iMindShift with Steve Chandler

SEEING the UNDERSIDE of the WEAVE

      One of the most pleasant experiences I've had in the corporate training/coaching side of my life has been working with Microchip Technology and its President Steve Sanghi (pictured here) and Vice President Mitch Little.
      This is a perpetually-self-responsible company with a deliberately-created culture. In his book Driving Excellence, Sanghi outlines his theory (and practice) of systems.

      Wherever you see a result, beneath it is a perfect system for producing that result. If your result is that you always run out of cash flow at the end of the month, there is a system in place that's perfect for that outcome. All systems are perfect systems for the outcomes they produce. If you don't like an outcome, don't go after the person involved and make him wrong. Go after the system. See that it's perfect and then replace it.

      Microchip's systems approach allows the mind to be an artist and a scientist simultaneously as it studies and unmasks the underlying perfect system for any repeated result. It shows you the underside of the weave.

      See the breakthrough in this. All systems are perfect. If you don't like a certain result, simply replace the system. You don't have to make anybody wrong. You don't even have to make yourself wrong. Therefore you avoid the greatest impediments to a smooth-sailing life: negative emotions. Because they seep into the brain and ruin it. The brain is, normally functioning, a super wonderful human creativity device.

      But pour emotions over it---guilty, angry, embarrassed, shameful, frightened and resentful emotions---and it ceases to function.

      Ever experience those emotions when getting a result in life that you don't like? Yes, but only a hundred percent of the time! And what do these emotions do for you?

      They put sugar in the gas tank. Sand in the mechanism. Oil in the water. Flies in the ointment, and more. Those negative feelings drop the mind down about five gears, so instead of gliding into high-creativity the mind is grinding in low recrimination.

      (Now I'm down. I'm really down. How can you laugh when you know I'm down?)

      What about living from paycheck to paycheck, always fearing the next catastrophe, never able to pay for anything big or thoughtful? That's actually a system.

      I've coached public speakers (including myself in the not too distant past) who have simply accepted it that living from speech to speech, starting life over every month, is simply the nature of the business. Not if you see the system for what it is. Because that system can be replaced with a year-long project for those audience members that includes the speech and allows for monthly payments. Everyone wins.

      Once you are seeing the system you are the artist stepping back from the canvas---a right brain activity that allows for a rather beautiful pattern recognition to occur.

      My co-author and friend Sam Beckford urges all small businesses---especially coaches and speakers---to install ongoing automatic monthly income that---at the very least---covers ongoing monthly business expenses. There are many systems to use for that.

      If you don't like a certain repeated outcome, replace the underlying perfect system with another.

                                                                  * * * * * *
      And now here's a picture of me with my new friend Abby at the home office of my old friend

Michael Neill

whose new book is aptly titled Feel Happy Now. I used to not be able to even be in the same room with a dog without having a profoundly negative physical, mental, emotional, allergic, psychosomatic reaction. Michael is a master practitioner of neuro linguistic programming, and in just two hours showed me how to remove past systems of pattern recognition and replace them, mentally, with new ones. Abby and Michael's other dog Mishka will now live in my heart forever.

CAUSING WATER TO CLIMB MOUNTAINS

Posted: 06 Jun 2007 08:38 PM CDT

      While working on my upcoming book Fearless it occurred to me that I have only been in the presence of one fearless human being in my life. That was at the School for the Work taught by Byron Katie, and Katie's presence took my breath away day after day. She never wavered or faltered or lost serenity or her amazing, quiet humorous energy. She was fearless.

      This is why I think we like Jack Reacher so much in the novels by the brilliant Lee Child. Reacher approximates being fearless. Fearless in the face of all kinds of danger and unnecessary evil. Recently Kathy and I went to hear Lee Child speak about the new Jack Reacher novel, Bad Luck and Trouble. Child was witty and bright as usual. And it was obvious that he loves Reacher --- the archetypal hero modeled after Lancelot and The Lone Ranger --- as much as we do.

      So as I worked more deeply into my book on the nature of fear (and how to live without it) I called Katie at her home to ask her a few questions. I told her that my experience at her school was the turning point for me on the issue of fear, and would also be the centerpiece of my book. (You can find out about Katie and her school at www.thework.com.)

      We talked for a long time about the mind's need to judge and label everything. How on one end of mind's polarity is the "I know" mind. It thinks it knows danger when it sees it. On the other end is absolute heart and wisdom --- the "I don't know" mind. It loves what is and sees no danger. In the middle of that pole is the fulcrum of "the work" --- a wonderful process for joining the two and dissolving all stressful thought.

      I told Katie that she reminded me of Ramana Maharshi who advised that people use "inquiry" to achieve enlightenment --- merely ask yourself "Who am I?" enough times and you'll never need to meditate because life itself will be your ongoing meditation.

      Katie agreed that that was useful direction, but said the four questions of The Work was more "user-friendly" for us. It allows the ego to participate in interviewing itself. In a way, it tricks the "I know" mind into participating in its own undoing. I said it was like getting an egomaniacal lawyer to argue the opposite of his own case. Just to show you he can do it.

      "Yes!" Katie said, "Because in the end there is no case."

      I asked her if she would help me with a particular phobia I had and she gently led me though the subset elements of the four questions that would best apply.

      Previous to Katie and the work I had believed that some fear was beyond thought. That the deepest fears simply arise. From my cells?

      "Cells are just a thought," said Katie.

      Then from where? Because phobic fear can strike you in the stomach faster than you can think. Or so it seems.

      "But you thought before. Before that feeling. Back in your history. Or you couldn't be afraid. Be with it and go back to your earliest thoughts," she said.

      And so I did. And so I have found them and so I have been doing the work on those thoughts. Amazing.

