Are you clear about your intentions?

One of my all time favorite authors is Deepak Chopra. I have participated in weekend seminars with him and have gone to numerous events to hear him speak. He has written over 30 books and the man is absolutely brilliant. I especially like that what he teaches is totally consistent with the Unshackled Leadership philosophy and for all of these reasons, when he says something, I listen.

One of the things he says is that your life is created out of your intentions and what you have your attention on. And, given the series of posts I’ve just concluded writing, that’s totally understandable since what we have our attention on and what we are intending live in our thoughts and it is our thoughts that create.

If you’re with me so far, you can understand why I stress that it’s critical to be thinking about the future you want to create rather than your current problems, challenges and circumstances because both are what’s grabbing your attention. If you have your attention on your problems, challenges and circumstances, you’ll create more of those. But if you have your attention on the future you want to create, that’s what you’ll manifest.

What I want to focus on here is the issue of your intentions. It’s not my experience that most people focus much on that. To encourage you to do exactly that, let me share with you something we at Unshackled Leadership Co. do every week. I learned this from reading The Intenders Handbook and if you want to learn more about this, you can go to their web site and there’s lots of information there.

Bottom line: in order for all of us to spend time thinking about what we want to intend to happen, we have a weekly phone call every Monday morning. We all call into our bridge line since we’re scattered around the country. What happens on the call is as follows: Understanding that each of us has declared our intentions for the week to the group the week before, each person in the group has an opportunity to report to the others how their week was, with particular emphasis on what we had included on our intentions list for the previous week.

For example, one of the things I always put on my list is that some new, unexpected business opportunity comes my way. Well last week, out of the blue, I received a call from someone who was referred to me by two people familiar with our work, wanting to talk about my willingness to participate in a meeting of their company. Another member of our group has been intending for several months to get a brand new car and this week she was excited to report that the new car had arrived.

There may be some questions or discussions about what each of us reports but that is not a major part of the call. Anyway, after each of us has shared our report from the previous week, we again go around the circle, so to speak, and each of us shares our intentions for the coming week. As each of us completes, the rest of us say: “And so it is.” We then forward our list of intentions to everyone else in the group.

Why do we do this and what are the benefits? Well, if what we create in life is based on what we have our attention on and our intentions, the most obvious answer to that question is that it forces us to create our intentions. What most if not all of us do is to take some time Sunday evening to think about the week ahead and what we would like to intend will happen. At least for me, this forces me to look at every aspect of my life and get clear about what I want to intend will happen. Then, every morning, I not only read my intentions, but I read everyone else’s intentions and take a few moments intending that all of us will see the manifestation of our intentions.

We’ve been doing this for well over a year and we have all seen miraculous events occur which we attribute to this process. New jobs, new cars, wonderful events, breakthroughs in results, profitability, and all manner of things. So I highly highly recommend that you put together a group of like minded people and start doing this. I know many people who have been in groups like this for years where they actually meet in person. Since our group is scattered around the country, we do it by phone. But however you do it, start a group and get to work being clear about your intentions and sharing them weekly with people who will support you in whatever you’re up to in life.

Some final thoughts on the road to success

In many of the recent posts, I said I was going to share with you the essence of what The Roadmap to Success program teaches and I have done that. And please be clear that there’s a difference between “the essence” and the whole story. If you find the essence of interest, you can access the whole story at http://www.unshackledleadership.com/the-roadmap-to-success-program.

Summarizing what we’ve discussed over these past few weeks:

* You were born with the same exact power to create as everyone else.

   * You can create anything

   * And, you’re creating all the time

   * There’s never a time you’re not creating

* There’s not one thing you see with our eyes that’s the truth – it’s only a projection of your past thoughts

* Your thoughts create your experiences 100% of the time

* Your emotions are the fuel that either makes everything happen or prevents things from happening.

In the last few posts, I have begun to share how to put these principles into action and create the life of your dreams. It is now time to complete this series and I offer you the following important remarks:

Because there is no such thing as a neutral thought and all thoughts create on some level, if you want to have an amazing life, you must watch what comes out of your mouth. People say anything they darn please. We’re critical and judgment, we talk about people behind their backs, we gossip and say all kinds of negative and disempowering things. Given the opportunity to say something nice, we mostly choose to say things that are not so nice.

Tell the truth: you know you do this, right? And what’s worse, we don’t even give it much thought. Somehow, we assume it’s fine to do this.

