Your mind is not your friend! Your mind or Ego wants to control you, it wants to protect you by using fear and it is definitely not your friend. It will warn you of the thousand reasons why you can’t, why you shouldn’t and why you will never succeed trying to do something new. Take that leap of faith and follow God.
Your Ego maintains its existence by keeping you spinning in fear, worry, self-doubt, mind chatter and most people never take the time to discriminate and separate themselves from the mind. Instead, they give their power away to it, by believing they are the doubts, they are the emotions and they are where the problem lies, in giving your power away.
Your mind is a great tool that needs to be used for remembering your bra size or where you live and as a reminder when to eat your broccoli. Just don’t go asking the mind about how to make more money or how to have better relationships or how to lose weight and keep it off. The mind is a processor - its job is to filter and locate information in the field - to call up and recall decisions you have made in the past, it is a storehouse of information. Asking the mind to find an answer it does not have is like looking into a filing cabinet for a file that will never be there.
Notice when your mind is spinning. Now identify the next thing the mind would have you believe. Your first thought is most likely that there is something inherently wrong with you because you can’t figure out how to solve this problem. You’ll never solve the problem because the answers come from God, from the source and to a certain extent; your mind has got you crazed, racing around and beating yourself up. There is no quiet space, no solace for God’s grace to find you.
Have you noticed when you’re in the shower or doing something very mundane that Bam you are hit with this download? The answer all of a sudden appears. Well that’s because your mind is not chomping onto it like a pit bull and God can swoop on in and deliver. A mind racing with thoughts and beating you up because you can never find answers looking in an empty filing cabinet is like a dirty muddy pond. You can’t see through the mud just as you can’t hear the voice of God with all that noise.
Your job is to take your Power Back and place it on God - on that ever-unfolding joy, love and peace that is ALWAYS inside you. When you tap into that consistently, it takes over, and begins to direct and guide your life in miraculous ways. Rather than taking my word for it - prove it to yourself. In chapter 21, The Release Technique, I’ll share with you a phenomenal technique to help you take yourself off automatic pilot and get you back into the driver’s seat of your life;; something you must do if you want to be a powerful creator in life instead of a victim of past programming and continual self-sabotage.
You are not your mind, you are not your body, and you are not your emotions. You are this larger unfolding presence of God to the extent that you allow yourself to be. The Ego would have you believe that if you try something and fail you will die. Examine every fear and you will come to see that at the bottom of it, at the root is the fear of death. That fear says, “Don’t take a risk and start that new business, you might fail then you’ll go broke, you’ll be out on the street, renege on your mortgage and die!” It’s crazy - the fear of failure is what runs and rules most people’s fate. You need to cut that out because that behavior will never serve you.
You are the master of your mind. You know that famous dog expert, Cesar Milan the Dog Whisperer? I’m sure you’ve seen his TV show. He goes into people’s homes whose dogs are very out of whack, unruly, barking, peeing all over the place, acting out and out of control. He goes over there and watches the family interact with the dog, watches it freak out for 30 minutes to an hour then he sits down with the owners and tells them, “Your dog is nuts.”
They say, “We know he’s nuts that’s why we brought you in!”
He tells them your dog is nuts because you have made the dog the master of the house. The dog just wants to be a little happy dog that plays around and acts like a little dog. When you give the dog all the responsibility to be the master he feels your anxiety and then acts out on it. Then you have a troubled, unruly dog. Cesar shows people how to take their Power Back and be the master of the dog. Then very quickly, the dog magically behaves.
Our mind is the exact same way - don’t make your mind your master. Your mind is a creative tool that requires you to command it! Don’t ask it what to do, COMMAND it with statements, visuals and of the types of scenes and feelings you want to experience. Letting your mind run your roost is like handing over the steering wheel to a tyrannical 4 year old! Stop doing that!
The mind, the Ego will have you running jumping through hoops playing small, hiding out, not rocking the boat, not taking risks, feeling resentful, angry, worried and all of these lower emotions spinning around in a soup. While lost, you end up identifying yourself as your feelings, you are unable to make decisions based out of fear and that fear protects you. Let me tell you something, I have failed and failed and failed and I am still here to tell you I’m not dead!
Failure is never failure;; it’s just another way not to get the result you want. Take note and keep going. Most people will never remember your failures but they will remember your achievements!
I used to do live product demos in a big chain store in front of crowds of sometimes 50 people 10-12 times a day. I have to admit to you; sometimes I bombed the shows, epic failures in front of all these people on a regular basis. After a while, I came to understand that the process to nailing the show and getting it right was usually about 2 days of bombing and figuring out what worked and what didn’t with the crowd. Then after that, it was smooth sailing and I had a license to print money.