      Amazing grace. I remember in the school --- the great Undoing as it was called --- when we all joined hands and sang "Amazing Grace" ..... we sang along with the wonderful Arlo Guthrie version of that song.

      So what happens when the "I know" mind dissolves into wisdom and heart and spirit and there is no more need to label or judge?

      "It's.....humorous..." said Katie. "That's the only word I can think of at the moment. Humorous."

      So I thanked Katie for her time. She thanked me for writing the book, and for the previous writing I'd done. It was nothing. Literally nothing! A void, at best. One creates a void.

      And so, and because, like Meister Eckhart said, "The fruit of the spirit is love, joy and peace. To be stripped, poor, to have nothing, to be empty --- this transforms nature; the void causes water to climb mountains and performs many other marvels of which we would not now speak."

      Humorous! Dr. Ludiker, my favorite comedian, is here: www.fredknipe.com and almost too hilarious for words. Go there. But don't go there with a hot cup of coffee in your hands or you will scald yourself and then you will sue me. Fred Knipe is also a wonderful writer of songs and poetry. Here is a poem he sent me yesterday that he wrote for Al Gore...it sums all this up rather nicely:


What can kill you matters little.
What can spoil living matters.
What spoils living is too much attention
to what can kill you.

FEAR IS AN ILLUSION

Posted: 14 Aug 2007 08:20 PM CDT

Fear as Fata Morgana

      A fata morgana, Italian translation of Morgan le Fay, the fairy shape-shifting half-sister of King Arthur, is a mirage, an optical phenomenon which results from a temperature inversion. Objects on the horizon, such as islands, cliffs, ships or icebergs, appear elongated and elevated, like "fairy tale castles."

      In calm weather, the undisturbed interface between warm air over cold dense air near the surface of the ground may act as a refracting lens, producing an upside-down image, over which the distant direct image appears to hover. Fata Morgana are usually seen in the morning after a cold night which has resulted in the radiation of heat into space. The first mention of 'Fata Morgana' in English, in 1818, referred to such a mirage noticed in the Strait of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily. It is common in high mountain valleys, such as the San Luis Valley of Colorado where the effect is exaggerated due to the curvature of the floor of the valley canceling out the curvature of the Earth. They may be seen in Arctic seas on very still mornings, or commonly on Antarctic ice shelves. It is really based on nothing, just like that thing you fear the most.

            *                        *                        *                        *            

      The metaphor of the snake and the rope (you feared the snake you stepped on until you saw it was a rope) was first extensively used by Ramana Maharshi whose teachings gained widespread circulation around 1923....like Byron Katie, he was a perfect master, fully realized and without any ego or fear. I'd been reading Maharshi since my Alan Watts days in first recovery 27 years ago...and when I heard Katie use the metaphor herself I realized that all realized minds are truly one:

      "Bhagavan's (Ramana Maharshi's) Works clearly set forth the central teaching that the direct path to liberation is Self-enquiry. The particular mode in which the enquiry is to be made is lucidly set forth in Nan Yar. The mind consists of thoughts. The 'I' thought is the first to arise in the mind. When the enquiry ' Who am I?' is persistently pursued, all other thoughts get destroyed, and finally the 'I' thought itself vanishes leaving the supreme non-dual Self alone. The false identification of the Self with the phenomena of non-self such as the body and mind thus ends, and there is illumination, Sakshatkara. The process of enquiry of course, is not an easy one. As one enquires 'Who am I?,' other thoughts will arise; but as these arise, one should not yield to them by following them, on the contrary, one should ask 'To whom do they arise ?' In order to do this, one has to be extremely vigilant. Through constant enquiry one should make the mind stay in its source, without allowing it to wander away and get lost in the mazes of thought created by itself. All other disciplines such as breath-control and meditation on the forms of God should be regarded as auxiliary practices. They are useful in so far as they help the mind to become quiescent and one-pointed."

      What Byron Katie has accomplished that sages like Maharshi were clueless about how to do is bring this wisdom home immediately to anyone in the form of the four questions. So perfect for the WEST! The National Enquirer's ad slogan is Inquiring Minds Want to Know!

_______________________________________________________

from KEN WILBER in No Boundary:

      The root of the whole difficulty is our tendency to view the opposites as irreconcilable, as totally set apart and divorced from one another. Even the simplest of opposites, such as buying versus selling, are viewed as two different and separate events. Now it is true that buying and selling are in some sense different, but they are also -- and this is the point -- completely inseparable.

Is there a difference between yes and no?
Is there a difference between good and evil?
Must I fear what others fear? What nonsense.

_______________________________
How We Learn to Forget Our Fears

      When we see a vicious tiger in a zoo, we know not to be afraid. How? Little children may be afraid of the dark and monsters under the bed, but they outgrow those fears in just a few years. How is it they do that?

      Scientists from New York University say they have located the part of the brain that helps us "unlearn" our natural fears. It turns out it's in the same area -- the amygdala -- where we learn fears in the first place, reports the BBC News Online:

      Much is known about how we learn fears and how they can be treated with psychological therapy and drugs, but very little is known about how our minds are naturally able to diminish fears through what scientists call extinction learning.

      The study: Led by Dr. Elizabeth Phelps, an associate professor of psychology and neural science, the NYU team used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to peek into the brain to find out what happens when a fear is "unlearned." To do this, they first had to establish a fear. A group of volunteers were taught to associate seeing the image of a colored square with a mild electric shock, creating what is known as a conditional fear. This kind of fear is similar to a phobia. That is, when the volunteers saw the colored square, they felt anxiety. To help the volunteers "unlearn" the fear, they showed them the same colored square but reduced the intensity of the electric shocks until finally there was no shock following the sight of the image.

