“As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.” -Helen Keller

From time to time in my life, I’ve gone on a “complaint fast” - that is, I go a day or a week or a month deliberately not complaining (out loud!) about anything.

That’s not to say that if I order pizza for lunch and they bring me a hamburger I won’t send it back - I just don’t follow it up with a list of complaints to my waiter, friends, manager of the restaurant and the editorial page of the Times about what an awful place the world has become when decent, hard working folk can’t even get a slice of pizza without having to deal with gross incompetence and a possible case of criminal negligence.

The reason I do these “fasts” is two-fold:

1. Complaining is the opposite of creating

When you think about it, a complaint is simply an observation with a judgment attached that whatever you’ve observed is a bad thing, or bad for you, or shouldn’t be the way it is.

For example, when I first begin working with someone they’ll often begin with a series of complaints about some aspect of their life.

“My wife,” one client told me, “is going to bankrupt us. However much we’ve got it’s never enough. Sometimes I wonder if she’ll ever be content!”

I nodded, which he took as encouragement to go on with his litany.

“I just bought her a new car and now she wants to go to Hawaii on holiday. She doesn’t seem to understand that it takes money to live the way we live, and the more she wants the harder I have to work.”

While I didn’t actually agree with the “more money = harder work” equation, I decided to leave that for a while and I asked what I thought was the obvious question:

“So what?”

He looked at me, nonplussed.

“What do you mean, ’so what?’”

“Well, it seems to me that you’ve made a few observations about your wife that I have no reason to question - that she doesn’t seem to be contented by having more stuff, and that she hasn’t yet really grasped the connection between your stress levels and the amount of money she spends.”

He was still looking at me, but his look had turned more curious.

“That’s just a statement of fact. It doesn’t have any positive or negative implications at that level. If you look at it in the context of “my wife should be the perfect woman and should be content and should understand all that”, it will seem pretty miserable. But if you look at it in the context of wanting to create a wonderful relationship with her, that’s just what is.”

I looked at him more directly now.

“Here’s my question: if you can see that she doesn’t get more content by you’re getting her more, nicer stuff, why would you keep doing it?”

He looked confused, as though he couldn’t even comprehend the question.

“Let’s think about it in another way,” I continued. “If you were eating cake in order to get thin but you noticed that the more cake you ate, the fatter you got, would you keep buying cake?”

“Of course not.”

“So if you want to create more contentment in your marriage, why would you keep buying your wife more stuff when you’ve already established that doesn’t work for either of you?”

While all their marital difficulties were not instantly resolved in that moment, dropping the judgment from the observation turned it from a “complaint” into a piece of useful data for him. He was trying to create better feelings in his relationship through the acquisition of more expensive stuff, and perhaps unsurprisingly it wasn’t working very well.

By focusing on what he wanted to create - a happy, loving marriage - he was able to make changes in himself and the way he responded to his wife’s discontent that did over time lead to more of what he truly wanted in his life.

2. Complaining is addictive

When I was a kid, I noticed something odd about my relationship with chocolate. I could quite happily go without a Mars bar for months at a time, but if I had one on a Tuesday, I craved another one on Wednesday. While the links between chocolate and serotonin levels in the brain are well-established, I suspect that if a study were ever done scientists would find a similar link between complaining and some brain chemical that relieves stress.

The problem, as with any addictive substance, is that the drug in question (in this case “complaining”) winds up creating more of the very stress it was originally designed to relieve, thus plunging its user into an ongoing cycle of stress and stress-relief that can only be interrupted by eliminating the drug from your system completely.

Today’s experiment will outline a few strategies I’ve found effective for those of you who’d like to live in a less toxic environment and are willing to begin by detoxifying yourself…

——————-
Today’s Experiment
——————-

1. Create a “no-complaint fast” for yourself. The first time I did this, I decided that I would go one week without complaining. If I complained at all during that week, I would immediately begin again with day one. It took me the better part of a year to complete the experiment, but it was
incredibly worthwhile.

2. The next time you notice yourself complaining, see if you can separate out the observation from the judgment. This can be subtle! For example, you might hear yourself say “I’m so busy today!”, which may well be an accurate observation. The judgment will be hidden in the angry or defeated voice-tone in which you say it, or in the heavy sigh that precedes or follows the statement.

3. Turn your complaints into acts of creation. The next time you are tempted to complain about something, ask yourself what is it you want to create in this situation and then go about creating it.

4. If you like, visit www.acomplaintfreeworld.org and order some purple bracelets as reminders for yourself. They used to give them away free, but at last check they had gone up to about 37 cents apiece. I considered registering a complaint, but then I thought better of it…

Have fun, learn heaps, and use your observations about life to create a better world!

With love,
michael

PS - ARE YOU A LEADER?

I will be running a very special workshop on “Creative Leadership” in Vilnius on the 13th - 14th November.

For more information and to reserve your place, visit:
http://www.funcode.lt/en/index.php?id=news

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“Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It
consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through
one’s head.”

