me is going to be in taking what I have learned and experienced this weekend at the Lifestyle Awareness seminar and integrating it into my life, my businesses and my coaching / mentoring practice.

There is so much cool stuff I learned this weekend that I can apply to everything else I’ve already been doing.

I’m going to integrate Lifestyle Awareness into the 1-on-1 mentoring I do with people, as well as into my lifestyle sessions with people and when I do Reiki healing.

To be more accurate really, I’m going to integrate Lifestyle Awareness into everything I do as it’s now a part of who I am.

That is not to say that I am an expert in Lifestyle Awareness or anything like that. I have a lot of practicing to do and a lot of self-discovery to go through with this, and I can’t wait to start playing with this.

Actually, more accurately I’m excited to continue playing with this as I have already started.

About a year ago I acquired a secret weapon for producing more effective results online.

It’s an online course that teaches essentially what is now the most effective way to communicate and produce results online in pretty much anything you do.

I haven’t talked about it much because by the time I actually started applying what I learned in this course and started producing results it was no longer available to the general public.

It was sold out.

And I hate telling people about something that could improve their results online when it’s not even available for them anymore.

So I kind of kept quiet about it, only mentioning it to my closest friends and one-on-one mentoring students who specifically asked me about it.

Anyway, I’m not sure what cave I’ve been in during the last few weeks but I just found out that this course is now re-opened to the public once again!

Apparently I totally missed all the emails leading up to the re-opening so I just found out about this right now.

Sorry about that guys, I should have told you sooner.

My Secret Weapon

Alright, so since it is re-opening again and all of you will have a chance to get access to it – I can finally talk about this little secret weapon I’ve been using for the past year or so.

It’s not like I’ve been hiding it or anything. For anyone who reads my Blog, I’ve been blatantly using it for about a year now but I just didn’t explain why.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, my secret weapon is video.

Yes, video.

Video is by far the most effective communication method online.

I’ve known this for a few years now, but I had all these excuses as to why I can’t do video.

Some of these excuses included:

Making videos is too expensive.
Making videos is too complicated.
Making videos is way too time intensive.

That was until I was introduced to Andy Jenkins and his online course called The Video Boss last year.

Andy basically destroys these myths / excuses and teaches you exactly how you can leverage online video to supercharge your results online.

There aren’t a lot of courses that I buy into that I feel good enough to promote as an affiliate, but as soon as I started applying what I learned in The Video Boss training last year and saw the results it produces I have been itching to tell everyone about this thing.

As an affiliate marketer I love promoting stuff that’s awesome and that I’ve actually used and applied myself.

Unfortunately, like I mentioned above, the course was closed and unavailable to the public until today.

So, now that they’ve re-opened for a period of time to accept new students I highly recommend you guys check this thing out.

Click on the image below to check out Andy’s hilarious new 3 minute re-opening video.

Results May Vary

Since I am promoting this re-launch as an affiliate I want to be fully transparent and say that the results I have produced by using program are not typical.

This is because nothing I do is typical. I’m a weird guy, with a small army of video clones which are even weirder than me (some genetic mutation during the cloning process?), so the results we produce are as far away from typical as you can get.

Having said that, I really think that anyone who actually takes the course, and applies what is taught within can produce results that are much more impressive than what I’ve produced.

I know this because I have only applied about 30% of what’s taught so far, and even then I haven’t done a great job even doing that.

Since I’m all over the place trying to do 500 things at the same time – dabbling in so many things at the same time as to render most of them largely ineffective. However, even just by dabbling with video I’ve seen a huge response with it.

Here’s a few things I’ve used video to accomplish (starting from scratch!):

Although there is no way of knowing exactly what was the final deciding factor, I also do know that video played a huge role in helping me win the $5,000 Fitness Town 21 Day Challenge last month as well.

I was the only contestant who was using video in the contest and I think it gave me a huge advantage in promoting the competition, getting votes, and impressing the judges.

What It Won’t Do For You

The training course is the best online marketing training course I bought in the last 5 years. It was worth every penny.

Having said that, there are two downsides to this course.

First of all, buying The Video Boss course is not enough to produce results. You have to also use what is taught inside to actually make some videos.

They don’t have to be great videos, or even good videos. When I first started, my videos were mostly crap. And they still produced results.

In fact, I still think my videos are pretty crappy compared to what some other people are doing, but that doesn’t matter… you know why?

Because even my crappiest videos produce WAY better results than anything else I do online.

This is a SAD fact.

I’m a writer. I’ve written over 600,000 words of text on my Blog over the last 5 years and at the end of the day the sad fact is that my videos are WAY more successful than anything I have written on my Blog.

I wish people actually READ stuff online, but the world has changed.

Nobody READS anymore. In fact if you’re still reading this Blog post, consider yourself an exception.

99% of people already closed this page, clicked the link or just scrolled past this.

Written text is not enough in 2011. You must do video.

The training in the program will help you to take advantage of video.

But, like I said above it won’t make the videos for you. You have to apply at least some of what’s taught inside to see results, but even if you just do the bare minimum you’ll see results!

That’s what’s cool about video. It produces amazing results very quickly, especially on YouTube.

Secondly though, there is one last thing that The Video Boss won’t do for you.

It won’t overcome your fear / shyness of being on camera.

I won’t lie, when I first even considered starting to do video I was horrified. Being on camera is SCARY AS SHIT!

Maybe for some it isn’t, but for me it was. And judging by what my mentoring students tell me, I’m not the only one.

Overcoming Camera Shyness

Because I was so camera shy when I first started contemplating doing videos, I had to really get creative on how to overcome that.

The cool thing is that I actually found a really simple, but effective process of overcoming camera shyness.

If you watch any of my videos on you’ll see that with every video I make I’m getting less and less camera shy.

However, to get to that point you have to start with your first video and if you’re camera shy that can be a big challenge.

Well, I’ve got a solution for that. It’s a process that I go through with people that I taught myself and then tested out on a handful of my mentoring students.

And it works.

So if “Camera Shyness” is something that you’re worried about in terms of making videos, I’ve got a deal for you.

IF you decide that program training course is for you, but you’re worried that you are too camera shy to make videos, I will personally coach you through overcoming your video shyness if you purchase the course through my affiliate link.

I know I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here as program training is not even re-opened yet… but I’m just putting that out there as an offer to you as my valued Blog reader.

I want to see more of you using video to make money online and I know for a lot of you, camera shyness is an obstacle so I want to help you overcome that.

Before we even get to that point though, regardless whether you decide to get this course, I highly recommend getting access to this free set of videos Andy has put together here:

This morning an idea floated into my head and it’s been on my mind all day long.

This is not something that I came up with as a result of sitting down and deciding to dream up yet another project for me to work on. It is something that I feel came to me straight from intuition, which is why I’m taking action on it right now by writing this Blog post even though this is still very much in the brainstorming phase.

Here’s the main concept of the idea…

I want to personally mentor a group of people to make money online.

Now, mentoring people to make money online is not new to me, and I already offer that service at a rate of $95/session where you get to work with me one-on-one via telephone.

I have never had a single client who I worked personally with one-on-one tell me they were disappointed with a session. In fact everyone I’ve worked with has told me they got a lot of value from their one-on-one sessions with me so I know what I deliver is at least worth $95/hour to people.

However, there are two main downsides to working with people one-on-one.

I find myself constant repeating the same content to each new client, since 80% of the issues people need help with are the same core issues other clients have had. Even though the content may be new to my clients, it’s nothing new to me and frankly it really gets boring teaching the same basics over and over again to one person at a time. There is only so much time I have to devote to mentoring/teaching so working with people one-on-one doesn’t provide me with a lot of leverage.

In order to really build momentum and start producing results quickly, I need to connect with my mentoring clients minimum once per week and ideally twice per week. Any less than that, and they start losing momentum in between calls and get nowhere. It’s almost like working out with a personal trainer. If you only go once a month or twice a month, it’s very difficult to see results. So ideally, to build momentum and start producing results people really need to connect to my energy at least 1-2 times per week. The challenge with this for most people is that they can’t afford the cost of 4-8 sessions with me per month – which is approx $400-$800/m.

Now, I know that I could lower my prices – and I have in fact tried that in the past to help people out – but even if I charged just $25/session that would still require an investment of $200/month to work with me twice a week – and there is no way I could afford to do one-on-one mentoring at such a low rate as I would have to say no to projects where I make four to ten times that amount per hour in order to make room for the lower rate. Even though I really enjoy mentoring and helping people, it obviously makes no sense for me to do that as that would mean it would actually be costing me money to mentor people.

