Context, Rules, success, transformation, wealth

Cafeteria Propinquity! 

Propinquity is how location influences success or failure.  Creating a method or a system that makes success inevitable would seem to be a real interest in the world today.  The norm is just the opposite. There are plenty of examples of how location and ease of use make all the difference.  If your exercise equipment is in a closet, in the garage, you are more likely to exercise getting out of bed if it is next to your bed, is my guess.  

The design and the way we relate to location may have more to do with success than anything else.  Training, study, motivation, personal conviction, mind memes, and dozens of other similar cuts on success may all be myths.  If the design and your location almost guarantee failure what does that say about the way the world works and you? It appears that there is a small group, the 3%, who appear to succeed no matter what.  What if it has virtually nothing to do with them but is something as simple as being in the right place at the right time and their success was inevitable?   

I am interested in designs that make success inevitable. Most of the designs we operate in are about something else.  Control seems paramount to me in just about everything. Whether it is the current design of all schooling, ‘higher’ education, all licensed professionals, the success rate is atrociously low.  Failure in the 80-90-95% range is NORMAL!   I say that is by design! 

There are systems and organizations that produce the same range of success.  They appear to operate out of the mainstream and the few that open their doors to the public may not even understand completely what it is about their design that makes the difference.  I doubt if it is one or even two items.  We live in a cafeteria thinking world.  The designed ease and simplicity of a cafeteria do not produce five-star dining.  A cafeteria is also about control.  

I am interested in the complete list of requirements that makes success inevitable.  Quitting guarantees failure.  What if quitting was no longer an option on the menu.  What if the design was such that quitting wasn’t even a wish any longer because the design kept you in the flow and success was inevitable! The training to believe that our success is a personal phenomenon is part of the control system.  Suggesting everyone can succeed is my first requirement. 

What are some of the design features you know about that make success inevitable?  What organizations do you know that currently take on all comers and produce success in the 80-100% range?  What ‘locations’ make the difference?  There is no smorgasbord, no cafeteria success model!  Imagine if every vehicle-controlled in its unique way.  The steering wheel was potentially anywhere or even just a ‘stick’ or maybe handlebars and the gas could be everything from on the floor to a knob somewhere and it was your job to figure it out upon entry.  Design matters!  When the outcomes are almost universally, failure, it is by design!  Please make known methods, steps, systems, organizations designed with success as their outcome! What comes naturally from success? 

The bane of happiness from a ‘successful’ experience is the tendency to take on more, to add to the daily tasks, and to believe you have found a perfect path. More is not better. Locating the source of anger, frustration, and despair, not the excuse, not the explanation, not even the cause like an expectation or belief, but following ‘it’ to source requires prior preparation and tenacity.  Swimming against the current of frustration and upset, without surrendering and ignoring the mind’s taunts of madness you will have to eliminate all unnecessary baggage.  

I was 15 when I read the collected works of St. Augustine for the first time. I was shocked when I read. 

There is no possible source of evil except good. – Saint Augustine 

We either live on the court or watch from the stands. Keeping ‘it’ simply simple in a world that taunts and resists our commitments moment to moment is a position on the court. From in the stands, wherein the blink of an eye you may reside as well, there is no struggle, only editorials. Seeing the present from the future, by even a few seconds is astonishing while trusting your internal compass, heart/gut combo to present the path moment-by-moment AND this means to be operating in the present moment. [There are no other moments you may operate in, is there!]  One is being either ‘all in’ meditating or all ‘out here’, in the world. The mind rebels and is addicted to the noise of TV, radio, music, and mind-numbing nonsense conversations. Some days I fail to attempt to shut it off at all. The failure is purely an ‘in the stands’ admonition.  

Who am I? I am not a mind, thoughts, or body. Is what is left the ‘soul’? ‘You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.’ was never uttered or written by C. S. Lewis and may not be valid either. I answered, ‘who am I?’ numerous times in my life and from the early ’80s for twenty years spent time in immersion events at least quarterly and a number of times, once or twice a month for a year or more.  The power and exhilaration experienced ‘being’ in a room with 100, 200 and especially 2000+ openly committed humans are beyond words. A ‘mastermind’ does not always appear, but immersion events are a way to skip across the pond by choice. For the last ten years, I have participated in random events, sometimes with nothing at stake but to relish in the experience. The buzz is profound for me and always lasts for days and sometimes for a month or more when what I had at stake was big enough.  