-Mark Twain

In the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “The Pirates of Penzance”, the general
saves his daughters from the clutches of the pirates by professing to be an
orphan. The pirates take pity and leave, but the general is next seen
weeping in a chapel.

When the reformed pirate Frederic asks him what the matter is, the general
says that he lied about being an orphan, as witnessed by the “tombs of his
ancestors” that fill the chapel. When Frederic then points out that the
general only recently bought the chapel and that he couldn’t possibly be
amongst his own ancestors, the general responds as follows:

GENERAL: Frederic, in this chapel are ancestors: you cannot deny
that. With the estate, I bought the chapel and its
contents. I don’t know whose ancestors they were, but
I know whose ancestors they are now!

While we may smile at the notion that in buying someone else’s family estate
you in some way also become a part of that family, we do the same thing all
the time in our own heads. That is, we fill our minds with random thoughts
and ideas about how the world is or even how it should be, and then feel the
burden of these thoughts as if they were truly our own.

For example, my daughter Maisy came into our bed last night, sobbing that
she had dreamt that our cat had died and we had to bury her. No amount of
reassurance (including the presence of the actual cat) would calm her until
my wife agreed to remove the dream from Maisy’s head. (For those of you not
familiar with this process, we have found it is most effectively done
through the ear after a bit of struggle and accompanying sound effects!)

When I checked in to see how Maisy was doing this morning, she told me that
although the dream had indeed been successfully removed, she was still able
to imagine the cat dying which made her very, very sad.

And herein lies the point:

*It’s not the thoughts that pass through your head that impact your life;
it’s the ones you take ownership of and think about all day long

Here’s an example of the typical thoughts that might pass through someone’s
head in any given minute on the way to work in the morning:

I’m going to be late I just know I’m going to be late I shouldn’t have eaten
that extra piece of cake last night god I’m a fat disgusting slob no wonder
no man/woman will ever find me attractive boy he/she is gorgeous I wonder
what it would be like to be with someone like that I bet it would be
wonderful I have so much love inside me it feels really good but no one will
ever know because I’m all alone what was the name of that song I heard on
the radio last night oh god I’m going to be late…

Now, in and of itself those thoughts are not a problem. You might experience
a slight boost in your feelings when the happier thoughts float by and a
slight dip in your mood when the more negative thoughts pass through, but if
you let each thought pass without thinking about it too much, the
thoughtstream will simply flow on quietly in the background throughout your
day.

But when thoughts can become a problem is when you step in and start to
actively think about them.

For example:

I’m going to be late I just know I’m going to be late I shouldn’t have eaten
that extra piece of cake last night god I’M A FAT DISGUSTING SLOB NO WONDER
NO MAN/WOMAN WILL EVER FIND ME ATTRACTIVE - WHY IS THIS ALWAYS THE WAY? IF
ONLY I HAD MORE WILLPOWER. I’M DEFINITELY GOING ON THAT DIET TOMORROW -
BUT WHAT’S THE POINT, I NEVER STICK TO ANYTHING. I’M SUCH A LOSER - I NEED
MORE CAKE!!!!

It’s easy to imagine where this train of thought might lead, and the
associated bad feelings and potentially poor decisions that will follow on
from it. The Toltec shaman Don Miguel Ruiz describes this phenomenon as
being “hooked” by a thought - and once we agree to give our attention to any
given thought, that thought becomes more and more real to us over time and
has more and more power over our life.

The trick, if you want a less stressful, more enjoyable life, is not to call
in the thought police but rather to allow any and all thoughts to pass
through your head unhindered. If you allow a negative thought to pass
through your head without giving it a second thought (or a third, or fourth,
or even fiftieth), that thought will have no impact on your life.

But if you get hooked by it, dwell on it, make it important, and start to
think about it and claim it for your own, then like that very model of a
modern major general, you will become subject to it’s inevitable effects.

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–

1. Take a few minutes to really listen to your internal dialogue. You may
find it easier to do if you write it down in “real time”, like taking
dictation from that voice inside your head.

2. Notice the somewhat random nature of these thoughts. If they seem very
linear and organized, that’s because you have been “thinking” them instead
of simply noticing them.

As best you can, allow each thought to pass through without clinging on to
it or taking it over for yourself. If you do notice you’ve gotten caught up
on one particular train of thought, just let it go or ride it out to its
inevitable conclusion.

3. During the day, if you notice yourself feeling down or a bit worried or
unsettled, see if you can spot the thought behind the feeling. As soon as
you’ve spotted it, let it go. You can imagine it like a stick that’s become
stuck in a river, and simply give it a nudge to set it free. Notice if a
higher thought comes to take its place!

Have fun, learn heaps and let your thoughts flow…

With love,
michael

PS - I’m going to be leading three workshops in London later this month and
I’d love to see you there!

For all the information, visit:
http://www.geniuscatalyst.com/events.php

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” The way of the world is meeting people through other people.” -Robert Kerrigan

Social networking sites like “MySpace” and “Facebook” are all the rage at
the moment, making it easier than ever to find people you’ve lost track of
over the years and harder than ever to stay in touch with any of them.