Now I’ve paid my dues, I was heckled, I’ve fallen off the stage, experienced power outages in the stores, I’ve had people fart and clear a place out, you name it! It’s embarrassing public humiliation but you don’t die. Watch that fear of failure, if you let it - it will rob you of the most fantastic life you have waiting already lined up for you!
I remember one evening driving back home up north in the Laurentian mountains after attending a Canadian Association of Professional Speakers (CAPS) meeting. I was driving this crummy beat up minivan, making $900 because I was sure that, I would get nailed if I committed myself to a car payment. Nuts eh? That’s the freedom seeker in me, always out for freedom.
I’m driving back from this CAPS meeting, beating myself up because I don’t have an impressive opening story to my speech. There I was trying to decide whether or not I should go to the big convention coming up later in the same month, spend $1,500 on the ticket, not to mention the money I would lose out by not showing up to my mop job during the busiest time of the year. In December, retail is always wild. So, all of a sudden I have this major release around the subject of money and realize that I was holding onto all this safety around money. I remember the moment clearly while driving back north. I felt this immense fear release in the van.
That morning at 5 am, I woke up and had this huge download about my opening story, about my dad, the famous artist. I furiously wrote while sobbing through tears this moving story and went back to bed. I woke up at 9 am noticing that I had missed a phone call from a 713 number. I listened to the message from a woman in Costa Rica who said she bought my book last March and had been thinking about inviting me to teach her yoga community some of my mindset principals. She said that she had been too afraid to ask me and for some reason today, she decided just the heck with it and rang me up.
Wow! Synchronicity strikes! It was just the day before that I had put on my Hawaiian scarf, stuck some feathers behind my ears and danced around the house to very loud Hawaiian music to start calling on Hawaii. It was October in Canada and there was snow on the pumpkin outside my door. I was desperate to get the heck out of there! Instead, I ended up attracting Costa Rica - I can do Costa Rica I tell myself. It’s similar to Hawaii – so, that began my international speaking and event touring.
I ended up speaking twice in Costa Rica, two years in a row. That very same morning something else really wild showed up. Out of the blue, and I do mean OUT OF THE BLUE. I was called up by a man inviting me to speak at, Let’s Spread Success, a TED talk event in Montreal.
The next day I had a lady ring me up wanting to help me for free to launch, promote and market my tele- summit because she wanted to learn the ins and outs of being a personal development leader. All of these radical fabulous things showed up on a silver platter as soon as I simply released my inner resistance! How’s that for manifesting on speed dial!
Want to learn how it works then go to Chapter 21, which covers the Release Technique.
A marketing mentor, Adam Urbanski once shared with me a quote from a famous racecar driver, Michael Andretti. He said, “If everything is under control, you’re not going fast enough.” It applies beautifully to both business and personal life. When clients seek me out for my sales and confidence coaching, and say YES they’re always a little afraid. Often the coaching I do comes before the sale to show these women the exact mechanism that has been keeping them playing small all along! Your mind and the fear are not your friends. Either in the end, you have reasons for your excuses or you have results. You chose whom you give your power to. I find that with selling, coaching, consulting or mentoring services, people are really just saying YES to themselves and taking you along for the ride. Mindset is the biggest hurdle because until you can take yourself off of automatic, use real discrimination with your feeling and thoughts and not let fear stop you - you will never get into action. Success is a combination of right action from inspirational action, commanding the mind with visuals and getting your cue from God or the source.
Think about Thomas Edison who failed 3,000 times before he invented the first practical, light bulb. No one remembers the failures. So if you’re life isn’t on par with where you thought it would be at this stage in the game, I dare you, triple dog dare you to take the leap of faith, take the risk of finding out how to say YES and really show up to who you want to be. Take action towards your goals. Sometimes you will fail but, if you keep the goal in mind, keep your eye on the prize and command the mind, you WILL succeed; you have to! This is the recipe for success.
One of the take actions that help to take your Power Back is create your goal’s statement such as, “I am so happy and grateful NOW THAT I have xyz.”
To do this, see yourself in the present tense wearing the clothes you are wearing right now, having ACHIEVED the goal. Get to the place where you know that you have it without a doubt. See, feel and hold that in mind, feel it in your body, every day make it a habit of visualizing your goals and the way will manifest. It will never be the way you think it will be, however, a way always opens. The HOW is not your job - the HOW is God’s job. Your job is to get really clear on what the goal is and affirm it - command it into the mind and let God handle the details.