What makes success inevitable? What has worked for me so far… 

Do what you do best and learn to delegate the rest. 
The way to get what you want is to want what you got. 
Do what needs doing and it gets done, don’t and it won’t. 
Create and honor your integrity each day. 
I Honor my word as Myself. 
Stay congruent with your ‘self’. 
Implement all insights with action or lose them to the drift.  

“If its comfort you want, life is not the place to be.” – Werner Erhard 

Werner Erhard’s rules … 
1. Respect the other person’s point of view, whether or not you agree with it. Recognize that if you had their history, their circumstances, and the forces that play on them, you would likely have their point of view. 

2.  Consider life a privilege—all of it, even the parts that are difficult or seem a waste of time. 

3.  Give up the islands that reinforce mediocrity, the safe places where we gossip and complain to one another, where we are petty. 

4.  Take a chance. Be willing to put your reputation on the line; have something at stake. 

5.  Work for satisfaction rather than for credit. 

6.  Keep your word. There will be times when the circumstances of life will make you forget who you are and what you’re about. That is when you need to be committed to keeping your word, making what you say count. 

If this makes sense to you, resonates with you, we need to talk. 

Discover/know/create your purpose. 
Align all habits to purpose.  
Align all goals with purpose.  
Carve out time for purposeful action.  
Say “NO” to all that stops, deflects, or subtracts from purpose. 

How to make hard tasks easy, mountains molehills, and challenges simple, opt for one of two paths. You can be still, wait for guidance, and expect spontaneous enlightenment. Or you can just roll up your sleeves and get busy doing what you can, with what you’ve got, from where you are. The latter [rhymes with ladder] is usually much faster. And it makes you a lightning rod for divine guidance and spontaneous enlightenment.  – Mike Dooley

financies, Rules, wealth

The Basics on How to Eliminate Debt and Create Wealth

Learn how to have money chase you, instead of you chasing it.

Banks make your money work hard for them.  The banks keep your mortgage and other loans separate from your checking and savings accounts. What purpose does this serve?  This allows them to make as much money as possible on all of your accounts.

Banks make money by lending your money from your checking and savings accounts to other borrowers. They make money by lending the money from other people’s checking and savings accounts to you. The banks make money by lending your own money back to you with interest. Would you like to be your own bank?

Keep this process in mind as we go through the following principles. You can eliminate debt and create wealth to turn the tide and have your money working for you.

Open-End Loans

An open-end loan is a revolving line of credit issued by a lender or financial institution which is approved for a specific amount. It is very flexible, meaning you can take out as much or as little as you need up to the amount of your credit limit, and once you pay off that amount, you can reuse the line of credit again later. Examples of open-end loans are credit cards, some bounce protection lines on checking accounts, and a home equity line of credit, or HELOC.

Closed-End Loans

Closed-end loans are dispersed in full when the loan closes and are paid back, including interest and finance charges, by a specific date. These types of loans are referred to as “installment loans” or “secured loans.” Closed-end loans allow borrowers to buy expensive items–such as a house, a car, a boat, furniture, or appliances and are paid on schedule or penalties and fines are imposed.

Interest Cancellation

Taking a mortgage as an example, the less you owe on your mortgage balance, the less interest you pay. It makes sense to find a simple and easy way to lower your mortgage balance to pay less interest and reduce your number of monthly payments.  Where do you get the extra money to lower your mortgage balance to pay less interest? The is where the excitement begins!

Float and Leverage

Leverage is the use of debt (borrowed capital) to multiply the potential returns from another investment or undertaking. Many companies use leverage to finance their assets. Instead of issuing stock to raise capital companies may use debt financing to invest in business operations to increase shareholder value. Consumers may use float to earn interest in a separate account while utilizing the bank’s assets to sustain their lifestyle.

Strategic Payoff

Most people have more than one debt.  Which debt should you make strategic transfers to first?  Some people recommend that you pay off your smallest debts first, regardless of interest rate, since eliminating the monthly payment for that debt will free up more of your money to go toward other debts.    Other people say to pay off your highest interest rate debt first so that your money will have the greatest impact and cancel the most interest.  Both methods have merit. There is another way.