While there will always be room in anyone’s wonderful life for good
connections with good people, from a business networking point of view, this
can become a problem.

The solutions is hidden in the notion of “six degrees of separation” - the
idea that we are all only six people away from anyone in the world, be it a
yak farmer in Outer Mongolia or the President of the United States.

This notion originally evolved from an experiment done by psychologist
Stanley Milgram in the late 1960’s.  160 people in Nebraska were given
packages with instructions to try and get those packages to a stockbroker
who lived in Massachusetts.

When Milgram tracked the trail the packages had gone through to reach their
target, he found a surprising fact. Not only was the average number of steps
the package took between 5 and 6 (hence 6 degrees of separation), over half
of the successfully delivered packages had been finally forwarded on to the
stockbroker by the same three people.

These three people acted as hubs for the social network - focal points which
connected not just people to people but network to network.

One of the most famous of these hubs, or as the author Malcolm Gladwell
calls them “People Connectors”, is the actor Kevin Bacon from the internet
game “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon”.  The object of the game is to connect
anyone in show business to Kevin Bacon in six names or less.

The game is surprisingly easy, although research shows that Bacon is only
ranked 669th on the all-time connected actor list.  (Number one is Rod
Steiger, star of a number of films from the ’50’s and ’60’s including “On
the Waterfront” and “In the Heat of the Night”.)

So what are the implications of all this for streamlining your network?

*Contrary to conventional wisdom, you do not need an extensive network to
get full value from the process of networking.*

In fact, an extensive network may slow you down. All you need is to maintain
strong relationships with a few People Connectors and you can replace your
rolodex with a short list of five to ten names.  This allows you to spend
less time “networking” and more time talking with the people you really want
access to.

This doesn’t mean you need to turn down friend requests on MySpace or
FaceBook; it just means that you can stay connected with your connections
and friendly with your friends in a fraction of the time.

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–

1. Over the next few days, make a list of everyone you know who would be
happy to receive a phone call from you.

2. Go through your list and circle the people you suspect to be People
Connectors. They’re always on the guest list, throw great parties, seem to
bump into people they know everywhere they go, and often are keen to get the
people they know together.

3. Now, think of some things you can do to be of service to these people.
One of the best ways to do this is to introduce them to some people you
think they might like. After all, People Connectors are usually People
Connectors because they enjoy connecting with new people!

4. Finally, brainstorm some other “People Connectors” it might be worth
adding to your new, very manageable network. A good way to do this is to ask
everyone you know, “Who is the most connected, plugged in person you know?”
If a name comes up again and again, this person will probably an excellent
addition to your network.

Have fun, learn heaps, and get connected!

With love,
michael

PS - If you’d like to become my friend at “Facebook” (www.facebook.com),
just send through a friend request with a quick note saying you’re a reader
of these tips.  I’ll look forward to “meeting” you there!

http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael_Neill/599977871

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If you missed parts one and two, you can read them here:

Part One: http://geniuscatalyst.com/geniusblog/?p=109
Part Two: http://geniuscatalyst.com/geniusblog/?p=110

“The secret of success - don’t do it yourself!” -Barbara Sher

Now that you’ve built your success team, how do you get the most out of it?

Here’s a shortlist of some of the most common reasons people like to help
out - take note of which ones you tend to use when seeking help from your
network, and which ones tend to motivate you….

1. Money

People exchange their time and energy for money all the time. But money
alone is rarely enough to get great, motivated action.

2. Status and Power

Hollywood and the political arena are perhaps the two most obvious examples
of how the promise of future status and power can motivate ordinary people
to extraordinary actions.

3. Challenge

For some people, it is the challenge that gets and keeps them involved.
What’s important here is balance. Too much challenge and people shut down;
too little, they get bored and walk away.

4. Enjoyment

When you are really enjoying something, do you tend to want to do less of it
or more of it? Me too!

5. Appreciation

Sometimes we feel taken advantage of, not because we haven’t been rewarded
for what we’ve done, but because we don’t feel appreciated.  Never
underestimate the motivational power of a well-placed and heartfelt “thank
you”!

6. Involvement

When it comes to living the life of your dreams, one of the least effective
pieces of time management wisdom is the notion of “delegation”. Apparently,
we should be constantly looking for activities that we can delegate to our
assistants, colleagues, spouses, and children, freeing up our time for “more
important things”.

There are several problems with this approach.

a. Many people don’t have assistants.

b. Colleagues, spouses and children tend to respond poorly to “delegation”,
largely because….

c. No-one ever delegates the fun stuff!

In fact, more often than not delegation winds up costing us time and energy
in teaching, managing, and worrying about whether or not tasks we could
easily do ourselves are being adequately done by others.

The solution is to increase involvement. Try replacing the idea of
delegation with that of “inviting people to participate” and watch their
levels of involvement, motivation, and creativity take flight!