So, this morning I got the idea to create a group coaching environment where instead of working with people one-on-one, I can mentor people in a group environment by setting up a membership site that is affordable to everyone and which allows me to leverage the technology of being able to create content once and have multiple people gain value from it many times.

Think of it as kind of a hybrid between my free Blog here at and the one-on-one mentoring I do at $95/session.

What Makes This Unique

Now, so far you may be thinking that there is really nothing unique about this idea since there are many different online courses out there teaching how to make money online taught by guru’s who have made tens of millions of dollars.

I know because I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars buying their courses, and I can attest to the fact that many of them are great! I’ve implemented many of the ideas taught in those courses to help myself and my consulting clients to make a lot of money by leveraging the power of the Internet, so I know they work.

However, my goal here is not to try to “one-up” any of these gurus. That would be like me trying to “one-up” Michael Jordan in basketball. That is not my intention.

What I want to do is to build a community / membership site that works with the same types of awesome people I have been mentoring one-on-one, but in a group environment.

And here is the one thing I have come to realize / learn from working with people one-on-one.

99% of the questions and issues people get stuck on when trying to make money online are NOT taught by the top guru’s online.

Let me repeat that.

99% of what may be stopping you from making money online is NOT being taught by the top guru’s online.

I know that’s a bold statement. Trust me, I was just as surprised by this as anyone else. Let me explain what I mean.

See, when I first started doing mentoring I thought I’d be teaching these advanced strategies to people on what is the best way to SEO optimize a page or how to implement a proper link-bait strategy or some kind of advanced video editing tactic etc. You know, all the super cool stuff I’ve learned from the guru’s over the years after spending thousands of dollars on their courses and seminars.

What I realized though is that THOSE are not the problems REAL everyday normal people are having.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean.

In relation to making online videos, the Guru’s out there teach courses that will tell you what settings to use for encoding your H.264 videos and what bitrate to use for best video quality/speed combination.

What I discovered is that REAL normal, every day people aren’t getting stuck on steps like that.

You know what step real normal everyday people are getting stuck at?

Being completely scared shitless to the point of being paralyzed about the thought of turning on the camera and recording themselves!

Normal people have no problem buying a video camera, and all the equipment they might need, but then they just can’t press that record button. And if they do, when they watch themselves back, they want to run and throw up – not upload their video to YouTube!

That’s the honest truth. Fancy words like H.264, codecs, bitrates, and all that techno-jargon doesn’t matter! Whose are just technical details. What people need is a way of overcoming their camera shyness and learning to make their first video!

I was the same way at first. Watching back my first video was horrible! I felt embarrassed for myself just watching it, even though I was alone and nobody else saw it. I deleted it 3 seconds after watching it back just to alleviate the anxiety and embarrassment I felt.

Then, I discovered some “secret” strategies that helped me to overcome that, and to make videos and build a YouTube channel with a tonne of subscribers and today I have zero anxiety about making videos. I can just shoot a video and upload it and I feel no fear about it. And I’ve helped others do the same thing!

Of course there are the technical aspects of bitrates, and codecs, and editing tools and all that as well, and I want to teach that too, but all that stuff only matters when the real issues of fear, anxiety, etc. are dealt with.

That is just one example. Here’s another one.

The Guru’s out there will teach you a course that will give you 487 traffic generation strategies for your Blog.

You know what people do when you teach them 487 traffic generation strategies?

Nothing.

That’s right. They sit there with a puzzled look on their face, slightly cross-eyed, slightly drooling, in a trance-like state with the mental chatter of “I can’t do this, I can’t do this, what makes me think I can do this, I can’t do this!” running through their heads!

You know what I have found to work with “normal” people?

You don’t teach them 487 strategies. That’s like trying to drink from a fire hose at full blast.

You don’t even teach them ONE traffic generation strategy. That’s like trying to drink water from a garden hose on full blast.

You teach someone the FIRST THREE STEPS of one traffic generation strategy.

And then you open up your heart and intuitive senses and observe what mental and technical blocks come up for them before moving to the next step.

Making money online is NOT just about strategies and techniques. That’s only one third of the challenge.

Making money online is largely about the right mindset and heartset.

As a coach I know that my job is not just to teach you the strategies and techniques of making money online.

I also have to get your mindset right, and I’ve got to get you PASSIONATE and excited about making things happen. You’ve gotta wake up every morning and be pumped up to build your online business.

If your mind and heart have already given up on your online business, no technique any guru will ever teach you will work.

I don’t care if their system is “foolproof” and “push-button-easy”. It still won’t work.

The Three Part Approach

To make money online, we need to get three parts working together.

We need to have the right strategies in place to produce proper results. MOST of the strategies taught online today don’t work. They worked in 2004 or 2006, but they don’t work today. You need to know what works TODAY in order to succeed. The landscape is constantly changing so you need to know what works NOW.

Execution, which simply means taking action is also a big part of success. If you take the most brilliant strategy for making money online but you don’t take any action on it, you will NOT produce any results. That’s the bottom line.

The two-part Strategy + Execution = SUCCESS is what most guru’s online teach.

They teach you the strategy and then they say “Ok, now run along and take action and EXECUTE these strategies and you will see results.”

And when people don’t produce results the guru’s say “Well, it’s not my fault, the person didn’t take any action!!!!”

Well, that’s fine and dandy, and it’s a convenient excuse but the question I have is WHY don’t people take action?

I mean if I teach someone HOW to do something and they are capable of doing it, and doing that thing will help their online business, then WHY do 99% of people out there still not do it?

Well, the answer is MINDSET.

Why Mindset Matters

Tony Robbins says that 80% of success is psychology – methods only account for 20%. This is coming from a guy who has worked with hundreds of millions of people worldwide from high-school students to the US President and everything in between. He’s worked with people who are on welfare and those who make billions per year.

I completely agree with Tony Robbins on this point. That is why I believe that mindset is such a huge part of making money online. If you don’t have the right mindset, you won’t make money online.

How do you know you’ve got the right mindset? You know you’ve got the right mindset if you’re already making the kind of money online that you’d like to be making.

If you’re not – then you don’t have the right mindset.

You may THINK you have the right mindset – but you don’t. If you did, you’d already be producing results.

As part of building this membership site I want to teach a LOT of mindset related stuff.

This is where I believe I shine above almost all other guru’s out there. My research, studies and experience with personal development related topics is awesome.
Adding a Spiritual Element

Now comes the final piece to this puzzle.

I have never done this before, and I have to admit that when this concept first came to me this morning it scared the crap out of me.

It’s no secret that I’m a very spiritual person. By spiritual I don’t mean Religious.

I believe that we are spiritual beings having a human experience here on earth.

I believe in the Law of Attraction. I have written and published a book about it.

I believe in energy healing, and am a trained Reiki healer.

Even though I write about the topic of spirituality on this Blog from time to time, I largely keep those blog posts separate from my “make money online” related Blog posts.

The reason I did that in the past is because I didn’t really want to “color” the more left-brained strategies I teach on my Blog – such as how to build an email list – with my spiritual beliefs.

However, whenever I do that – hold back on adding in the spiritual side of things to my Blog posts – I always feel like I’m holding back a piece that may be the most important piece of the puzzle.

In the membership site I want to create, I will NOT be holding anything back.

You are going to be getting my WHOLE opinion on each topic – including my spiritual beliefs around the issue.

If that offends you, then this membership site is NOT for you.

What does this mean? Well, what this means is that if I’m teaching a technique for curing writer’s block for Bloggers I may give you a meditation exercise that I use for connecting to and opening up my throat Chakra – the Chakra responsible for communication.

It also means that in addition to teaching you the strategies and techniques for starting up your own YouTube channel, I may teach you some visualization exercises you can use to literally ATTRACT viewers to your videos using the Law of Attraction.

For those who don’t believe in such “spiritual” concepts, this stuff will sound like “hogwash” or “magical thinking”.

To me it’s a way of life. I LIVE this way of thinking every day now, so I can’t NOT be who I really am.

Here’s another example. Last week I bought a for my house to protect my house from low-level energies which may be attracted to me as a result of the Soul Realignment™ course I’m taking. As part of the course, I’m doing psychic Akashic Record readings and clearing work for clients and as taught by my teacher in the course, I have to take precautionary steps to protect my house and energy from some of the “nasties” that are out there.

The reason I bring that up is to give you an example of the types of stuff I believe in.

If me talking about such things annoys or insults your religious or atheistic beliefs, then this course will definitely not be for you because my “spiritual” beliefs in the Law of Attraction and Chakras and such things WILL be an integral part of the MINDSET part of my teachings in this course.