      The results: As the team expected based on previous research, the MRI scan of the brain showed that the amygdala was active when the fear was being learned. But that same area of the brain, along with the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, was also active when the volunteers were "unlearning" the fear.

      What does it all mean? It's hoped that the findings will help doctors better treat phobias and anxiety orders. "Certain drugs influence the chemicals involved in this type of unlearning in animals," Phelps told the BBC. "Now we can all start to look at different things we can try in terms of treatment. As humans, we actively try to control our emotions. We know not to be anxious in certain circumstances but to be anxious in others. When we see a tiger in a zoo we know we should not be afraid. The question to answer now is how do we regulate that? We are doing that work now."

(The study findings were published in the journal Neuron.)

FEAR of SELLING

      I learned so much about selling from an amazing book on negotiation I highly recommend called START WITH NO by Jim Camp that taught me to negotiate with people by (really and truly) NOT WANTING THE DEAL right from the start......it has been the most amazing system I've ever used....

      I was also greatly assisted a couple years ago by Tom Freese's book, Question Based Selling. Absolutely brilliant text on how to sell by not selling. By turning the tables on your tormentor. Freese and I now both train Microchip Technology.

      Of course this kind of selling is centered in Katie's "I need this business" is that true? NO! It's not true at all.

      I wrote 100 Ways to Create Wealth with Sam because I wanted people to be less scared of money. I wanted people to learn Ayn Rand on money. The book I'm writing now is about fear. It is called Fearless. It is about my experience in Katie's nine-day school, and it's about a number of other things related to a state of fearlessness available to anyone willing to listen to the silence enough times.

***********************************
Wisdom tells me I am nothing.
Love tells me I am everything.
Between the two, my life flows.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
************************************

      On the airplane from Newark to Phoenix I read a book that I'd bought when Terry Hill and I did our bookstore walking tour of New York, Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You. It's a wonderful book that explains why people are getting brighter and more intellectually powerful every day because of (not in spite of) our pop culture of computer games, video games, reality shows and movies like Memento . He devoted a lot of pages to what he considered to be the forerunner of high-IQ games, APBA Baseball! That was a game I played a lot as a kid so it was great to get confirmation that the very playing of that game boosted our IQs into the stratosphere...and speaking of "strato" he also saluted "Stratomatic" baseball, which I also played, but I never thought was a very smart game, especially compared to APBA. Remember? You'd put those circular cardboard disks on a dial and spin for each player's at bat? APBA was vastly superior and more complex.

      Think how dumb we'd all be if we hadn't played it.....was Johnson's point.

      I found this proverb this morning. I really like it!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

      There is no AGE at which fearlessness happens, but there is a STAGE at which it happens, and the beauty of life is that you get to decide when your stages occur. So you can be into variety and OUT of nostalgia and limitation right up to your death bed where you're having Wyclef Jean piped in.............you set the stages.

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"Attempt easy tasks as if they were difficult, and difficult as if they were easy."
Baltasar Gracian
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      When I take on the easy task as if it were difficult, I slow down and look at the task differently. I bring more consciousness to it. I see more opportunity in it. I look for hidden potential in the task. I dance with it a little more slowly and have more fun. Most people rush through their easy tasks just "getting through" them without "getting anything from them."

      When I take on the difficult tasks as if they were easy, it makes them easier to start. I just waltz right in.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
the final debunking of ROBIN HOOD by Ayn Rand:

      "It is said that Robin Hood fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don't have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors."