7. A Sense of Worth

One of the most popular links on the web is the link to The Hunger Site -
(www.thehungersite.com)  Clicking on the link allows people to donate a cup
of food to a hungry child just by clicking a button. Despite our societal
protestations of increasing selfishness, my experience is that people will
still do far more for others (and the sense of self-worth that engenders in
them) than they ever will do for themselves.

Bonus Tips:

On “Being Taken Advantage Of”

The notion that people “take advantage” of one another is based on the myth
of reciprocity - that if I do something for you, you are now obligated to do
something for me. Here’s how it usually works…

I do something for you which I don’t really want to do in hopes of getting
something from you later that I want. When I don’t get it, I say I was taken
advantage of.

People even get angry with God about this - “I was a really good person, I
ate my broccoli and went to church and didn’t covet my neighbor’s wife, but
bad things happened to me anyway”.

The problem is that in most cases, the bargain was never made explicit - if
it had been, the other person may well never have made it. Fortunately,
there are two simple solutions to this…

1. If you want to play tit-for-tat, make sure all agreements are explicit
and mutual.

2. If you don’t want to do something, say “No”.

On “The World as a Mutual Support System”:

There is one other distinction which I believe to be critical to getting the
most out of what other people have to offer, and that is the idea of the
world as a mutual support system. One of the most common ways this idea is
expressed is:

As you sow, so shall you reap, or What goes around, comes around

What makes this a very different idea than reciprocity is that we do not
need to look to get back from the same place in which we give. The Jewish
notion of “tzedakah” says that the highest form of charity is to give
anonymously to those who cannot possibly give back. Not only does this
relieve the receiver from the burden of reciprocity, it opens the giver up
to receive “fair value” back from the whole universe.

The key to tapping in to the mutual support network?

1. Give, give, give, give, give!

2. Don’t look to get it back from where you gave it.

And if someone does something nice for you, don’t pay it back - pay it
forward!

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–

1. Review the seven keys to motivating your team listed above

2. For each of the people on your list, make a note of how you could
actively incorporate one or more of the keys to keep their motivation and
interest high.

Have fun, learn heaps, and if all else fails - just love them!

With love,
michael

PS - This series of tips was originally adapted from the audio series “The 7
Myths of Success”, now available as a download!

Order yours here:

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If you missed part one, you can read it here:
http://geniuscatalyst.com/geniusblog/?p=109

“My motto has always been that anybody can do it better than me.”

- Paul Orfalea, founder and chairman of Kinko’s

Let me tell you some hard truths about my family - my youngest daughter is
an incompetent human being. She can’t drive a car, she gives terrible
advice, and quite frankly, her cooking leaves a lot to be desired.

“But Coach” , I hear you cry. “That’s OK. Cut her some slack. She’s only
six!”

Hmmm….

Here’s my question - at what age does it stop being OK to not be good at
things? Should I start judging her as incompetent and less than when she’s
Sixteen? Sixty?

Perhaps more importantly is at what age will it stop being OK to her -
because that’s the age where we will begin to teach her the myth that asking
for help is an admission of inadequacy.

Oh, we won’t mean to, of course. But when her teacher rolls his eyes and
tells her to “just work it out for herself”, her well-meaning parents huff
in frustration and do it for her, and her friends all laugh because she
didn’t know the answer, she’ll learn.

And unfortunately, then she’ll become as limited as each one of us, trying
to make her way dependant on only her own meager resources in a world of
knowledge and possibilities that expand by the nanosecond.

Fortunately, there is a cure. It’s called “other people’s resources”, and
you can tap into them at any time through the simple act of asking for
assistance!

Once you have identified someone you would like to be a part of your success
team, (see last week’s tip), the next step is to contact them.

Today’s experiment gives you an excellent process to use to make your
contact successful. (This is assuming you already know the people you want
on your team. If not, your next step is to find someone else who does!)

In one of my favorite success books, “Simple Steps to Impossible Dreams”,
author Steven Scott offers the following advice for recruiting mentors which
I have loosely adapted for recruiting members of your success team…

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–

1. Your “Dream Team”

Make a list of the people you would like to be on your success team. List
the names in order of preference, starting with the potential members of
your “dream team”.

2. Relationship Inventory

Go down your list and note the status of your current relationship with each
person. I like to use a home-made rating system as follows:

We regularly help each other out
5 Points

Our relationship is good
4 Points

They owe me a favor
3 Points

I owe them a favor
2 Points

Our relationship is poor
1 Point

(Note: Some people find the logic in my point system a bit puzzling. I find
that people are more motivated to help when the relationship is strong than
when they “owe me one”.)

3. Research!

For each person on your list, write down everything you know about them -
likes, dislikes, interests, and passions. Don’t be afraid to ask around and
do additional research - the better prepared you are, the better your
meeting will go. (Plus it means you can put off actually contacting them for
a little while longer!

4. Prepare your approach

Use what you know and what you’ve learned from your research to decide
whether to make your approach formal or informal, general or specific, overt
or covert. While “Hey - wanna be on my success team?” may work for some of
the people on your list, it’s liable to get you kicked out of as many rooms
as it gets you in to.