I’m not saying you have to believe in everything I believe in. But I’m just saying if that kind of stuff doesn’t resonate with you then you probably won’t like the “real” me in this course.

For those of you who are totally into that stuff, I think you’re going to absolutely LOVE this course. 🙂

How It Will Work

I haven’t worked out the details of exactly how this course will work yet.

As I mentioned earlier, I feel that this idea was “given” to me and I trust that there is a LOT more to come as to how to set it up.

Here’s what I do know.

I will be running the course as a membership site using Kajabi.

There will be a lot of videos and lessons teaching all aspects of making money online.

They will most likely be a community forum aspect to the site where people can ask questions, leave feedback etc.

Each lesson / video will allow you to leave comments, ask questions etc.

For my one-on-one mentoring sessions what I normally do is that I actually intuitively tune into the person’s energy who I am working with and I actually “read” (yes as in psychically) and mentor on the fly. Meaning, I have never had an agenda for ANY of my mentoring calls with any client until about 5 minutes before the call.

What I do is 5 minutes before a call I just do a meditation, tune in, and I literally get FLOODED with intuitive insight as to exactly which strategies would be best to teach the client on that call. All my mentoring clients love this as they are usually blown away by how I’m able to teach them solutions to the exact problems they have been having without even having to tell me what the issue is.

What I am going to attempt to do with this course is to try to do this on a group basis.

I know this sounds like it may be more challenging than working with someone one-on-one, but I’m feeling intuitively drawn to try things out this way.

I feel I will be supported in this challenge.

So, what this means is that I am going to create the content for this course on the fly, week by week, based on your feedback and my intuitive sense of what I feel the group needs most.

There will be no actual set linear curriculum.

As a subscriber to the course, you’re going to have to trust that what I teach next is what you need to learn. Of course I also plan on having many ways to send your feedback, questions and comments to help me create the type of content my subscribers want. But there will not be any set curriculum with a beginning and end to it to start with.

I trust things will just evolve as they should in a way that’s best for everyone.

I must admit that this idea seems like it is either the STUPIDEST thing I’ve ever thought of, or the most BRILLIANT thing ever.

YOUR feedback to this Blog post will tell me which it is.

Would you like me to teach you how to make money online?

Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Pricing

I haven’t figured out pricing yet.

I want to make this course really affordable for everyone though.

If you were to work with me one-on-one, having a mentoring session twice a week, you would have to invest around $800/month to learn how to make money online.

I believe that investment is worth every penny, however I know a lot of people don’t have that kind of money to invest.

So I don’t want to make this membership site cost anywhere near that amount.

I am thinking that I might build it out on a scaled price model.

Meaning, I think ultimately the “perfect” price for something like this will be around $97/month to access all the content.

However, what I might do is to build it out more along the lines of this:

First 10 people will get in at $9/month.

Next 15 people will get in at $19/month.

Next 25 people will get in at $29/month.

Next 25 people will get in at $39/month.

etc.

So the price will go up over time, rewarding those people who get in earlier. The reason for this is that obviously those who get in earlier will not see a lot of content to start with since I will be making this content on-the-fly each week.

As time goes on, there will be more and more content within the course and so the price will go up. Also, I really want to reward those people who join in on this program from Day 1 to support it and it will be their feedback and support that will help this project grow.

I am not sure about this pricing model yet, it is just something that popped into my head. What I do know is that I want to make it really affordable for people as I know that when people are just getting started with making money online a lot of them don’t have a lot of money to invest in the beginning.

So, what do you guys think?

Who would like me to teach them how to make money online?

Leave your questions and comments below, and sign up below to be the first to hear about the course when it comes out. That way if I do decide to do a scaled pricing model as I described above, you can get in at the lowest rate.

About two weeks ago I woke up with a crazy idea for launching a new membership site.

Starting from scratch, from start to finish I completed the product launch in just 11 days.

In this post I want to share some of the things I learned during this 11 day launch process.

(1) Trust Your Intuition

The idea I came up with two weeks ago was to start a group mentoring site where I teach people how to make money online, with a twist.

The twist is that unlike all the other courses which teach how to make money online techniques and strategies, I wanted to create a course/membership club where I would cover not just the strategies of making money online but also the mindset of making money online.

More specifically, when referring to the “Mindset” side of things the intuitive idea that came to me was to include a “Spiritual” component to the training.

I have to admit that when the idea first came to me I was a bit scared of it. The reason for this is that I have always kept the “making money online” and the “spiritual development” sides of my Blog somewhat separate.

My thoughts on this is that those people who are looking for the more strategy / technique / technical sides of making money online, are probably not interested in spiritual topics and vice versa.

So when I got the idea to combine the two, I wasn’t sure if it was going to fly.

However, I decided to act on the intuitive idea and it FLEW!

When a new member joins my Club, I ask them to fill out a questionnaire which helps me to identify where they’re at in their online money making journey, and where they want to get to.

I have now begun receiving completed questionnaires from my members and so far all I am seeing is people praising me for putting together a mentorship site that will combine strategy + mindset and include the spiritual side of things in it as well.

The very thing I was worried might turn people OFF from considering the course has become my biggest selling point.

Lesson Learned: Trust your intuition, especially if it takes you out of your comfort zone a little bit.

(2) Follow a Formula

After deciding to do the launch, I decided to follow a proven formula for doing a launch, because frankly I had no clue what I was doing.

Luckily, two years ago I bought into Frank Kern’s “Mass Control” course and when it came time to do the launch I dusted it off and started to follow it.

The funny thing is that at the same time as I was doing my launch, Jeff Walker was doing his launch for “Product Launch Formula 3.0″, LOL.

If PLF3.0 came out a few weeks ago, I might have bought into the program and used it for my launch but it wasn’t even available for purchase until March 1st which was my launch date as well.

Honestly though I didn’t really feel like I needed PLF3.0 as I already had Frank Kern’s “Mass Control” and that was already “overkill” for what I was doing with my small launch.

What I did do though is I combined the absolute most basic steps from Mass Control, and the stuff I saw in other launches, and my intuition to come up with my launch plan.

What made it a lot easier to organize everything is Kajabi.

I’m not sure if I have said this before – but I just love Kajabi. It makes everything so much easier.

It’s not perfect. Now that I’ve done the launch I have found a few little glitches and details here and there that I think they can improve on, but overall it’s the best product of it’s kind that I have seen.

Lesson Learned: No need to re-invent the wheel. Follow a proven formula and system.

(3) Expect Doubts to Creep In

Doubts, doubts, doubts.

Those damn little buggers.

Right from the start I had doubts about launching this product / course. Here are some of my favorites that crept up along the way and how I squashed them.

“What if nobody joins?!”

This was probably the first one that popped up. What if nobody joins? I’ll look like a fool, with no students and feel like a failure. That would suck right?

Well, I squashed this one with a few logic loops to shut the Ego up. It went a little something like this…

“What if nobody joins? Well, if we don’t do the launch how many group mentoring students will we have? 0. OK, and if we do the launch and nobody joins how many group mentoring students will we have? 0. OK, so how much worse off will we be? Uhhh, no worse off? Right, so shut up and let me do the launch!”

As soon as my mind paused for a second to try to compute that logic I also hit it with “What if people do join though? “

Then this one crept in…

“OMG, what if like 1,000 people join and I’m totally overwhelmed!?”

First my silly mind was worried about nobody joining, and then it jumped straight into worrying about what will happen if a gazillion people join and it’s so overwhelming that we can’t handle it.

This one I attacked from two sides… I thought to myself…

“If 1,000 people join, the amount of work to produce the content will be on different than if just 1 person joins. It’s just like on my Blog, whether I have 1 subscriber or 10,000 subscribers, it’s still the same amount of work to produce the content. That’s the beauty of leveraging digital content. The ONLY possible challenge with having thousands of people joining is perhaps handling some customer support issues. It will not be a content production issue.”

So then, to make sure that is not an issue I thought to myself…

“If I get so many students that it gets overwhelming, I give myself permission to hire an assistant to help me with the workload. Since I’ll be able to afford an assistant with the money I’ll be making from subscription fees, this is a non-issue. Right? So shut up and let me do the launch.”

That shut my mind up about that one. 🙂

A while later it popped up this one…

“Wait, what if we only get 1 person joining and then we have to produce all this content for just ONE person.”

I have to admit, that one kind of stumped me for a bit because essentially this would mean that this ONE person in my mentoring course would be getting one-on-one coaching from me for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring me one-on-one and it may not make business sense for me to keep the “group” mentoring going with just one student.