Conversion

Albert Einstein said Compound Interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it. He who doesn’t pays it. This statement could not be truer! Those who spend 30 (or more) years paying interest on mortgages, cars, credit cards, etc. are simply making the banks rich—extraordinarily rich! Fortunately, those who have the right tools and understanding can also become rich! As you may already know, your money has great potential power. If you use it correctly, and with the right tools, your money can multiply almost exponentially.

By using these principles and applying them to your debt, we can show you how to pay off ALL your debt, including your mortgage, in as little as 5-7 years, and convert your debt into wealth!

financies, Rules, transformation, wealth

This New Year Pull out ALL the Stops!

Are you willing and up for pulling out all the stops in your life? Unless something happens to you, tomorrow will happen for you. You already know how it will go, or maybe not. Would you like to have a today and tomorrow of your choosing?! What’s stopping you? This question has been around for centuries if not 2 or 3 millennia.  Frequently we know what to do and we don’t do it.  What’s missing?

I say it’s awareness. A specific kind of awareness. What you are unaware of, you have no choice over. Everything that operates unconsciously keeps us caught in a web of our own making.  Somehow, even if you don’t know how, something you are doing ‘inside’ and yet outside of your awareness creates how you feel moment to moment.  When in the flow of a certain kind of feeling nothing stops you.

Most of us, most of the time, think that when something happens, some experience of ours triggers a feeling.  That is not how it really works.  There is an internal set of pictures or dialogs we have accumulated and associate with every experience we have that generates the feeling.  Someone says something in a certain ‘tone’ of voice and we instantly become upset and it is their fault for our feelings because they used that tone! You are not sure of where to turn and the panic in your voice and behavior make it nearly impossible to understand any directions.  Once you can catch, notice, or see the missing second step in the process you have a new source of power, and the ability to choose what you create.  Once you are aware of your internal dialog, your internal representations will continue to occur with less power over you, and you now have a choice over how you feel.  If we are unaware of the second step, what happens is an “always automatic” response, based on our childhood experience and programming, giving us the same feelings over and over, automatically.

Instead of ‘the experience’ triggers ‘the feeling’ what happens is ‘the experience’ instantly initiates an ‘old picture or dialog’ first, that comes automatically with the same feeling every time.  Until you catch yourself, are aware of the ‘old picture or dialog’ you are just a robot programmed to do and act the same way over and over.  I’ve noticed mine starts with a ‘something is wrong here’ thought that takes me out of the flow and stops me from being present.

What takes us out of flow? Resistance. What you resist persists. Everything you don’t like about yourself, your life, your surroundings stays in place because of resistance.  Everything we believe is bad and wrong we repress or disown attempting to keep it from our awareness.  Everything we think is bad we resist.  We express it anyway, in dysfunctional and covert ways that create suffering for us and those around us.  You didn’t keep a promise to accomplish some simple tasks this week?  Notice the feelings of blame, discouragement, panic, and or resignation associated with making yourself and the circumstances around you wrong.  I was told over and over as a child, what you like least in others you like least in yourself. Every time someone or something occurs to you as something bad about you, it triggers you emotionally and stops you. We attract situations and people that have the qualities we disown, suppress, and condemn in ourselves, a special form of attraction.

What you are aware of, you have a choice over. The more aware you are of what you are doing ‘inside’ creating how you feel and behave gives you choices you didn’t have before. When aware of the people and situations you attract, become attracted to, and what things mean will reveal your perceptions and points of view that can suddenly provide choices over what to do.  New points of view, perceptions, sometimes called insights provide new freedom to be who you are. What stopped you in the past suddenly disappears.

When we embrace, allow, come to terms with, re-own those parts of us, or our life by becoming aware of them, watching them occur with awareness, new paths open for us and others.  We stop being triggered emotionally and discover compassion for ourselves and for those still stuck exhibiting the behavior.  Fewer people will exhibit what we used to suppress in ourselves, what we disowned, what we resisted.

Watching our feelings of resistance and upsets, the thoughts and pictures that accompany them, with curiosity and awareness, allows us to re-own what we disowned about ourselves and others, ending the resistance and unpleasant feelings associated with them. How we behave is generated by our internal state and our feelings. If the feelings, the internal state is generated automatically and unconsciously, our behavior is automatic and unconscious. “That is just the way I am!” When we behave in ways, we later regret or fail to accomplish what we set out to accomplish we can be sure it is from an automatic program we are not aware of.