At the very least, you should be able to say exactly what it is you would
like them to help you with and why in less than a minute.

Example:
“Bob, I’m always amazed at how much smarter I am when I’m talking with you
than the rest of the time. Would you be willing to let me bounce my business
ideas off you before I approach the banks?”

5. Make contact

The old rule about asking for help was : In person is best, on the phone is
second best, and a letter is a distant third. These days, however, you may
find e-mail gives you access to people you would never have been able to
speak to in the past.

Whatever your means of communication, try and be brief - most people worth
getting assistance from truly value their time.

Have fun, learn heaps, and may all your success be fun!

With love,
michael

PS - This series of tips was originally adapted from the audio series “The 7 Myths of Success”, now available as a download!

Order yours here: http://www.geniuscatalyst.com/7myths.php

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“When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.”

-Ethiopian proverb

How did Diane Nyad, holder of the World Record for the longest individual nonstop swim (102.5 miles in the open sea) do it? In her own words, she did it thanks to the combined efforts of her 51 person “success team”.

Successful athletes at any level, from Olympic medal winners to Tiger Woods (currently the highest paid athlete in any sport with an annual income above $100 million) are supported by a huge team of skilled professionals, from coaches to mentors to managers, trainers, nutritionists, and psychologists, all working together to bring out the best in the person and help them in achieving their full potential.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had the support of that kind of team in the pursuit of your dream, whether it’s to join the millionaire’s round table, marry the woman of your dreams, climb Mount Everest, or raise happy, healthy children?

One of the most crippling ideas pervading our society is the myth of “one woman against the world” - the idea that success is most meaningful and gratifying when it’s achieved on your own. Stories of “self-made” men and “self-made” millionaires have inculcated an attitude in Western culture best described as “it only counts if I do it myself”.

There are two primary problems with this attitude:

a. When we evaluate our achievements by the effort we have expended rather than by what we have achieved, we devalue our own inner sense (innocence?) of wanting and lose touch with our most basic source of motivation.

b. It doesn’t work!

In fact, I would go so far as to call it’s opposite a law of life:

*Every worthwhile accomplishment is the result of a team effort.*

Now when I say team, I’m not suggesting that everyone who supports a successful person thinks of themselves as part of that person’s success team. Many of the people who have helped me most in my life have never met me, be they authors, speakers, or role-models I have learned from. In fact, we all know people who would take offense at the very idea that they were part of your success team.

Here’s a distinction - the world operates like a mutual support network (more on this in next week’s tip!) Anytime we help someone better themselves or reach for a goal, we have, if only for a moment, joined their team. Similarly, anytime someone supports us, be it by helping to provide the food we eat, the information we need, or the money that helps us to thrive, they are in those moments on our team.

When I ask people on my “Seven Myths of Success” workshops to give me an exception to the above rule, invariably someone proudly refers to themselves as having “put themselves through school” or some other educational/training process.

While I believe we have every reason to be proud of whatever level of education we’ve attained in our lives, I wonder how far we could have gotten if we had to write our own textbooks and make the money to support ourselves without in turn being supported by the efforts of others who have built the businesses, created the products, or earned the money that eventually finds its way into our bank balances. (Let alone making our own computer chips from silicon we harvested using simple tools made from wood and flint we found lying around the cave!)

So if “doing it ourselves” isn’t a real option, how do we go about consciously and actively making living the life of our dreams a team effort?

Glad you asked….

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
———————
Today’s experiment (and next week’s, which is a continuation of today’s theme) takes more time than usual, but the benefits you reap will be significant. You may want to print off these tips so that you can do the experiments in your own time….

Step I. (approx. 5 minutes):

Write down a description of your big dream - the goal in life, tangible or intangible, that for you would be the epitome of success and fulfillment. For now, don’t worry about whether or not it’s stated in the positive, how you’ll know you’ve got it, and whether or not it’s realistic or within your control to create it. In the words of Robert Fritz, “You want what you want, whether or not you think you can have it.”

(If you are having trouble with this step, who do you know who could help you in uncovering what matters to you most?)

Step II. (approx. time 10 minutes, though you’ll come back to this list throughout the week as more names occur to you):

1. Make a list of the people who are already part of your success team. This can include friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues, but it can also include authors and role-models who inspire and educate you, be it in person or through their books, tapes, videos, etc. Remember, your success team is made up of those people who support you in the pursuit of your dream and/or your day to day life, regardless of whether or not they think of themselves this way!

Bonus Tip:
Every great king kept a fool or jester in his court - a person who had permission to criticize and therefore counsel the otherwise “infallible” monarch. What perhaps unwitting members of your success team offer you honest feedback, even (and especially!) when you don’t want to hear it? As Abraham Lincoln said “The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.”

Step III (approx. time 30 minutes):

To help expand and refine your team, try each of the following:

1. Make a list of all the roles you would like fulfilled if you were building your own personal success support team from scratch.