It’s not, so stop it. Wake up. Think about what you’re about to say before you say it. Your words reflect your thoughts, your words create your reality, your words get planted in the fertile soil of creation and manifest. Learn to speak about what you want. Speak words of gratitude and appreciation. I was told by a student of ours that Albert Einstein used to say Thank You at least 100 times a day. So all of us have gotten into the habit of saying Thank You all day long. Try it and watch how quickly you will create things that will support you in being grateful.

And finally, if you want to have a really amazing life, forgive yourself and everyone else in your life for everything. Unforgiveness often doesn’t hurt the person we refuse to forgive at all, but it always hurts us. As long as we don’t forgive, we are bound to the other person with bonds of pain or anger or a desire for revenge. Forgiving doesn’t mean finding a way to excuse someone. There may be no excuse in the world for what they did. But forgiving does mean giving up the desire to punish them. Holding on to the need to see them pay for their words or actions is holding on to the injury itself. Forgiveness releases us from the power a wrongful action still has over us and sets us free to heal and move on.

It’s often the case that the person we most need to forgive is ourselves. We often regret actions we’ve taken or feel guilty for them. If that’s the case, surely look to see what actions need to be taken to set the situation right. But once that’s done, be willing to forgive yourself and move on. It’s been proven over and over again that true joy cannot occur in the absence of forgiveness. And what’s a life worth if it doesn’t contain joy.

I hope you’ve found these posts of value. The entire Roadmap to Success program has been recorded and is available as a download or as a 3 DVD package. If you’re interested in either, check out the program at http://www.unshackledleadership.com/the-roadmap-to-success-program. Or give us a call and we can discuss how to bring this program into your company.

Here's what you've been waiting to hear about money and wealth

Summarizing what we’ve discussed over these past few weeks:

* You were born with the same exact power to create as everyone else.

   * You can create anything

   * And, you’re creating all the time

   * There’s never a time you’re not creating

* There’s not one thing you see with our eyes that’s the truth – it’s only a projection of your past thoughts

* Your thoughts create your experiences 100% of the time

* Your emotions are the fuel that either makes everything happen or prevents things from happening.

This week, let’s talk about how this applies to money and wealth and I want to warn you right up front that what I’m about to say probably violates everything you’ve ever been told about money. So do your best to keep an open mind and don’t run away the first time I say something that offends you.

Let’s start with the first principle above: you were born with the same exact power to create as everyone else. That being the case, you have the same power to be a millionaire or even a billionaire as Bill Gates, Donald Trump and Warren Buffet. Now you may think they’re smarter than you, more creative than you, or more knowledgeable about money than you. You might even believe they were in the right place at the right time or just had more opportunities than you. Now the fact of the matter is that some or all of those thoughts might be true, but it still doesn’t mean you can’t be as rich as them.

The one thing those people don’t have that you likely have is a wide range of limiting beliefs about money. Remember, there’s not one thing you see with your eyes that’s the truth – it’s only a projection of your past thoughts, in this case about money. So the amount of money and wealth you have right now is what you have created with your thoughts and emotions. Hardly anyone understands that. You likely think that you “earn” money from what you do. That’s nonsense. The money may come to you via the work you do but it’s not created by what you do.

Money and wealth works like everything else. There are no exceptions to these principles. You create money and wealth with the thoughts you have about money and the emotions you experience about money and those thoughts are mostly very limiting and those emotions are mostly very negative. And this is why the rich keep getting richer (they have rich thoughts) and the poor keep getting poorer (they have poor thoughts) and why some people, like my father, work their whole lives and end up with nothing.

My dad was quite a teacher for me. He had incredibly limiting beliefs about money. When I was growing up, I constantly heard “we can’t afford it” or “do you think money grows on trees?” If I wanted something really badly, he would tell me to ask my grandfather because after all, my grandfather had a lot of money and the implication was that we didn’t. My dad also bought into the common belief that the way to make money was to work for it and work hard. So he quit school when he was 15 and went to work in the family plumbing business where he worked for the next 50 years, hating every minute of it and literally ending up with nothing.

And my dad’s attitude was also really negative. His father and brother both escaped from the plumbing business, leaving it to him, and became successful and fairly rich investing in real estate. Of course, my father completely resented them because they had what he wanted and you could feel his resentment every day when he came home from another hard day at work.

To be complete, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with hard work. If you want to work hard at something you’re creating, go for it. Just don’t think it will make you rich. If you want to get rich, you must eliminate your negative and limiting beliefs about money, start thinking like rich people think, and start generating a positive attitude, like I discussed last week, about money and wealth.

We have many ideas and programs to help people identify and release their limiting beliefs about money, far too many to go into any detail here. If you want to hear about our programs and how we can support you and your company in doing this, please e mail me at scott@unshackledleadership.com.

To be continued . . . 