After thinking about this one for a bit I came up with this solution…

“Well, if only ONE person decides to take the course then he or she is going to be getting AWESOME value for their money, basically getting one-on-one coaching at a fraction of the cost. This “worst case” scenario can be converted to a beneficial situation for everyone involved by (1) realizing that I’m still ‘on purpose’ with my goal to help people, (2) lighting a fire under my butt to market/sell my course to more than just one student, and (3) expose some kind of limiting beliefs I must have about doing group mentoring which must be creating such circumstances which I can then squash with PSYCH-K or other tools at my disposal.”

So in a way, I realized that there is no way for me to lose here. Regardless what happens, I will produce some kind of result. Whatever that result, I can learn from it.

And of course there is always this possibility “What if the product launch goes well and everything works out fine!” 🙂

Of course our silly little minds don’t want us to admit that possibility, even though it’s the most likely scenario. Turns out that is exactly what happened, BUT I just wanted to share that I – like every one else – have doubts that creep into my mind.

The trick is to move past your doubts, not let them stop you. Expect them to show up. Be OK with doubts. They’re normal. Just don’t let them stop you from achieving your goals. 🙂

Lesson Learned: Every inspired idea comes pre-packaged with some doubts. Don’t let them stop you from online success.

(4) Don’t Try to Be Perfect

If I had 6 months to properly plan this launch I probably would have made it “perfect”. Instead though I wanted to get it done fast… as in launching in just 11 days from initial concept to launch date.

To accomplish such a thing in such a short period of time, I had to lower my expectations for perfection.

I goofed up on a lot of things…

I encoded my first few videos at too high of a resolution so I had complaints from some people that the videos were taking too long for them to download. They worked fine for me, but I realize not everyone has the same speed Internet connection as I do.

Each of my videos has “mistakes” in them. None of them were perfect. I can point out half a dozen “goof-ups” in each video that 95% of people probably can’t see, but I totally see them.

My final sales video has a blatant typo in it that I only discovered after the program launched.

The day before launch I realized I wasn’t going to be able to move the course content in my other Kajabi Project into my project as Kajabi doesn’t yet have a way to transfer content between projects. So last minute I had to re-upload about 30 videos into my new project content area which takes a LONG time – as anyone who has ever uploaded HD video will understand.

My first video in the course has parts of me “cut” from the frame because I zoomed in too much on the camera, the cat starts MEOWing halfway through my video, and one of my light softeners came off and started dangling in the shot.

NOTHING I did in the product launch went perfectly. There were glitches, goof-ups and bumps along the way.

But you know what? My intention was genuine and that is all that people wanted from me.

Every step of the way I was emailing everyone who signed up for notifications during the launch and kept them up to date with everything that was going on – mistakes and everything. Most of them just laughed at my goof-ups and told me not to worry about them. ALL they want is good content. They don’t care if they hear my cat meowing once in a while.

And come launch day – they signed up.

Perhaps even more so because they saw that I’m not perfect either… nobody is… 😉

Lesson Learned: Don’t try to be perfect. Focus on what matters. If you did it perfectly, it means you waited way too long to do it.

(5) Product Launches Work

Prior to this I have never done a “product launch” before. Any products (eBooks etc.) that I have created in the past have always just been put up for sale with no product launch. Even in other businesses that I have ran, I have never used a product launch to launch a product.

The concept made sense to me, but I didn’t realize just how effective they are until now.

Even with this “little” product launch that I more or less whipped together as quickly as I possibly could, and even with all the mistakes and goof-ups I made along the way, by the weekend prior to launch I already had people emailing me saying stuff like “I’m dying to join the membership site!” and “I can’t wait to get started!” and “Will you release it already!?”

That kind of energy has a double benefit. Firstly it ignites peoples interest in your products/services and helps them to understand what they are going to be buying before buying the product.

Secondly though, it lights a huge fire under your butt to get the launch done and to produce content. It’s very exciting to see people excited about your product – as they should be – especially when you’ve put in so much effort and energy into it. It’s a very rewarding experience and it’s a lot of fun as well.

Now that I’ve actually done my first product launch and I realize the benefits of doing one for the time/energy investment required to do one – I will definitely be doing more in the future.

Although I’m no product launch guru by any means, I do also plan on teaching the exact specific strategy I used for the launch to my students as well – if they’re interested.

Lesson Learned: Small scale product launches work just as well as large scale ones. If done right, they can provide a lot of value to your members, and motivation for you to get the product completed on time.

Wealth is an energy field.

Building wealth has a lot more to do with what energy you are at, than what you do, have or who you know.

Many times in my life I have often wondered if I am blocking wealth.

For example, 10 years ago when I was stuck at a $3,000/month income I wondered if I was somehow unconsciously blocking myself from earning $5,000/m.

When I started earning $5k/m, I wondered if I’m blocking myself from earning $10k/m etc.

Whenever I ever wanted to manifest something – like a new car, a new house, more income, a relationship, new friends, or whatever else – there would often be a delay – lag time – between me creating a desire for something and it’s achievement.

While in that lag time I often wondered “Am I blocking this somehow at the unconscious level?”

I would ask myself “Is there some kind of limiting belief that’s blocking this from happening?”

I have worked with many mentors and coaches that have helped me to overcome those blocks and limiting beliefs and to help me open up more of my connection to abundance in its many forms – health wise, money wise, relationship wise etc.

This past week I have come across an awesome “Wealth Block Tester”.

Meaning, if you ever wondered about whether or not your current beliefs or energy or environment or thoughts are blocking you from manifesting wealth – I have a very simple test for you.

The Wealth Tester

To determine whether or not you are ready to build wealth in your life, here’s all you need to do.

Complete the following steps, (if you haven’t already), and the final step will tell you whether or not you have wealth blocks in place.

Step 1

The first thing you need to do is to connect to a morphic energy field of wealth.

If you are blocking wealth, this will be very difficult to do. In fact as soon as you read what I’m about to say next, you might start to sweat a little.

Either one of those options will connect you to the energy field of wealth.

A really good friend of mine who is an intuitive energy healer felt the connection immediately after he signed up as a affiliate. I felt the connection as soon as I signed up. And I have also spoken to three or four other friends of mine who are very “energetically sensitive” to these kinds of things and we all agree on the fact that has a VERY powerful morphic field of wealth, health and prosperity.

Listen guys, I *know* what I’m saying here sounds strange.

But it works.

I have shared this thing with a LOT of people in the last week or so.

Including the people on my Blog, probably close to 10,000 people have heard about this from me.

I have also shared it with probably 50-60 people in my personal network.

And you know what I have discovered so far?

I have discovered that only those people who are NOT blocking their wealth are able to pass this test.

Everyone else who I know who *IS* blocking their wealth right now has NOT been able to follow these simple, yet incredibly powerful steps.

For example…

… I have had someone tell me that when they tried to load the website, it won’t load for them. Their browser just crashes. The GIN site never crashes for me.

… I have had someone tell me that they were just about to sign up and all of a sudden their computer got a virus from somewhere else and now they have to re-format their hard drives before they can sign up. I never got a virus.

… I have had someone tell me that when they try to listen to the CD’s on their computer, they CAN’T do it because they IMMEDIATELY get interrupted within a minute of clicking PLAY by something or someone. I didn’t let interruptions get in the way.

… I have had someone tell me that when they tried to burn the audio files onto an audio CD so that they can listen to it in their car, the audio CD didn’t burn properly and the audio was all scrambled. None of my audios were scrambled.

… I have had someone tell me that while listening to one of the audios, the sound just all of a sudden CUT OUT for no reason and the rest of the audio is just blank empty space. My audios have no blank space.

… and about 20 or so MORE weird happenings in the last few days alone. 🙂

LOL!!!!

The reports I’m getting from people are hilarious!

It’s like a Gong Show. I’m seriously waiting for someone to tell me that they tried to listen but they got abducted by aliens or something. 🙂

This company and the CD set, has such a strong morphic field of wealth, health and prosperity that people, and their computers, cars, CD players and telephones are literally ALLERGIC to the energy **IF** the person has strong ANTI WEALTH beliefs and blocks in place.

I’m not joking guys.

I’m being TOTALLY serious.

I would also be willing to bet that a LOT of people are actually going to have an “allergic” reaction (energetically) to this Blog post.

It probably won’t load for many people.

Those Who Have Passed the Test

In addition to the hilarious stories I have heard from people as to WHY they CAN’T join for some reason or another, and CAN’T listen to the CD’s, there have been a few people I know who HAVE signed up and who HAVE started listening to the CD’s.