DON'T DIE WITH YOUR MUSIC STILL INSIDE YOU

Posted: 03 Aug 2007 07:40 PM CDT        "It's going to happen very soon. The great event which will end the horror. Which will end the sorrow. Next Tuesday, when the sun goes down, I will play the Moonlight Sonata backwards. This will reverse the effects of the world's mad plunge into suffering, for the last 200 million years. What a lovely night that would be. What a sigh of relief, as the senile robins become bright red again, and the retired nightingales, pick up their dusty tails, and assert the majesty of creation!"                   Leonard Cohen _____________________________________________________       Where does "music" "come from"? Salieri defined it through Mozart as "taking dictation from gaud! As difficult as it is for thought (the response of memory) to grasp or unner'tan the ineffable fact of human consciousness, there appears to be some sort of capacity to `pluck an infinitude of beats out of the sea of rhythm we are all immersed' in."       This is from The Dance of Life, The Other Dimension of Time, by Edward T. Hall:       Rhythm is basic to synchrony. This principle is illustrated by a film of children on a playground. Who would think that widely scattered groups of children in a school playground could be in sync? Yet this is precisely the case. One of my students selected as a project an exercise in what can be learned from film. Hiding in an abandoned automobile, which he used as a blind, he filmed children in an adjacent school yard during recess. As he viewed the film, his first impression was the obvious one: a film of children playing in different parts of the school playground. Then -- watching the film several times at different speeds, he began to notice one very active little girl who seemed to stand out from the rest. She was all over the place. Concentrating on the girl, my student noticed that whenever she was near a cluster of children the members of that group were in sync not only with each other but with her. Many viewings later, he realized that this girl, with her skipping and dancing and twirling, was actually orchestrating movements of the entire playground! There was something about the pattern of movement which translated into a beat -- like a silent movie of people dancing. Furthermore, the beat of this playground was familiar! There was a rhythm he had encountered before. He went to a friend who was a rock music aficionado, and the two of them began to search for the beat. It wasn't long until the friend reached out to a nearby shelf, took down a cassette and slipped it into a tape deck. That was it! It took a while to synchronize the beginning of the film with the recording -- a piece of contemporary rock music -- but once started, the entire three and a half minutes of the film clip stayed in sync with the taped music! Not a beat or a frame of the film was out of sync!       How does one explain something like this? It doesn't fit most people's notions of either playground activity or where music comes from. Discussing composers and where they get their music with a fellow faculty member at Northwestern University, I was not surprised to learn that for him, and for many other musicians, music represents a sort of rhythmic consensus, a consensus of the core culture. It was clear that the children weren't playing and moving in tune to a particular piece of music. They were moving to a basic beat which they shared at the time. They also shared it with the composer, who must have plucked it out of the sea of rhythm in which he too was immersed. He couldn't have composed that piece if he hadn't been in tune with the core culture.       Things like this are puzzling and difficult because so little is known technically about human synchrony. However, I have noted similar synchrony in my own films of people in public with no relationship with each other. Yet, they were syncing in subtle ways. The extraordinary thing is that my student was able to identify that beat. When he showed his film to our seminar, however, even though his explanation of what he had done was perfectly lucid, the members of the seminar had difficulty understanding what had actually happened. One school superintendent spoke of the children as "dancing to the music"; another wanted to know if the children were "humming the tune." They were voicing the commonly held belief that music is something that is "made up" by a composer, who then passes on "his creation" to others, who, in turn, diffuse it to the larger society. The children were moving, but as with the symphony orchestra, some participants' parts were at times silent. Eventually all participated and all stayed in sync, but the music was in them. They brought it with them to the playground as a part of shared culture. They had been doing that sort of thing all their lives, beginning with the time they synchronized their movements to their mother's voice even before they were born. . . .       Before the Renaissance, God was conceived of as sound or vibration. This is understandable because the rhythm of a people may yet prove to be the most binding of all the forces that hold human beings together. As a matter of fact, I have come to the conclusion that the human species lives in a sea of rhythm, ineffable to some, but quite tangible to others. This explains why some composers really do seem to be able to tap into that sea and express for the people the rhythms that are felt but not yet expressed as music.        "Music is moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and a gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order and leads to all that is good, true, and beautiful."                   Plato ************************************************ MAKE A COMMITMENT TO YOUR MUSIC       "Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out."                   Oliver Wendell Holmes       Everyone has a kind of music in them. That certain thing they love to do. Repairing cars? Dancing? Collecting baseball cards? Scrapbooking? Playing the guitar? Gardening? Fishing? Singing? Poetry? Building bird houses? It's your music. You cannot let it die. You must not sacrifice it in the name of someone else's (largely imaginary) expectations of you. You must not call it a mere hobby. It's more than that.       An added benefit of honoring the music in you is that in your "retirement" (or whatever the next phase of your life is, preferably not thought of as retirement) you can bring the music forward even more. Your music can even merge with your career. Two commitments then become one. My lifelong friend Terry Hill was a multiple-award-winning advertising creative director for many years, so successful that he was able to retire at an early age.       During his business years he kept alive (although in deep background) his love of art and poetry and literature, so that when he retired he was able to bring forward this music and nurture it even more seriously. Even to the point of moving the writing part of it into the commitment level of "career."       Although he now thinks of his first portion of life as a kind of "waste" (although it wasn't, because many of his skills in copywriting and campaign-creation are now being used in his writing, which is wonderful writing now, including a mystery novel, many entertaining essays, a play and a book of literary criticism. And he's just getting started), he has made a transition that gives him an added reason to live. If he hadn't kept the music alive, this would not be happening. LOSING THE FEAR OF NOT BEING GOOD       Jack Cooper was a communications director for a non-profit school in Los Angeles when he and I began corresponding and soon he had hired me as a coach for six months. It turned out that his music was poetry, and we used those six months to elevate that dormant music into real live active poetry writing that he began to do each morning for an hour prior to work.       Unbelievably to him, his poetry began to be accepted by numerous prestigious journals and quarterlies throughout America and he rapidly became a widely-published contemporary American poet!       He wrote to me, "I can hardly believe the difference you have made. I think because of you I may have broken through a primal fear of not being good enough. You have shown me it's not about how good you are but about how high you aim." _____________________________________________________       "It is generally recognized that creativity requires leisure, an absence of rush, time for the mind and imagination to float and wander and roam, time for the individual to descend into the depths of his or her psyche, to be available to barely audible signals rustling for attention. Long periods of time may pass in which nothing seems to be happening. But we know that kind of space must be created if the mind is to leap out of its accustomed ruts, to part from the mechanical, the known, the familiar, the standard, and generate a leap into the new."                   Nathaniel Branden ___________________________________________________       My friend Fred Knipe was a professional writer whose real music was comedy, and later in life he elevated his music to the status of career and became a full time successful comedian and comic playwright.       So not only does your music balance and nurture whatever career you are now in, it often later will rise to the top and become your new career. If you keep your commitment to it. Commitment is everything.       So many people, people like my own father, become so monomaniacally focused on career that they leave no room for their music and when it's time to retire they feel lost and adrift without any music. My father increased his drinking to drown that part of his soul that had not been expressed. Very sad to watch.       Your music is nothing less than your soul's yearning to self-express. So it's much more than just a little diversion or hobby to keep you entertained. _________________________________________________________ RIGHT SIDE of the WRONG BED       For five years of my life I was a full time songwriter. It was the hardest work I've ever done. For me, there was no more difficult way to make a living from writing than to make it from trying to write a hit song. One had to write everything perfectly. Everything had to obey rhyme schemes and meter, and one had to have song titles and concepts that stood out above the millions of other songs vying for a recording artist's attention.       It was that degree of difficulty that made it so tempting to live by a lie. A lie like, it's who you know.       I worked in the music business with the highly-talented Fred Knipe, and he and I invested a huge amount of our time in it's who you know. We took trips, wrote letters and made phone calls to expand our network of connections in the music business. We networked and schmoozed. When we were in groups of music executives, we worked the room. We got to know a lot of key figures on a lot of levels (and if there was ever time left over, we also wrote songs.)       In the end, though, our biggest financial successes came from people whom we did not know. In the end, networking meant nothing at all. The schmoozing was an empty waste of time and ego. Country singer Don Williams had a number one hit with Fred's "Listen To The Radio" and a popular album cut with Fred's and my "I Can't Get To You From Here." But we didn't know him or anyone associated with him! Those songs were recorded because his producer had pulled our envelope out of a huge pile of unsolicited songs and played the songs and fell in love with them. We didn't know him and he didn't know us. We didn't even know his address! We sent the songs to Don Williams' label address at Columbia Records. We got the address off of an album cover, something any homeless person in any music store could have done.       After all those hours invested in networking and relationship-building and making the right connections, it was what we did (in the writing of those songs) that the great producer Garth Fundis heard and converted into musical success. It wasn't who we knew; it was what we did.       As I look back on my five years in the song-writing business, I realize that it was always the best songs that actually went out there and found places to bloom. It wasn't who we knew, it was what we did when we wrote them. Fred and I wrote "The Right Side of the Wrong Bed" with Duncan Stitt, turned it loose and watched it find its own places to bloom. It had nothing to do with our networking and schmoozing. It landed on a Mickey Gilley album and then, from that success, it seemed to find its own way onto Michael Landon's Highway To Heaven show.       Telling myself the lie that success depends on who you know was a deliberate attempt to avoid the real work of writing something extraordinary. An attempt to justify putting my time into easier, softer pursuits. Every time we lie to ourselves like this we are trying not to go for it. ********************************************* Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.                   Tolstoy ************************************************