Example:
Coach, Mentor, Cheerleader/Motivator, Teacher/Trainer, Financial Advisor, Lawyer, Accountant, Plumber, etc.

Answer each of the following questions:

*How many of these roles are or could be filled by people who are already in your life?

*If you were going to create your “ideal success team”, who would you most want to fill them?

*Who on your current success team could help you find the “missing” players on your ideal success team?

2. Make a list of your strengths and weaknesses in relation to your big dream - those things you do extremely well and those things you do not which interfere with your success.

3. Next to each weakness, write down your ideal person to support you in this area

Bonus Tip:
I like to keep a separate list in my address book and contact management software for members of my success team. When I get stuck on a project, a quick flick through my success team roster will remind me of just the right person to call or e-mail and help me “unstick myself”. Surprisingly enough, I find I often don’t even need to make the call - just seeing the person’s name acts as a trigger for my creative imagination and I can “hear” them telling me or asking me about exactly what I need to know!

Next week, in part two, I’ll give you some top tips for recruiting, motivating, and managing your team as you move forward in pursuit of your dream….

Have fun, learn heaps, and in the words of Oprah Winfrey, one of the people on my success team:

“You can’t do it all yourself. Don’t be afraid to rely on others to help you accomplish your goals.”

With love,
michael

PS - This series of tips was originally adapted from the audio series “The 7 Myths of Success”, now available as a download!

Order yours here:
http://www.geniuscatalyst.com/7myths.php

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Few things are more worthy of letting go of than the habitual thoughts which lead to feelings of pain, rejection, resentment, bitterness, and anger. The longer you harbor these old, dark thoughts, the longer they will hold you back from the love, peace, and joy we seek in our relationships with ourselves and others.

It’s like a scab - if you pick at it, it will re-open, fester, and likely become infected. If you leave it alone, it will heal. Even if there’s a lot of pain and the healing is slow, by shifting your focus away from the scab and on to the rest of your healthy body, you’re making space for the wound to heal itself.

—————–
TODAY’S EXPERIMENT
—————–
1. Pick an old grudge, resentment, pain, or rant you’re still holding onto. It doesn’t matter if the other person is dead or alive, or how old the ache you’ve got stuck in your craw. (By the way, what IS a craw? :-). Write down one concise sentence summing up what you’re still upset about.

Example:
I am so angry that you stole money from my business.

2. Find three positives you received, other bad experiences you were spared, or other good outcomes that flowed forth from this event. Write down the blessings, starting with “If you hadn’t done this, I might never have….”

Example:

* If you hadn’t done this, I might never have learned to pay attention to my finances.
* If you hadn’t done this, I might never have realized how much I hated this work.
* If you hadn’t done this, I might never have faced my issues with my father.

3. Looking backward from today, trace all the seemingly unrelated good things you’ve got in your life now that might NOT have come about if you hadn’t gone through that “unforgivable” experience. Add these to your list.

Example:

* I might never have gone to Europe.
* I might never have met my beloved.
* I might never have discovered my calling.

4. Fold the piece of paper several times. On the outside, write your own version of this message: “From this day forth, I release myself from this resentment. I have suffered, I have been blessed, I am letting go, and I am moving on.”

5. Tear up the piece of paper or burn it ceremonially. You may feel a rush of energy released when you do so. The rush comes from the energy you’re reclaiming as you let go of the old resentment.

Have fun, learn heaps, and stop picking those scabs!

With love,
Michael

PS - Today’s tip was adapted from our 365 day e-program, Success Made Fun, co-written with the fabulous Michele Lisenbury Christensen (www.workingwithpower.com). Tuition for the program is included in your membership to the Solutions Café. If you join the Café between now and the beginning of September, we’ll extend your membership an extra 3 months so you can begin our brand new program in October.

For more information and to sign up, visit:
http://www.geniuscatalyst.com/cafe.php

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“I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.”

-George Bernard Shaw

My two dogs, Mishka and Abby, have very different personalities. Mishka is bored unless engaged in her favorite game, which as you might imagine for a dog, is fetch. You take her bone and throw it as far as you can, and she chases it as fast as she can. Then she brings it back to you and asks (well, begs) you to throw it again. She wants to play fetch continuously, and I have occasionally speculated that if I let her, she would keep chasing that bone right up until the point where she collapsed of physical exhaustion.

I call Mishka a “Goal Dog”, because her behavior is similar to what I see in compulsive goal-setters. They continually set goals in every area of their lives, driving themselves forward relentlessly towards the ever receding goal of “making it”. They rarely stop to consider what they would do if they did make it, and those that do succeed (at least by societies standard) often find themselves bored and lonely until they throw themselves back into the fray.

Essentially, compulsive goal-setting is like playing a game of fetch with yourself - you throw the bones as far as you can (set the biggest goals you can imagine) and then chase them with hyper-focused attention and continual action. The problem comes when your happiness and self-worth are the bones.