And the amazing thing that I’m hearing from them is that their lives have literally ALREADY started changing, even though they JUST STARTED listening to this stuff.

Here’s an example of an email I got from one person (who prior to this I didn’t know) who started listening:

I asked here if it would be OK for me to share her email with people on my Blog and she was totally OK with it, which is why I’m posting it.

The reason she says “I have no idea who you are but you have changed my life” is because up until a few weeks ago she didn’t know who I was. She just “co-incidentally” stumbled upon my Blog while searching for a WordPress related technical issue and saw me writing about the this stuff and that’s how she got into it.

I have spoken to a few other people who are reporting the same things to me. Some of these people I know, and others I have never met in my life.

But what I’m seeing is that *IF* they can join as an affiliate without some kind of “mysterious force” stopping them, AND they can start listening to the CD’s without their CD player or MP3 player blowing up or whatever else they manifest to block them from this information – THEN they begin to see immediate life changes in their lives.

Not just money/wealth changes either.

And the crazy thing is that all of these people just heard about this a few days ago. I mean I’ve only heard about this a few weeks ago.

Anyway… that’s the wealth tester.

I already know that someone will say that this “Wealth Tester” is BS and that I’m just trying to make money off people by getting them to sign up for them using my affiliate code, and that’s fine. They obviously don’t pass the wealth tester.

The bottom line is that I don’t care if you sign up under my affiliate code. Of course I would prefer it because I want to hang out with cool people like you if you’re interested in building wealth and if we’re on the same team then we’ll most likely hang out together a lot more than if you sign up under someone else’s affiliate invitation code – but using my code is NOT a prerequisite of this test.

If you don’t want to use my code then go find someone else’s – but take the test. If you want to connect to a different morphic field of wealth besides, go for it, but they are NOT easy to find and it will NOT be free.

If you don’t, for WHATEVER reason, it most likely means you have some major energetic and/or subconscious belief blocks towards building wealth.

And when I say WHATEVER reason – I mean WHATEVER reason.

If you can’t sign up for – because your computer blows up – that’s you blocking it.

If you can’t listen to because your MP3 player scrambles the audio – that’s you blocking it.

If you can’t listen to because every time you click play the phone rings – that’s you blocking it.

If you can’t sign up for – because you don’t think you can afford membership – it doesn’t matter since the affiliate level is FREE so that’s no excuse. If you are using that as an excuse – that’s you blocking it.

If your excuse is that you don’t have time for this stuff right now – that’s you blocking it.

WHATEVER excuse you can think of… it’s you blocking it.

Period.

It costs nothing except a little bit of your time / energy to sign up and listen to the CD’s.

There is no excuse.

The only excuse is if you’re not ready to build wealth and you’re blocking it by manifesting WHATEVER reasons that show up in your life.

And that’s OK. I’m not judging you. I’m just sharing with you a cool “tester” to see if you’ve got wealth blocks.

What will you do next?

Will you take the steps I wrote above?

Ever have one of those frustrating days where you just want to go back to bed and start the day all over again?

Ever have one of those weeks, or months or years?

Sure you have – it’s part of being human.

It seems that no matter how hard we work to bring order into our lives, there is always at least one part of our lives that’s driving us nuts.

If we get our careers going, and our financial situation stabilized, it seems that all of a sudden we run into health problems.

If we get our health and finances in order, now all of a sudden our relationships suffer.

If we get our relationships and health in order, we never get to relax.

If we take a vacation to relax, suddenly our career goes south.

There’s always something that seems to pop up in our lives that frustrates us.

It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, healthy or sick, single or married. If you’re alive, you’ve got some kind of challenges in your life. It’s a given.

Avoiding Frustration and Anger

One of the most common and worst things that we can do when such a situation arises is to go into turtle mode.

Going into turtle mode means retreating into your shell to try to avoid the frustration and anger that you feel.

Anger and frustration are a type of energy. If you try to ignore that energy, it will just intensify and get worse over time.

There are many avoidance patterns we can go into when such feelings/energies arise.

Some of us turn to eating food or smoking cigarettes when frustration & anger show up. Some of us go shopping or to watch a movie to try to distract ourselves.

The challenge is that avoidance doesn’t work. Overeating causes you even more frustration and anger long term. So does smoking, or retail therapy.

Nobody is perfect. To some degree, we all at least sometimes resort to avoidance behavior when dealing with anger and frustration.

Some of us do it all the time, never dealing with the root issue.
How to Deal with Frustration and Anger

If avoidance doesn’t work, then what does?

How do we transform frustration and anger into something useful in our lives?

One of the most effective ways I have been recently dealing with this exact issue is something I learned from a book

The book relates to finances and money, but I have used the same technique for dealing with every situation in my life recently.

Whenever you feel the energies of Frustration and Anger rising up in your life, in any situation, simply follow this formula.

Accept the feelings. Don’t try to avoid them. FEEL the feeling of anger. FEEL the feeling of frustration. Don’t try to downplay them. Trying to downplay them will just make things worst. If you’re angry, BE OK with being angry in this moment. Be honest with yourself and acknowledge the feeling of anger/frustration within you. It wants to be heard. The more you try to ignore it, the louder it will get.
Ask the feeling/energy what it’s trying to tell you. What is the problem / challenge that is “causing” you to feel angry / frustrated. You can either acknowledge it in your mind, or write it out in your journal. Let the feeling / energy be heard. Let it say what it wants to say.
Tell the truth about the situation. Accept responsibility for everything you create in your life 100%. Don’t give away any power to anything or anyone else.

The first two steps in the formula are pretty self explanatory. I don’t think I need to go into any more depth as to what they mean.

However, step #3 is the most important one to understand.

What exactly do I mean by “Tell the truth about the situation”?

Well, the truth about any situation in our lives is that WE are the ones who are 100% responsible for creating it.

That is the truth.

We create 100% of everything that we experience in our realities, no matter how much it seems like someone else or something else might be at fault.

I know that’s not easy to accept, but it’s the truth. It is the ultimate truth.

Let me give you one example of how I have used this process in the recent while.

A few weeks back I called one of my credit card companies to make some changes to my account. While on the phone with the service rep there, I was told that in order to make the changes I wanted I would need to make a payment for a certain amount first and as soon as they receive that payment, they would be able to make that change for me.

Just to make sure that I didn’t mishear the person, I asked them the same question a second time to make sure that they understood what I was asking for. Once again the rep assured me that she understood what I wanted and that there would be no problem processing that change as soon as they receive the payment in the amount they requested.

So I made the payment and I called in a few days later to check if they had received the payment. Once the payment was received I asked to speak to their account reps again and asked them to make the account change that I originally wanted.

Well, guess what happened next? This second rep proceeded to tell me that the account changes I wanted are not possible. That the only way I would be able to make such changes was to close my account and re-apply from scratch for a brand new account with them.

After a very frustrating 30+ minute conversation with them I basically realized that I was lied to by the first rep who told me that the changes I wanted were totally possible just as soon as I made a payment. I don’t know if they make a commission or some kind of bonus based on how much money people send in for payments after speaking with them or what, but basically I was lied to.

The changes I wanted are not possible, and the payment I was asked to make had nothing to do with anything. It had no bearing on the changes I wanted at all. The first rep just wanted me to make a payment, and lied to me in order to get it, most likely knowing that I would make the payment and then when I call in a second time I would be someone else’s problem to deal with.

Now this is a perfect example of being frustrated and angry. I got off the phone with this credit card company and I was pissed. Not because the changes I wanted to make were not possible, but because I was lied to.

If I knew from day one that those changes were not possible, then I would have made other arrangements with another credit card company but instead this rep wasted my time and just lied to me.

What was even more frustrating was the fact that the new rep I was dealing with on my 2nd phone call was not at fault. She didn’t lie to me. She did nothing wrong, so getting mad at her wasn’t going to solve anything.

After I got off the phone, I followed the formula as listed above.

I accepted my feelings of anger and frustration for being lied to. I didn’t try to shy away from them or hide them. I let myself FEEL them.
I asked myself why I was angry. I realized that what pissed me off was the fact that I was lied to and had my time wasted and that I couldn’t really do anything about it. Getting angry with the new rep wasn’t going to accomplish anything, as she wasn’t the one who originally lied to me. Since I didn’t have the name of the person I spoke to originally, nor did I record the conversation, I had no proof that I was lied to. The company does record their conversations so I could have asked to speak to a supervisor and probably could have been able to track down who it was that spoke to me, but that would have wasted even more of my time. And to what end? Even if we found the conversation, all the supervisor would have been able to do is apologize to me. It still wouldn’t have solved my problem, just would have wasted more of my time.
Once I let my mind vent a bit about the situation, I then told the truth about it. What was the truth? The truth is that I created that whole situation. It was 100% my doing. I created this event in my reality. I am 100% responsible for it. Nothing was done “to me”. I did it to myself. Once I accepted this truth, the feelings of anger and frustration dissipated.