ATTITUDE: Is yours worth catching

Summarizing what we’ve discussed over these past few weeks:

You were born with the same exact power to create as everyone else.

• You can create anything
• And, you’re creating all the time
• There’s never a time you’re not creating
• There’s not one thing you see with our eyes that’s the truth – it’s only a projection of your past thoughts
• Your thoughts create your experiences 100% of the time
• Your emotions are the fuel that either makes everything happen or prevents things from happening.

This week, let’s talk more about how to put these principles into action and create the life of your dreams:

Since your emotions are the fuel that either makes everything happen or prevents things from happening, you must learn to “choose” your attitude. No successful person allows the circumstances to dictate their attitude. Successful people choose their attitude and bring it to the circumstances of life.

So, what does it mean to “choose” your attitude? First, it means you choose to be satisfied and happy. If you’re waiting for the circumstances to be exactly the way you want them to be in order for you to be satisfied with your life and happy, I promise you’ll have a long wait. Your life’s the way it is and that’s that. Now you get to decide if you’re willing to be satisfied and happy. You can still want a lot more, but why not choose to be happy and satisfied now and take your satisfaction and happiness along with you on the journey rather than waiting for some day that will likely never come before you are that way? Makes sense to me. Furthermore, if I can’t trust you to be happy and satisfied now, when you likely already have an amazing life, how can I trust you to be happy and satisfied and some unknown time in the future when you’ll probably still be waiting for life to turn out.

Choosing your attitude also means to be optimistic, positive and enthusiastic and to have faith and trust in your future. Every truly successful person I’ve meet had this genuine knowingness that everything was going to turn out great and they looked forward to the future with optimism and enthusiasm.

Get in the habit of looking for things to appreciate wherever you are. My favorite way of saying this is: cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Learn to be appreciative of and grateful for all of the things you now probably take for granted, like: having a house to live in, a bed to sleep in, food to eat, a car to drive, roads to take you places, traffic lights to keep you safe, your family, friends, co-workers and customers, and most of all, when you awake each day, for the privilege it is to be alive and contribute to life.

And if that’s not enough, here are some additional thoughts to think about: Speak only about what you love and brings you happiness. What good could possibly come from speaking about what you hate or makes you unhappy. But isn’t that what far too many of us do? Makes no sense. Stop watching CNN, which stands for “constantly negative news.” Focus on what’s working in your life and the good news of the day. I personally love the way the NBC evening news with Brian Williams ends with a section called Making a Difference where they focus on people and organizations who are doing just that. I often turn on the show just for that section.

And for the grand finale, do not allow yourself to feel irritated or disappointed. Learn to accept people and life just the way they are and it is and just the way they and it are not. Give up complaining, blaming, criticizing and gossip. Could you even begin to imagine what life would be like if you did that? We so take those things for granted, as if life is just supposed to be that way. No, it’s not supposed to be that way, it’s just that we have made it that way. And the fact that we have is probably the biggest reason why people are not happy and don’t have the life of their dreams.

To be continued . . . 

Is conflict among teams really inevitable?

Is conflict among members of a team really inevitable? Is all a manager able to do when a conflict arises is meet with the team members and do his or her best to soothe the hurt feelings and play nice and try to get people to forgive each other?

If you read the recent article entitled How Conflict Goes Viral by Lindred Greer in Inc. magazine, you would surely conclude that the answer to both questions is: yes. According to the research done by Lindred and her team, conflicts “inevitably arise” and predictably go through three stages starting with a conflict between two individuals, after which others take sides and the team starts to disintegrate. Since conflict is inevitable, managers need to take action and make sure they do not stay unresolved.

While I don’t take issue with the final statement under the assumption that conflicts are inevitable, I do take exception to the underlying assumption that they are. In our research, we have found that using the Unshackled Leadership philosophy, we can literally transform team members from a world where conflict is inevitable to a world where it is not.

To do this, you must first understand that we live in a world of duality. There literally are two worlds going on simultaneously. Einstein says one is friendly and the other is hostile. A Course in Miracles says one is dominated by love, the other by fear. In the predominant hostile, fear based world, of course conflicts are inevitable. But is it inevitable that people live in that world? We say no.

The real issue is that for most people, that’s the only world that exists. If you put your hand in front of your eyes, you could block out the sun. But that doesn’t mean the sun goes out of existence. In the same manner, just because most people have only seen the world of hostility and fear, that doesn’t mean the other doesn’t exist.

So is there a solution beyond accepting the inevitable? We say yes. Train people in the Unshackled Leadership philosophy which literally transports them from the hostile world of fear to the friendly world of love and watch them play nicely together in the sandbox of business.