PARADISE HAWAIIAN STYLE

Posted: 23 Jul 2007 02:22 PM CDT       On Friday I spoke for an hour with Dr. Joe Vitale of THE SECRET fame...he is one of the stars in that popular DVD and was recently featured on Larry King because of that.       Joe wanted to talk to me for an hour and record our conversation because he had been reading my books recently and, in his words, "become a real fan." He even wrote some blogs about me that praised The Story of You and 100 Ways to Create Wealth. A lot of people must read his blogs because the sales of those books went WAY up on Amazon the weeks his blogs came out.       Joe is as sweet and gentle in person as he was in The Secret, and he's also very smart and wise. He is going to send the recorded conversation he had with me to all the members of his gold member mastermind group, and I truly appreciate that.       Joe's most recent book is beautiful and profound...I read it walking around the house without putting it down. It's called ZERO LIMITS and it's about...well, these are Joe's words: Two years ago, I heard about a therapist in Hawaii who cured a complete ward of criminally insane patients---without ever seeing any of them. The psychologist would study an inmate's chart and then look within himself to see how he created that person's illness. As he improved himself, the patient improved. When I first heard this story, I thought it was an urban legend. How could anyone heal anyone else by healing himself? How could even the best self-improvement master cure the criminally insane? It didn't make any sense. It wasn't logical, so I dismissed the story. However, I heard it again a year later. I heard that the therapist had used a Hawaiian healing process called ho 'oponopono. I had never heard of it, yet I couldn't let it leave my mind. The Hawaiian therapist who healed those mentally ill people would eventually teach me an advanced new perspective about total responsibility. His name is Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len. We probably spent an hour talking on our first phone call. I asked him to tell me the complete story of his work as a therapist. He explained that he worked at Hawaii State Hospital for four years. That ward where they kept the criminally insane was dangerous. Psychologists quit on a monthly basis. The staff called in sick a lot or simply quit. People would walk through that ward with their backs against the wall, afraid of being attacked by patients. It was not a pleasant place to live, work, or visit. Dr. Len told me that he never saw patients. He agreed to have an office and to review their files. While he looked at those files, he would work on himself. As he worked on himself, patients began to heal. "After a few months, patients that had to be shackled were being allowed to walk freely," he told me. "Others who had to be heavily medicated were getting off their medications. And those who had no chance of ever being released were being freed." I was in awe. "Not only that," he went on, "but the staff began to enjoy coming to work. Absenteeism and turnover disappeared. We ended up with more staff than we needed because patients were being released, and all the staff was showing up to work. Today, that ward is closed." This is where I had to ask the million dollar question: "What were you doing within yourself that caused those people to change?" "I was simply healing the part of me that created them," he said.       I won't spoil the ending. But I loved the experience of reading this book and I recommend you go here: http://www.zerolimits.info/ to read about and then buy the book for yourself.       After I'd finished reading it I said to Joe, "I just finished Zero Limits, and I loved it that Hew Len got to 'kill the Divine' near the end.....as you know (and I love your persona in the book...the enlightened skeptic! everyman!) even 'the Divine' in this book's case is a human CONCEPT, a story, in other words, and therefore it is interfering with ZERO. BUT, as your master told you, just like your earlier books, it is a STEPPING STONE to ZERO.....you have to evolve up the spiral of spiritual evolution (itself a concept: awakeness on the way to zero) through such levels and your books boost and boost people up and up and you have to master INTENTION before you master NO INTENTION/just Inspiration, and then there's something even better after that. Zero Limits is a huge gift to the world, and you have 'translated' Hew Len through hard writer's work (I know) so that the average seeker can experience him through the eyes of a lovable skeptic and therefore GET HIM!"       This wonderful book confirmed for me once again that the only thing that ever stands between me and my pure, total happiness is a story. And the story is never true. The same can be said about the ways to create wealth. People fail at wealth because of the worried stories that distract them all day long.       Once the stories are gone, pure creation, pure joy and whatever level of wealth you are ready to create is yours. At least that's my experience. You can challenge that. And you can challenge it LIVE on August 4 in Arizona (and buy a ticket and bring a guest for free if you sign up quickly at the top of http://www.stevechandler.com/) when I'll be doing the first LIVE 100 Ways to Create Wealth seminar.       In the meantime, get Joe Vitale's book Zero Limits. Joe was once homeless. Now, he's the millionaire author of numerous bestselling books, an Internet celebrity, and an in-demand online marketing guru. He's obviously got "the secret" to creating wealth.       The Secret isn't the whole answer, but it did a beautiful job of waking people up to the difference between creating and worrying. It was the best dramatization I've ever seen of what happens to my life when I worry about things all day long---I become a chicken-hearted, pathetic victim of circumstance who never achieves anything.       So let's end this with a passage from Shakespeare as quoted by Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len in his appendix to ZERO LIMITS:                   Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass                   Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,                   Can be retentive to the strength of spirit.