I know that #3 is not an easy step to take. It IS the hardest step of them all, but it is the one where you reclaim your power from your anger and frustrations.

There are many levels at which we can accept #3. From a purely physical world perspective, we can say that I am 100% responsible for not recording the original conversation with the operator and I didn’t ask their name.

I am 100% responsible for making the choice to even have a credit card with this particular company. I am 100% responsible for needing the changes to be made to my account in the first place. I am 100% responsible for trusting the phone rep even when my intuition was telling me that what she was saying didn’t sound right.

I am 100% responsible for applying for that credit card 13 years ago.

I have to take 100% responsibility for everything related to the situation in order to reclaim my power from it.

If we look at it from a more spiritual perspective, things get even clearer. From a spiritual perspective, I am responsible for everything in my reality. I’m not just responsible for falling for a lie, I am responsible for creating a reality in which credit card phone operators lie.

My subconscious beliefs create the reality I experience and I am responsible for my beliefs.

Even if we only accept step #3 partially, within the physical world realm and ignore the spiritual implications of it, there is still a lot of power to be re-claimed from our anger and frustrations.

I would encourage you to try out this technique the next time you feel frustrated and angry. Even if you don’t take full responsibility in step #3, but just claim 5% or 10% or 25% of the responsibility, you will still reclaim your power from it and your anger/frustration will dissipate to that degree.

I’ve been doing this for over a month now and I’m really loving this process. Every time I feel angry and frustrated, I go through the process and usually end up laughing at myself with the thought “Oh man, why did I create THIS experience? What a fiasco. Hehehe….”

It is so liberating to take responsibility for your life instead of feeling like a victim of circumstances.

The more we accept that responsibility, the more liberated we feel.

You may ask, “Yeah, but what do we do then?”

Meaning, what do we do once we accept responsibility?

Well, the right course of action – if any necessary – will present itself.

For me, after reclaiming my power from the situation, the course of action involved me closing my account with that credit card company.

I was a client of theirs for 13 years. They lied to me. I took my business elsewhere.

I didn’t do it out of a place of anger or frustration though. It just seemed like the most “responsible” course of action to take after what happened.

This morning I received my first letter from them, asking me to reconsider closing my account.

Of course I’m responsible for creating that too. 🙂

Try this technique out.

It really works.

If you guys remember from my previous post on body fat testing, I basically talked about how inaccurate standard bathroom scales are when it comes to calculating body fat %.

I shelled out more than $250 for my bathroom scale as well, so it’s not like it’s a “cheap” one either.

As I said in my last post, if you’re thinking of getting one of those scales – don’t bother. They’re pretty much useless.

After getting my first scan done, I was already sold on the benefits of doing this kind of scan and have been telling everyone about it. However, after today’s second scan I’m even more sold on it and will be promoting it to everyone I know.

If you’re even dreaming about doing any kind of weight loss or exercise plan, do yourself a huge favor and get one of these scans done before you start so you can accurately track your progress.

My Body Fat Testing Results

Firstly, I’ll mention that when I got our scans done on Nov 3rd, we were already 16 days into the weight loss competition so I had already lost about 10lbs by that time. So really our “before” scans are not true “before” scans since they aren’t taking into account the first 10lbs of weight loss.

Either way, the scan does accurately represent what happened in the last 40 days which is just under 6 weeks.

Here are my results:

The great news is that between the two scans I’ve been able to accomplish something that isn’t very easy to do. I successfully cut fat and gained muscle mass at the same time.

My total weight loss was 4.3 lbs but I actually lost 5.6 lbs of fat during that period of time.

At the same time, while cutting more than 5.6 lbs of fat off my body, I also gained 1.5lbs of muscle mass.

I don’t care who you are, cutting fat and building muscle at the same time is not easy. Losing weight is not that hard, but doing it in a way where you don’t lose half of it in muscle mass is the tough part.

I don’t remember exact numbers off the top of my head, but I think he actually lost a little bit more weight than me, but what the scan revealed is that he lost fat and muscle at the same time. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was about 40-50% of the weight loss for him came from lean muscle mass.

So even though I think he lost a little bit more weight, he actually didn’t lose nearly as much fat as I did (less than half the 5.6 lbs I lost), and he also simultaneously ended up losing some lean muscle tissue which is not good.

What happened to himis not uncommon. I know because I’ve done the same thing in the past when all I was focusing on was weight loss.

This is why most starvation diets don’t work.

It is also why just doing cardio doesn’t work either.

If you want to cut fat, without destroying the lean muscle mass your body needs, you must follow a diet and exercise program designed specifically for this goal.

What Does Fat and Muscle Look Like?

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed lately when talking to people about weight loss is that most people have a totally inaccurate view of how much a pound or five pounds of fat or muscle really is.

For most people it’s just a number. 5lbs, 10lbs, 20lbs, 30lbs – the higher the better. We hear these kinds of numbers being thrown around in the weight loss industry all the time, usually when trying to sell you some sort of crappy crash diet.

The challenge is that 20 years ago, if an advertiser said “With our solution you will lose 5lbs of fat“, people would be impressed.

Today, you see advertisers saying “With our solution you will lose 30lbs of fat in 7 days” and people are still not impressed. Everyone wants instant results NOW.

When I hear people saying “Oh I know this guy who went on this diet and he lost 30 lbs in 1 week” I cringe, because there is always more to a story like that. Unless you’re talking about liposuction or something, you can’t lose 30lbs of fat in a week or two. Of course you can dehydrate yourself beyond that point.

There are professional athletes like boxers out there who lose like 15lbs of weight (not fat!) in a 72hour period when they’re cutting weight for a boxing match. BUT, that is NOT fat loss we’re talking about. All that they do is dehydrate themselves and lose 15lbs of water weight, which is dangerous and they put it back on within 24hours of making weight.

Don’t mistake dehydration with fat loss. They are totally different things. Yet another reason to get a scan, instead of relying on your bathroom scale “weight”.

Let’s get a more accurate view of just how much 5.6 lbs of fat really is. Maybe if you see some pictures it might re-calibrate your thinking a bit.

This is a 250 gram (0.55 lb ) stick of butter. Yes, this big chunk of fat I’m holding in my hand is only half a pound of fat.

So, if that is about half a pound, then what does 5.6lbs of fat look like? Well, imagine 10 of those!

That’s how much excess fat my body has shed in the last 40 days or so. Pretty crazy right?

So what about muscle? How much is 1.5lbs of muscle? Gaining 1.5lbs of muscle doesn’t sound that impressive at first, does it?

Well, here’s a photo of an 8 oz steak ( ~ 0.5 lbs ). Sorry, I don’t have anything in the picture to compare scale but I think you can get a general idea of what an 8 oz steak looks like.

So how much would 1.5 lbs of muscle be then? Well it would be approximately 3 of those steaks:

I know this is not super accurate, nor are the pictures to scale, but I think it at least illustrates the point that a pound of muscle or fat is a LOT.

30 lbs of fat would be about 54 of those sticks of butter. Pretty crazy right?

Do you really think your body can safely shed 30 lbs of fat in a week or two? Or put on 20 lbs of muscle in a few weeks, like some hyped up muscle building products claim?

I really don’t think so.

Bone Density

One thing I totally didn’t notice until I got home was that the scan revealed that my bone weight dropped from 2.8 kg to 2.7 kg which is a loss of 0.1 kg (approx 0.22 lbs).

I didn’t notice this when I was there so I didn’t get a chance to ask about it, but if this is correct it would seem to indicate that I’ve lost some bone density in the last 6 weeks.