When we focus on what we don’t want, we immediately create unpleasant feelings, and cause our mind to create and attract MORE of what we do not want! Any area that isn’t working is where we are unconsciously focusing on and making internal representations of what we don’t want.  How long have you been on a diet that only leaves you more overweight than before?  How far in debt have you become after every commitment to change your behavior with money? What makes a difference?

Watching the internal state, the representations with ‘awareness’ AND directly seeing how they create our feelings and the other internal states, enable what does not serve us to fall away.  Awareness is not the same as knowing that you do something.  “Awareness” involves seeing what you do, AS YOU DO IT, to create your feelings, behaviors, and what and whom you attract or become attracted to.  Instead of attempting to stop doing something that doesn’t serve you, watch yourself do it, with “awareness”.  Once you clearly see the result of what you are doing, you will not be able to keep doing it. If you keep doing it, you have yet to watch it with ‘awareness’.  You do not need to evaluate whether something is resourceful, or exercise any will power [fruitless; you already know that has never worked]. JUST WATCH and the awareness will come.

Until you can change a belief [you may always change them back once you know how], you will unconsciously accumulate ‘evidence’ that the belief is “true”.  When something you do not like happens repeatedly, you are likely proving to yourself that some belief of yours is “true”.  We prove our beliefs to be true in three ways.  Attract, interpret, and act. We unconsciously attract or are attracted to, people and situations that are perfect to help us be right.  We interpret what happens as evidence that what we believe is true, even if or especially if there are other interpretations.   We will act in a way that makes what we believe come true!

Apply awareness; watching the belief with awareness causes the dysfunction to fall away. Once you watch yourself believe something, KNOWING what you are creating, the belief will fall away IF it doesn’t serve you or others.  Be careful that isn’t another belief, however.  Your motivation and enthusiasm for continuing to believe or creating it will disappear once you watch the belief with awareness.

There is a game we play without awareness with ourselves and with others. When we are young, we are taught and we now teach our young children, that certain aspects are bad and wrong, while others are good.  To be ‘okay’, good, and likable we repress or disown the ‘bad’ qualities and do our best to express the ‘good’.  This “Game of Black and White” has the main rule that White MUST Win! Since we all potentially have all the qualities, and because we express the disowned qualities anyway, usually in covert and dysfunctional ways, the game is unwinnable.  The disowned qualities are often called shadows.  The way to spot a shadow is to notice what qualities in others trigger us emotionally. What we like least in others, we like least in ourselves… whenever you point a finger at someone there are three pointing back at you… the reason you do not get along with someone is you are just alike. Many of our issues and problems are the result of playing the Game of Black and White.

If we continue to disown the shadows, we express them in ways that create suffering for us and for others. When we see the shadows with awareness and realize they exist in us, that the feelings and behaviors come from us, the aspects can mature into qualities that are beneficial to us and others.  When you re-own your anger, you can make tough decisions for the benefit of all, develop the power to protect others from suffering, and generate tough love.  When you re-own your fear, sounding the alarm when there is a real threat makes you and yours safer. When we re-own narcissism we acquire true self-esteem, real self-love and allow us to love others more generously.

This path of awareness is a mountain without a top. There are some areas I can offer help and guidance to my family, friends, and current and potential clients.  Would you like to be debt-free without having to change your lifestyle, refinance, or add new income?  I DIDN’T believe it was possible and you may not either.  I can show you a path, that comes with a date in your future when all your debt is paid.  Real freedom appears when there is no mortgage, no credit card debt, no loans of any kind.  A financial analysis of your situation takes less than an hour of your time and I discovered it changed my behavior immediately.  The belief I was forever in debt led to poor habits and behaviors based on either panic or resignation.  $20 for items of no real need were so what, what difference does it make.  There is another path, without stops to your financial freedom.  Contact me now.

Who knew life insurance could provide so much more value than merely a death benefit (which is a big deal)?  How would you like to be your own bank, and sit on both sides of the table, borrowing money from yourself and paying yourself back interest that is tax-free? Sounds too good to be true. I thought so as well.  Contact me now and I will show you how.