START A HUGE FOOLISH PROJECT

Posted: 16 Jul 2007 06:36 PM CDT "Start a huge, foolish project like Noah. It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you." Rumi ************************************** "I'm not an ordinary man, and I'm not going to live an ordinary life." Theodore Dreiser ***************************************       Without our stories we are so great. We are so happy and energetic, without all those heavy thoughts and beliefs about our story of disappointments and bad breaks.       What do we care what other people think?       In The Story of You I talked about this. What it's like to be free.       When there are older people willing to become unchained like this, it's often because they are at death's door! Near-death experiences are just that strange and paradoxical. And instructive. Because all your old stories can evaporate in the face of death. And then the worst thing and the best thing start to look like the same thing. The same opportunity to wake up. Terminal illness is the worst thing, and yet for so many people it was the best thing.       Because it gave them a chance to throw their stories overboard. To go to the edge of the boat (or the ark) and drop their sad story into the sea. How free they became once they did that. How creative. How extraordinary. They no longer have an ordinary life.       One day, when Gerard Barber was a clinical epidemiologist and researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, he was examining a terminally ill woman. All of a sudden she grabbed his lab coat. Barber said she "had a grip much, much stronger than I'd thought she could muster---and she instructed me to live my life, 'every delicious second of it.'"       The story of your difficult, undelicious life is made up. Because the story of you is made up. It's just a story. It's just what you say about yourself. It's what you say in self-defense when someone asks you who you are. Or how you are. But who you really are needs no story because it's too alive and awake and at play for that. Too busy living and loving. Too busy laughing and singing. Too busy dancing with life.       Nietzsche said, "And those who were dancing were thought to be insane."       And when you are at your happiest, that just may happen to you. Your laughter and your happy tears may put people off. They may think you are insane. Just like Nietzsche said: "And those who were dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."       This calls to mind the Samurai concept of "Dying before you go into battle" which is a mind shift that allows you to battle with joyful and fearless abandon. Or like in the Kevin Costner baseball movie, For Love of the Game, in which his Detroit Tigers pitcher character learns again to pitch well by learning to "clear the mechanism" on the mound before pitching. In other words, to go to the state that the Samurai warriors call "no mind." Or like the Fred Knipe song Dying to Believe in which our singer is dying because of his futile effort to believe something that is not true.       Alan Watts said we should not fear death because we were there before we were born and it caused us no problem back then. The best Watts book on this subject is called The Wisdom of Insecurity. To Watts, death is a part of life, the tails to the heads of life on an ever-tossing coin.       All my changes occurred for me after I suffered the living death of active alcoholism. Alcoholism is a form of ongoing and relative (but not absolute) suicide. After that recovery, through the 12-Step method, I encountered other expanding levels of recovery and indeed even personal and accelerated evolution toward the spirit that knows no death. And I've devoted my life to helping others do the same. All my books and all my seminars and consulting are part of showing others what has happened for me. The answer is to start dancing. Stop dying to believe. The music is already playing. Start your project today.