For most compulsive goal-setters, their sense of well-being comes from how well they think they are doing. And since they are constantly raising the bar on what “success” and “making it” mean, they are never doing well enough to feel happy and worthwhile.

There is always more action to be taken and more targets to be reached, so there is never a sense of being content right where you are sitting now. And, I occasionally speculate, if they let themselves they will keep chasing those goals right up until the point where they collapse of physical exhaustion.

My other dog, Abby, is more of what I call a “River Dog”. I call her this based on the writing of Earl Nightingale (founder of Nightingale-Conant), who described “river people” as being those “who are happiest and most alive when they’re in the river - in whatever business or career or profession it happens to be. And success comes to such people as inevitably as a sunrise. In fact, they are successes the moment they find their great field of interest; the worldly trappings of success will always come in time.”

Abby loves the park, and she loves the house. She loves going for a run with my son, but she seems equally happy and content to hang out on the sofa with our cat. In fact, wherever Abby is, she throws herself into the mix without ever seeming to need things to be a certain way.

Bizarrely, the one game Abby will almost never play is fetch. You can throw her bone as often as you like, but unless you go and get it yourself it will never be seen again.

When it comes to us human beings, I think of these two approaches to life as being less about personality types than behavioral choices. In any moment, we can decide that what we have is not enough and look around for something to fill in the gaps, or we can decide that what we have is exactly what we want. We can turn our “bone of happiness” into a bone of contention and throw it off into some imaginary future, or we can enjoy gnawing on it right here, right now.

As Henry David Thoreau wrote so many years ago:

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to suck the marrow from the bones of life; to put to rout all that was not life, and not to come to the end of life, and discover that I had not lived.”

———————
Today’s Experiment:
———————

Step one: Take the week off from trying to accomplish anything with your life. Enjoy yourself, enjoy your loved ones, enjoy your work, enjoy your life. If you can’t bring yourself to take the whole week off, take a few days off from the game of achievement. If you can’t get yourself to take a few days off, just take one. If you can’t even take one day off from the “more, better, faster” game, repeat step one.

Have fun, learn heaps, and may you live all the days of your life!

With love,
Michael

PS - In case you think I missed out on step two, I didn’t. There is
no step two. When it comes to living fully in the moment, nothing
happens next!

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“If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t achieve.”

-Lao Tzu

Last weekend, I was chatting with the extraordinary therapist/philosopher George Pransky (www.pandacc.com) when he shared a distinction that gave me a whole new understanding of the dynamic underlying not only my frustration with certain world events but also the effectiveness of my own “Effortless Success” programs.

In order to share the distinction with you, I’d like you to imagine there are two separate elements involved in creating anything we want.

The first is an emotional investment - the extent to which we put our happiness, self-worth and well-being on the line in our pursuit of an outcome.

The second is mental and physical involvement - the extent to which we put our creative and physical energies into the creation of that outcome.

There are essentially four ways in which these elements can combine in relation to any goal, problem or circumstance you can imagine in the world.

1. Low Investment/Low Involvement

Low investment/Low involvement is when you don’t particularly care (or even know) about what happens and you are doing pretty much nothing to influence the outcome in any way.

Someone who doesn’t care about sport will be unaffected by the outcome of a sporting match. Someone who has no interest in a relationship, job or world situation will not only not care how those things are going, they will do little or nothing to attempt to influence how things go in the future.

On the plus side, low investment/low involvement is an extremely low stress and relatively easy way to be; the down side is you both miss out on both the fun of creation and the potential impact you could be having in your life and in the world.

2. High Investment/Low Involvement

One of the few fist fights I have ever found myself in came when I misguidedly suggested to a football fan that his team’s loss that day to their cross-city rivals did not really merit the amount of moral outrage he was expressing in the pub that night. This is, in fact, every fan’s dilemma - their moods rise and fall with their team’s fortunes yet outside of cheering loudly and the occasional fervent prayer, there’s nothing they can do to affect the outcome.

This is the high investment/low involvement dilemma - you care too much and do too little. While in some situations this is necessitated by circumstance (i.e. it’s unlikely your favorite team will ever let you out onto the field to make the game winning play), the lack of action is more often due to learned helplessness and emotional paralysis - it seems as though there is so much to be done that you wind up feeling overwhelmed and doing nothing.

3. High Investment/High Involvement

Graduates of motivational seminars, social and political activists, and high-flying entrepreneurs and careerists tend to pursue their goals from a high investment/high involvement point of view. They work long hours, take massive action, do whatever it takes, and then ride the emotional rollercoaster up through the thrill of victory and down into the agony of defeat.

One minute they’re on top of the world; the next their down in the pits of despair. In fact, how well they’re doing often comes down not so much with whether you happen to catch them in an up or a down than with how long they’ve been riding the coaster.

For while this can be an effective approach in the short-term, it often leads to the burn-out/drop-out mentality that stops so many people from actually reaching their goals, and in many people an actual fear of setting goals.