I have to double check on this with him, and also check my research, but if this is correct then it may be attributed to a few things:

Lack of Mineral Supplements – I have a good quality multi-vitamin & mineral supplement which I know I need to be taking, but for some reason I haven’t been taking it regularly in the last 6 weeks. I was pretty good with it for the first few weeks of the competition, but then I just stopped taking it. I don’t know if it’s just laziness or some kind of mental block, but I always have a hard time taking my multi-vitamins every day.
Exercise Causing Acidity – Exercise and fat burning are acid-forming activities in your body / blood. When we begin exercising, the body will actually pull alkaline minerals ( like calcium & magnesium ) out of your bones to buffer the acids in your blood – unless we have those alkaline buffers readily available in our body through supplementation (aka multi-vitamin & minerals).
Protein Consumption – My protein consumption has increased since starting this competition. I eat protein in the form of meats and I also supplement with high-quality whey proteins. Although there’s nothing wrong with protein, since our body needs it in order to build tissues and muscle, eating too much protein can be acid forming for the blood. And of course once again if our blood becomes even slightly acidic, the body will automatically pull alkaline buffers from the bones to neutralize the acids.
Lack of Hydration – Although I have increased my water consumption since starting this body transformation, I know it’s still nowhere near the levels I should be at. I have to check my research again, but I do believe inadequate hydration also contributes to bone density loss.

My gut feeling is that it’s probably a combination of all four of these factors. I would be willing to bet that the increase in exercise and protein consumption, along with inadequate hydration has elevated my “acidity” levels for the last 6 weeks or so and due to a lack of daily mineral supplements my body has had to utilize a bit of the minerals stored in my bones to neutralize the acids.

I’ll be doing more research on this for sure. In the meantime I need to smack myself for not taking my multi-vitamin and minerals. Doh!

Why You Should Get a Scan

Raising your awareness is one of the biggest keys to success in life.

Have you ever said to yourself “I’m watching my weight“, or “I want to lose 10 lbs“?

The question I have for you is “10 lbs of what“?

Without accurate body composition analysis, weight loss is rather meaningless.

Weight loss can come from fat loss, muscle loss, bone density loss or from dehydration. Losing 5 lbs or 10 lbs doesn’t mean much unless you know how much of that weight loss came from fat, muscle and bone mass.

I’ve only had two scans so far, and really they were only done less than 6 weeks apart and I’ve already learned so much about my body.

Ideally you’d want to do your scans at slightly larger intervals, such as for example every 3 months in order to see more drastic results, but I can’t tell you how motivating it is to see that you’ve built 1.5lbs of muscle by doing strength training or that you’ve lost 5.6lbs of fat.

Last year when I was doing P90X I know I was building muscle while simultaneously losing fat, but my bathroom scale seemed stuck at 212 lbs or so and that was really demotivating. If I had gone in for a DXA scan back then and saw how much muscle I put on during the 58 days I was on P90X I probably would have stuck with it long term.

Do yourself a favor and get a scan done on your body. Even if you do it just once a year, it’s still a great way to become more aware of what your body composition looks like so that you can track your progress.

If you live elsewhere, I’m sure you can find other people offering the service as well.

I began working on a small project that I naively thought was going to make me a lot of money online.

Like a lot of other people, I heard the success stories of guru’s who wrote eBooks and became overnight success stories selling millions of copies overnight.

So, I set out to write my own eBook with the thought that even if my eBook is just 1/10th as good as theirs I should still be able to sell at least a thousand copies, right?

Even if I only sold 1,000 copies, at $29/copy that would be $29,000 in my pocket. And imagine if I was able to sell 10,000 copies!

Writing the eBook

When I began working on this eBook, this Blog was still under the domain and my main slogan / topic was “Make Money Doing What You Love”.

One of the very first trends I noticed while just starting out with that Blog was that quite a few of my readers ( like all 20 of them ), weren’t really sure what they wanted to do in life.

Meaning, I noticed that quite a few of my readers would say stuff like “I love your Blog, but I don’t even know what I love to do. What do you do if you don’t know what your passion is?“

That gave me an idea…

I decided to write an eBook on “How to Figure Out Your Passion in Life“.

I was all excited because I knew the topic was popular, as I know a lot of people have no clue what their passion in life is. So I started researching the topic like crazy.

I began reading all kinds of Blogs on the topic. I read several books. I experimented with a bunch of different exercises and ways of figuring out my own passion in life, and I found several really cool exercises which really worked.

After a lot of research, testing, experimenting, and writing, I had my first eBook written.

Selling the eBook

All excited at the prospect of making thousands, possibly tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars selling my eBook I put it up on Clickbank and waited for the money to start pouring in.

The first few sales trickled in within the first few days. Most of them came from the 20 or so Blog readers I had on my Blog at the time.

After about a week or so, there were no more sales. I tried reducing the price, but that didn’t seem to change anything.

I tried changing the sales page, and a whole bunch of other things. Nothing seemed to help.

My hopes were shattered. I felt like crying.

What happened to the thousands of dollars I thought I was going to make?

Was my eBook really that bad?

That didn’t make sense to me, as people would have to buy it first to not like it, and the few people that did buy it loved it!

Was it my marketing? My sales page wasn’t the best, but I thought it was much better than most of the other ones I saw on Clickbank.

Learning The Most Important Lesson

That is when I learned one of the most important lessons of online marketing.

It’s a lesson that I try to teach all of my mentoring students – although sadly most of them don’t listen.

Not that I blame them because until that moment in my life, I didn’t listen either.

The biggest lesson in online marketing success is to build your audience first.

The reason my eBook didn’t do very well is because I had no audience!

My Blog at the time had 20 subscribers, yet somehow I thought that I would sell thousands of copies of my book. It just doesn’t work that way.

There are a lot of guru’s even today selling people on this idea of “Just create a digital product, and you will sell lots of copies!”

What they mean is that if they create a product, they will sell a lot of copies, but that is because (a) they have built a brand around their name, and (b) they probably have a list of 350,000+ email subscribers, and (c) they have access to other email lists where they can get affiliates to promote the product to a few million people.

THAT is why their products sell. It’s not that their products are so much better than what you can create. It’s that they have push-button access to millions of people. Period.

Converting Epic Fail to Epic Success

Disappointed by my “Epic Fail” eBook, I wondered what I should do next.

My Blog wasn’t growing at nearly the speed I had hoped it would.

My eBook wasn’t making me any money.

How was I ever supposed to quit my job, when I couldn’t even sell ten copies of an eBook for $9?

That’s when I made a decision that changed everything.

I decided to give away my eBook for free, instead.

I setup an Aweber account and decided to send people a free copy of my eBook in exchange for becoming a subscriber to my Blog.

The result was amazing.

People started signing up for my email list and I started to get really good responses on the eBook.

Once people started signing up, I was able to start emailing them every time I wrote a new Blog post as well which meant I started getting more comments on my Blog.

By getting more comments, I got more inspired to write more posts, which led to more subscribers and in turn even more comments.

The success cycle began.

I launched my Blog I had 39 RSS subscribers and around the same amount on my email list.

Just six months later, by June 2008 I had over 1,000 subscribers on my Blog.

By that time I had actually written several eBooks which I gave away for free on my Blog.

Today, just over 3 years since starting this Blog I have almost 10,000 subscribers.

99.9% of my subscribers today originally subscribed to my Blog in exchange for something free.

The Power of the Ethical Bribe

Here are 3 rules of Making Money Online that I have come to learn from my “mistake” of trying to make bank with my eBook.

Rule #1 of Making Money Online …. People LOVE free stuff.

People LOVE free stuff. There is no better way to build rapport with people than to give them something valuable for free.

If you are willing to make something of value, and give it away for free, people will love you for it.

Basically you are creating an “Ethical Bribe”. You agree to give someone something valuable for free, in exchange for them signing up to your email list.

Once they are on your email list, you treat them with respect by not spamming them and they reciprocate by staying subscribed long term.

It is THE best way to build an online audience FAST – Period.

Rule #2 of Making Money Online …. Most people are afraid to give away free stuff.

Most people online are afraid to give away their “best” stuff for free. I see Bloggers slaving away for years trying to establish an audience and when I suggest to them that they write an eBook and give it away for free as a bribe, they say something along the lines of “No, I’m going to wait until I build an audience first, then I’m going to sell my eBook to it.”

Yeah, well good luck with that.

The other thing I hear people saying is “If I give away my content for free, then nobody will ever want to pay for my stuff in the future.”

That is a pile of crap. It is totally not true.

But, here is the good news. 99.999% of Internet Marketers out there will always think this way, so the great news is that there is very little competition for YOU!

Don’t be an idiot. If you don’t have an audience right now, start building it today by giving away something for free.

In the long run, it will make you a pile of money.

Rule #3 of Making Money Online …. Most free stuff on the net is crap.

This is an important one. Remember, when I originally wrote my eBook, I wrote it thinking that I was going to make thousands or tens of thousands of dollars selling it. So I treated it like a ten-thousand dollar project. I didn’t just slap it together in 15 minutes.

I put so much energy into the eBook that if somebody paid me $30 for it, I would still think they got a great deal out of it.