A HUMBLE AND OBEDIENT SERVANT

Posted: 26 Jun 2007 07:34 PM GMT-06:00 "Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be."                         - Rita Rudner    If you live close to Phoenix (and even if you don't) you'll want to sign up quickly for the limited-seating live event I'm doing August 4th, 2007 called 100 Ways to Create Wealth.       Some people who have already signed up are people we have given books and CDs to as a way to simply get to know them and, especially, to serve them. A lot of people ask me why I do that. Why do I honestly and truly care more about serving people than selling them?       Unselfish service has a magical track record.       President George Washington was known for signing all his letters, "Your most humble and obedient servant."       No one questioned his power. What they didn't know is where he got it: in his commitment to serve. He knew the power and the grace he could get from service.       Service is the opposite of inferiority to another person because in service, the other person can't touch you. You are so high above your emotional center, you can't be intimidated. When your focus is on service, you are in the most spirited part of your being and it gives you the feeling of having wings.       People used to ask Mother Teresa how she found the inner strength to live such a life of self-sacrifice. All of her selfless service to the poor seemed so unimaginable to the journalists who interviewed her. However, as she often said in her interviews, "If people knew how much joy I was experiencing, they wouldn't consider this to be a sacrifice."       People who serve are way beyond the opinions of others. They are not worried about what other people think of them. They are too busy serving. And, as my mother used to annoy me by saying, "Busy hands are happy hands."       Studies at Harvard University show that helping others has a measurable impact on the immune system of the body. Even thinking about reaching out to serve others has a dramatic effect. Harvard researchers had 132 students watch a film of Mother Teresa helping the sick and dying in Calcutta. After the viewing they tested the saliva of the students for the level of immunoglobulin A, a vital defense against the cold virus. They found that students who watched the film, no matter whether they admired the work of Mother Teresa or not, experienced dramatic increases in immunity. Then the students were asked to watch a film about Nazi Germany and Hitler, and the same test was made afterward. The immune systems were depressed after the Nazi movie. This experiment has been called "The Mother Teresa Effect" ever since, because it has helped scientists explain why people who are serving others live so much longer.       Dr. Allen Luks created a breakthrough study of what he called "helper's high"---the rush of endorphins into the brain that people get when they help other people. He compared it favorably to "runner's high," and demonstrated that people who are in the act of helping others receive profound physiological and psychological benefits.       Meditation expert Dr. Herbert Benson also concluded that helping others gave the same kind of relief from stress that meditation gave, if not more.       Once when meeting with the Dalai Lama, Benson asked the famous holy man what one could do to maintain inner peace and joy once the meditating was over and it was time to go out into the chaotic world. The Dalai Lama replied simply, "Look at what's in front of you."       In the years that followed that conversation, Benson pondered that answer. "For a while I wasn't sure what he meant," said Benson. "Then I realized that by looking at what's in front of you, you attach your thoughts to other persons. That breaks the message of stress. And now I see that a way to make that really happen for a lengthy period is through helping."       Serving others breaks the message of stress because stress comes from focusing on personal worries. The more I worry about myself, the more worried I become and soon I am even worried that I might be worrying too much.       But the moment I shift that focus to what's in front of me, I see someone who could use some help. And the more I help, the higher I get. That's the huge personal benefit to making a difference in another person's life. The book 100 Ways to Create Wealth dives deeply into giving versus getting as the source of happiness in life.       I've been coaching, training and consulting with businesses and individuals for 15 years and I have never dared to do a program like 100 Ways to Create Wealth---a program that reveals (and destroys) the central BLOCK to making money---the one consistent OBSTACLE in the brain of the person desiring a breakthrough in their wealth curve.       What's that block we put up? We are reacting. We are distracted. We are busy. We are overwhelmed. We are solving problems and fighting fires. And none of that activity creates wealth. Not the kind of wealth you want to create---not the kind of quantum breakthrough that would give you total financial freedom.       There are certain activities that you do that would produce wealth. Yet 80% of the day (at the very least) is spent on OTHER NON-WEALTH PRODUCING DISTRACTIONS. You are busy instead of effective.       How do I know this? Because in those 15 years of working with small businesses and professional individuals like you it has always been the case that what is stopping you from a wealth breakthrough is distraction. A habit of reaction. How busy you always are with other things. Life has become one big emergency.       Bestselling self-help author and radio talk show host Michael Neill said about the wealth book Sam and I have written, "After years of reading books about how all I needed to do to have more money was 'think positive' and 'visualize success,' it dawned on me that I had accumulated more books than money. Steve Chandler helped me to turn that around and in three months I earned more than I had in the previous year. Want to know the real 'secret' to creating wealth? Read this wise and wonderful book!"       My friend and partner Sam Beckford co-wrote this book with me. He became a millionaire in his early 30s (just a few short years ago) after failing FIVE TIMES in business. His five business failures taught him so much that he became a millionaire, and has coached literally hundreds of small businesses to become highly profitable. He discovered the same thing I did: failure comes from distraction and emotion. Success comes from logic and discipline.       Discipline is remembering what you want.       We distilled and compressed 100 ways to rejuvenate your approach so that you are CREATING wealth all day instead of reacting to problems. This is not the Law of Attraction as taught in The Secret. (Even though one of the key people in the DVD of The Secret now raves about our book.) The law of attraction is good but it's only step one---getting your mind cleared for a vision. 100 Ways to Create Wealth is about action and execution as well. Just doing it.       I've had my own painful lessons, too, in how NOT to become wealthy. I'll share those with you. This program won't be about investments or money management. This will be about actually generating a flow of wealth into your life, dramatic and immediate. What you do with it is your business and for other experts to discuss.       My dream has always been to take this teaching to the world, so that anyone who chooses to can become wealthy. There is no longer any mystery to it. You don't need rich parents or years of study at the Harvard Business School. You just need to know what you love to do, and then apply the 100 Ways to that.       I've been asked to make a presentation of this book's content at the University of Santa Monica in January. I am donating that day and taking no fee for myself. As a service to the University I believe in. The president of that University, Dr. Ron Hulnick said: "100 Ways To Create Wealth is more than worth its weight in gold. If you apply only one of the ways, your wealth will increase significantly. Applying four or more will change your whole life."       Believe me, come to one of these events and we will apply more than four.