“Oh, no - I’m not putting myself through *that* again” the former eco-warrior or bankrupted businessman will say. Yet lowering your involvement (i.e. doing less, dropping out, not playing anymore, etc.) will not ultimately resolve your desire for change. It will simply give you a bit of time to lick your wounds and recover your spirit before throwing yourself back into the arena in the only way you know how.

4. Low Investment/High Involvement

The two best ways I know to lower your level of emotional investment in an outcome are:

a. Get as clear as you can about what is within your control and what is not.

b. Really see that you will be OK regardless of what happens and how things turn out - that your ultimate happiness and well-being is not at stake.

Years ago, I decided to see what would happen if I engaged in an act of “happy activism” - that is, I would do anything I could think of to get our local council to put a crosswalk in at the intersection near our house, but I would completely let myself off the hook for how things turned out, which I recognized lay well outside of the sphere of my control. While the process wound up taking over a year, to my surprise the entire project was low-stress, extremely enjoyable, and as it happened resulted in a crosswalk.

This is the real pay-off of a low investment/high involvement/”effortless success” approach - you get all the fun of being creatively engaged without any of the stress of being emotionally invested. It’s completely sustainable because it’s not dependant on continual emotional refueling to keep you going. And by letting go of trying to control the uncontrollable (i.e. what other people will do and how things ultimately turn out), you ironically increase your influence and the probability of getting what you want.

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–

1. Make a list of the significant projects, goals or problems you are facing in your life right now.

2. On a scale from 1 - 10, rank yourself for investment (how miserable will you be if this doesn’t work out?) and involvement (how much creativity, engagement and action are you bringing to creating things the way you want them to be?).

3. Choose one project or goal to deliberately take a low-investment/high-involvement approach to and notice what you notice.

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy experimenting!

With love,
Michael

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“The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

-Marcel Proust

I was speaking with a friend yesterday who told me about a simple conversation which changed her life.

She was in the midst of complaining to one of her teachers about her life when she said “I guess what I really want is to be happy.”

He smiled at her and asked, “Do you ever get a happy feeling?”

“Occasionally,” she replied.

“Do more of that,” he said.

Nonplussed by the simplicity of the reply, she went on to discuss her failing marriage.

“Was there a time when your marriage was happy?” her teacher asked.

“Well of course, in the beginning.”

“What was different?”

She thought about it for a few moments.

“I guess when we were first together I wasn’t so critical of him all the time. Nowadays I’m obsessed with every stupid thing he’s ever done, and when we’re together it feels like I’m just waiting to see how he’ll mess things up this time.

In the early days, I couldn’t stop thinking about what a great guy he was and running through all the fun times we had together in my mind. All I wanted to do was just enjoy hanging out with him.”

Her teacher smiled again, said “Do more of that”, and walked away.

She said that her first response to the conversation was shock and a bit of anger at her difficult, difficult problems being dismissed like that. “After all,” she thought to herself, “that’s the kind of simplistic advice I would expect from my grandmother!” But then something shifted.

She could see her future out in front of her like a line, and she saw how her constant obsession with her husband’s faults would lead to an unpleasant separation and divorce. Then she imagined making his good qualities more important than his bad ones and simply enjoying his company and could see a long and increasingly happy life together stretching on out into the future.

When she imagined herself continuing to obsess about her unhappiness, her image of the future became cloudy and grey; as soon as she imagined herself “doing more happy feelings”, it brightened up and just thinking about it made her smile.

Since I knew her to be someone who was generally very happy and whose marriage, while no doubt not perfect, seemed perfectly wonderful, I asked her how she had made the change.

“It was actually quite easy”, she replied. “Once I really saw the impact of my obsessing with what’s wrong and compared it to the possibility of focusing on what’s right, I just naturally started to do less of what wasn’t working and more of what was.”

“But what about when you were caught up in a negative spin?” I asked.

“I either waited it out, knowing it was just a low mood and would pass,” she said, “or sometimes, I just changed my mind.”

Now it was my turn to be nonplussed.

“You just changed your mind?”

“Sure. Haven’t you ever had a negative reaction to something but then, as you learned more about it, you decided that it was actually a good thing?”

“Of course. When Nina first told me she was pregnant, I thought it was a disaster and that I was going to have to give up my work and become a plumber. As soon as my son was born, I realized how gloriously wrong I had been and now having kids is one of the most wonderful things in my life.”

My friend smiled at me mischievously.

“Do more of that.”

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–

1. Think about a situation in your life you would like to change for the better.

2. Divide a piece of paper into two columns. In the left hand column, jot down everything that’s wrong with that situation and how you behave in relation to it.

3. Next, use the right hand column to note anything that *is* working and how you behave in relation to it when you are at your best.

4. Look at the left hand column. Imagine how this situation will wind up if you keep thinking about it and responding to it like this.

5. Now, do the same with the right hand column. What would it be like if it kept getting better and you kept responding to it in this way?

6. Whatever you discover that works in the right hand column, do more of that!

Have fun, learn heaps, and when you’re convinced there’s no hope, realize that it might be time to change your mind…

With love,
Michael

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