To me, that eBook was worth at least $30/copy. And then I gave that away for free.

The mistake a lot of people make when creating a “Free” eBook or report to give away on their Blog is that they treat it as a “Free” eBook.

Meaning, they slap it together thinking “Who cares, people aren’t paying for this so why should I bother making it good?“

This is the wrong mindset to have. You want to create your “Free” bribe/eBook as if you’re writing an eBook that people would gladly pay $30 for, and THEN give that away for Free.

That is what will impress people and get you a growing audience FAST.

Differentiate yourself from everyone else out there by creating something of value, that you would have zero hesitation charging for, and then give it away for free.

Three days ago I arrived in New Brunswick for a three week visit/vacation with my wife. She’s been out here for the past six months working on developing her intuitive & healing abilities.

One of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned so far by being here is just how powerful of an influence the environment we are in plays on our lives.

While flying out from, I had a three-hour layover in Toronto as well and it was really interesting for me to read the energy in each city.

The energy at Vancouver International Airport felt very familiar to me. Although a lot more fast-paced and stressed out than the energy at my house, it still felt pretty relaxed and comfortable.

When I flew into Toronto, however, as soon as we got off the plane and I had a chance to walk around the airport for a few minutes I could totally tell the difference in energy compared to Vancouver.

For me, Toronto’s energy feels very similar to the energy I felt in Manhattan, New York when I was there a few years ago. The energy feels hurried, stressed, driven, fast-paced, impatient, corporate, and fear driven. I’m not saying that everyone in Manhattan or Toronto has that energy, I’m just saying that to me that is what the city’s energy feels like in comparison to Vancouver’s energy.

When I arrived here, I once again felt a totally different type of energy. I find the energy to be slow, stable, traditional, comfortable, polite, unambitious, judging, impatient, social, unchanging and family oriented.

I don’t consider any of the qualities I described as “positive” or “negative”. I see a positive/negative side to each one of them, so I’m not saying the energy here is better or worse than the energy in Vancouver. I’m just saying that it’s different and depending on what your goals are in life, the energy can be more or less conducive to your plans.

How Energy Affects Us

I’m actually quite surprised how much energy has already affected me. For one, I am finding that time seems to move differently here, and I’m not referring to the four hour time difference between Vancouver and this place. What I mean is that it’s almost as if the speed at which my thoughts think have slowed down since I’ve gotten here so it seems like time goes by faster.

It’s really hard to explain, but it just feels like things move much slower here, and then you look at the time and a lot more time has elapsed than you’d previously guess. This slowing down reminds of when I was on my honeymoon in Maui just over four years ago. Life just moves so much slower on Maui.

The benefits of this kind of energy are that it’s more relaxing and it’s easier to just “chill out”. The drawbacks of this type of energy are that it seems harder to get inspired and to get things done in a given day. Even writing this Blog post seems to be taking me forever. I can’t get my brain to think fast enough to write!

Normally my thinking far outpaces my ability to type, but right now I’m finishing sentences and staring blankly at the screen for a few seconds before the next thing to write comes to me. It’s like someone’s turned off the turbo button on my brain. It’s so weird. I don’t feel less-intelligent or anything like that, but just “slower” than usual.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that my drive / ambition has diminished since getting here. I’ve had very little ambition / desire to write Blog posts, or to exercise or to really do much of anything. I have to really try hard to get inspired / excited.

Of course there are benefits to this, especially when you’re on vacation like I am. This type of energy is very conducive to vacationing, relaxing or if you’re retired and want to just rest.

On the flip side of that, to someone like me who’s naturally very ambitious, this energy makes me feel “depressed” compared to my normal state. It would take a lot of willpower to get myself to do anything more than the “social norm” here.

Energy Spots

So far what I’ve described as the energy around here and the Toronto airport is general in nature. This place is a big province with many different cities and the energy differs from city to city. The Toronto area is huge and I’m sure there is a different type of energy to each area. I’m mostly just describing the energies I’ve been picking up in the areas I’ve been.

Besides the general energy of a city, there are also smaller energy spots around individual places or even individual people.

For example, when my friend James came over on Tuesday I immediately noticed an energy shift. All three of our energy levels (my wife, James and I) went up as soon as James came over. I went from feeling tired to feeling energized within seconds of him arriving. It’s amazing how a person can affect the energy around them. I also think that when high-energy people get around each other, the effect of their energies coming together is exponential.

Another example of this happened yesterday when I went to visit for a healing session. He is a very powerful psychic / healer who has also been helping my wife develop her intuitive / healing abilities. As soon as we arrived at his house, I felt an instant shift in energy even before I met him and his wife. I felt a difference in energy just walking up their driveway, on their property.

I felt my thinking instantly speeding up back to “normal” speed and my energy levels increased instantly. I’ll write more about my experience with getting a healing done by Geoffrey in another post, but I’ll just say that my energy was “buzzing” high for a few hours after our visit, even though technically my healing just involved me relaxing and drifting off while he did his thing.

Why This Matters

You may be asking yourself “So what, why does this matter?”

In the past, I’ve written about the influence your friends can have on your wealth in my post.

Who you hang out with on a regular basis definitely affects your ability to build wealth. It’s very difficult to have an abundance mentality if you’re surrounded by people with poverty mentality.

But what if you live in an environment where almost everyone has a poverty mentality? Or what if you live in a city where everyone places a lot of emphasis on looks? Or what if you live in a city where health is not a huge value?

I’ve always known that your environment affects your energy, but until taking this trip I never realized just how much.

As I write this Blog post, I kid you not it is taking at least two or three times as much energy for me to concentrate and get this thing written and published as it would if I was at home.

I can’t believe how much the energy here is affecting me. As I said earlier, I’m here on vacation so I don’t really mind as it’s kind of a good thing that I’m feeling a “slower” energy than normal since it allows me to relax and rejuvenate for the holidays. However, I can totally see how it would take a lot more effort for an ambitious person to break free from the “default” energy here.

The interesting thing is that really I haven’t been interacting much with the locals. The ones I have interacted with have been super nice and friendly. The energy I’m referring to though is not coming from them individually, but rather from the city as a whole.

I think I’m only able to notice this difference in energy because of the contrast in comparison to the energy I feel at home. I bet the locals here don’t notice it at all. They probably think that this type of energy is normal and that it’s everywhere, just like New Yorker’s probably think the whole world runs on New York type energy, and Vancouverites probably think that the world runs on Vancouver type energy.

I assure you that is not the case. Every city has it’s own energy. I’m not saying any city has better or worse energy than any other city, as such judgments have to be made personally depending on who you are, and what you want to accomplish in life.

The only thing that I think is important to ask yourself is whether or not the energy of the city, area, neighborhood, and social circles you hang around is conducive to your personal goals and future growth.

If not, maybe it’s time for a change in your environment. It doesn’t have to be permanent either. Maybe you just need to take a temporary break from your environment and experience something else. If you want to connect to a more ambitious type of energy, get around a city or a group of people who are ambitious. You don’t have to even talk to them, but just being in their presence will rub off on you.

You’re not going to absorb wealth-consciousness by putting yourself around poverty-minded people. You’re not going to absorb health-consciousness by putting yourself around people who are sick. You’re not going to make money online or become a Blogger by putting yourself around people who don’t make money online or who have no clue what a Blog even is.

Whether you realize it or not, your environment is affecting your energy right now. Eagles can’t learn to fly and soar, hanging out with a bunch of turkeys. There’s nothing wrong with being a turkey, but I’m just saying that if you’re an eagle you need to get around other eagles. If you’re a turkey, then by all means hang out with the rest of the turkeys. 🙂

This place is a very nice and beautiful city as you can see from some of the pictures my wife took during the summer here. If your life goals match up with the energy of this city, I think it’s a great place to live. It actually kind of reminds me of the energy I felt in another place. Everything is very relaxed, calm and laid back. However, if you want to connect to the energy of ambition, drive, change, and rapid growth, I think there are other cities whose energy is much more conducive to that.

I think it is possible to create a little energy spot within a city like this where you dictate the energy you want to be influenced by, and in a way that is exactly what I’ve done on my property out in the area as well, but I think it’s always easier to make a few tweaks to an energy that already exists in an area to make it exactly how you like it, than it is to try to create an energy that is exactly opposite to the one you’re surrounded by.

What’s the energy like in the city you live?

How aligned is the “average” person with your personal vision of your future?

Are you surrounded by people who exemplify who you want to become in the future, or by people who represent your past?

How is the energy of the city, neighborhood and the social circles you’re hanging out with affecting your energy?