Courage to Change the Things We Can

Most of the work I do is based on fear. The work I do with myself, with my coaching clients and with my larger-group training clients.       Without fear, everything flows so well. If something doesn't work, something else is tried. Energy prevails. Problems are solved quickly and in a spirit of fun. Problems become fake opponents. They pretend to oppose you, and when you engage them, they end up dancing with you, then embracing you. You thought you had to kill them, because you thought they were trying to kill you.       They love you! They want you to get stronger and add powers. Like in a computer game when your character goes to a higher level and in doing so adds powers.       So when I attended Byron Katie's 9-day school I was amazed by the power of it. I had long been an admirer of Katie's CDs and books. My friend Steve Hardison had recently been to her 9-day school and came back so enthused that I was taken aback. Steve had seen it all, and was not easily impressed. He said it would be the best thing I could ever do for myself.       I remember watching Katie handle the harshest questions, attacks and criticisms in the course. She handled then with love and kindness and an amazing intelligence. And I began to whisper the word "fearless" as I teared up in my eyes watching her. "Fearless."       When I got home after the 9-day school I was so happy I decided to call my next book "Fearless." I had already made a CD called "Fearless" long before the school, and it was everybody's favorite of all the books and CDs. (You can download it by clicking on "audio" at the top of this page.)       Then after writing a lot of it, I thought about calling it "Better Than Heaven." I was basing that on this quote from Katie, "There is something better than heaven. It is the eternal, meaningless, infinitely creative mind. It can't stop for time or space or even joy. It is so brilliant that it will shake what's left of you to the depths of all-consuming wonder."       Life was better than heaven after the school. Everything looked different. Felt different. New joy and music and color in everything. Katie kept asking us, "Who would you be without your story?"       Nothing! No one! Is the ego's panicked reply.       I had tried to express this, but she was better. I had written The Story of You prior to going to the school. People are better than they think they are. There is all that beauty, energy, love and creativity inside them just waiting to dance. And then there is their story. The story gets in the way. But only every time.       One thing that happened in the Byron Katie school was that all my money worries disappeared and have not returned.       Americans are tortured by their thoughts around money. And that's a tragic elevation of money. It's putting money on a pedestal higher than your own religion or spirituality, to keep using the term "blessed" only in reference to money. And to be humbled and in awe of life only when it comes to money.       Why not have money be just like anything else? Instead of giving it religious standing. If you want to have some eggs, you'll just go make some eggs; and if you want to have some money, why not just go make some?       It's not something you have to be awestricken over. You don't have to put in an immediate call to the almighty when it flows in. Do you do that when water flows in? Or a breeze?       It's just cause-and-effect money we are talking about here. Serve and you shall receive. It's not something that ought to inspire tears streaming from your eyes in humble adoration. It is no different than anything else you want to make.       The blessing happens when you are born. The blessings continue when you wake up in the morning. That's when you're blessed. It's not, "I'm not blessed yet. I made my sales calls but I'm not blessed yet."       One morning at Byron Katie's school she was getting ready to teach the day's lesson, adjusting her microphone, and she sneezed. When someone in the audience said, "God bless you," she said, "You're too late."       Katie has freed many people from their "money issues" and helped them to fully enjoy watching the ebb and flow of wealth without worrying about any of it. As Katie has said, "Money is a wonderful metaphor. It flows from here to there, through all countries, through phone systems and wires. It shows us how to be, mentally: how to flow, how not to have any barriers, how to take all forms. It shows us how easy it is to come in and leave all the time. It's a great guru. If you did what money does, you would be completely in love with what is." (From Work and Money by Byron Katie: www.theWork.com.)       When I began integrating the writings of Ken Wilber and the work of Byron Katie into my own life and the lives of my clients is when I began to see some new choices. I began to see that fear was not necessary. It did not have to be "part of the package."       So rather than feeling the fear and doing it anyway -- how about feeling the fear and looking for the thought that causes it?       It's the thought that is the source of the problem. In fact it's not even the thought, it's whether I believe that thought.       It's time to send in the bomb squad, or else that thought ("I'm not safe") will rise up in other situations throughout your whole life. Let's defuse. Not overwhelm. Let's not fight fire with fire, let's fight fire with water.       The great Chinese sage Lao-Tzu said, "There is nothing softer and weaker than water. And yet there is nothing better for engaging hard and strong things."       Katie's nine day School for the Work cost a few thousand to attend, but it was worth every penny because of her brilliantly transformative guidance. And the most amazing thing about Katie is that you can get everything from her for free if you want to. Her two websites, www.theWork.com and www.ByronKatie.com allow you to download audios, videos, interviews, worksheets, articles and more of her "treasure" than you'd have time to take in in a single day. She gives it all away up front. The result? Do the math: over 300 people paid around $3,000 each for the school we attended. That's wealth creation at its best. And the people were there because of how much of Katie they had already experienced.       People think if you give it away you can't charge for it. Absolutely not true. The opposite is true

If I Only Had a Brain

IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN Posted: 05 Mar 2008 12:39 PM CST       I'm just back from Vancouver Canada where Sam Beckford and I put on a three-day program based on our book 100 Ways to Create Wealth.       We had 24 powerful clients in the room who came in from all over North America to roll up their sleeves and work on eliminating the mental barriers to being creative about wealth.       Our brains are biological computers. We can use them to create wealth and wonderful relationships. Or we can be used by our brains. One function is creative and the other is reactive.       You can use a patch of soil the same way! To grow beautiful vegetables and flowers. Or you can just let your soil REACT. Then you'll see weeds and bad bugs and rot and pestilence.       Henry James said, "To live in the world of creation--to get into it and stay in it--to frequent it and haunt it--to think intensely and fruitfully--to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation--this is the only thing."       And by "meditation" Henry James didn't mean to just withdraw into Ramana's cave and become a vegetable. Because even the Bhagavad Gita says, "Nobody can become perfect by merely ceasing to act." *               *                *                * WHAT I LEARNED FROM GERTRUDE STEIN       A publisher asked if I would write a book called 100 Ways to Win People Over. I declined.       Why would I want to teach people to win other people over? What if we had a whole nation of people waking up every day and winning other people over?       Do you like being won over? Do you enjoy it when someone comes up to you at a gathering and tries to win you over? Tries to impress you? Dropping names and trying to make an impression? More time is wasted that way. More tragic hopeless time. We think two things that make us do this: A) Everyone else is a grown-up, and B) the grown-ups have the money.       I know a lot of people these days who are writing books. Some have hired me to coach them through the process. Because I have written or co-authored over a dozen books they think I have a formula to pass on. Well they are correct. I do! And I borrowed it from Gertrude Stein, who said, and I quote, "To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write."