iMindShift with Steve Chandler

DISCOVER A PERFECT SYSTEM

       I was in Chicago this week to work with an elite leadership team at Microchip Technology, a global leader in the field of microcontroller and analog semiconductors. Very exciting.

     What sets that company apart is its deliberately-created culture.  At the heart of it is a commitment to work with systems – and to see the underlying system beneath every phenomenon.

     They stress the use of the word "perfect" when describing a system.  For example, "We have a perfect system for angering the customer, and for producing poor-quality products, excessively long R&D Development cycles, low margins, unreliable computer networks, low productivity, high turnover," and so forth.  (See Driving Excellence by Michael Jones and Steve Sanghi.)

     The point is you'll always get what you've designed the system to get.  Therefore the solution is to design a new system.  As opposed to blaming people and making people wrong. This is called systems thinking and it's a higher order of thinking than we normally do.  We are usually tapped by fear in a very low-level form of judgmental thinking.

     Almost all the companies I have worked with have ongoing problems with politics, ego and the arrogance of certain managers.  The feeling is that you're always going to have that.  It's how well you deal with it.  But at Microchip they see it differently. At Microchip, politics, ego and arrogance are . . .  are you ready for this? . . . "not allowed."  They're not allowed.  In other words, NOT ALLOWED!!!

     That's pretty simple.  And bold.  Can you really do that?  Well, yes, it's called a deliberately-created culture.  The old story that everyone believes is that politics, ego and arrogance will simply be a fact of life.  Grow up!  Get used to it. But at Microchip they are not allowed-----in the same way that wearing a swim suit to work is not allowed.  When it's really clear that something is not allowed, people just don't do it.

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     When you take the linear road nothing will ever be enough.  When you live a story's path from birth to death, nothing you do will ever feel like it's enough. I love the way you've fixed up your house and you say "We're not done yet.  We've just got started.  There's so much to do.  It's really a mess." That's the story you can't get out of.  It's the story of not enough.

I tell you “you've done well at your job.”  You don't agree, you say "I really want a division manager's position.  I should have had it a year ago."

     You look good, though.  You've lost weight.  I tell you “you look like you've lost a lot of weight.” You say, "Not enough.  Not nearly enough!"

     I remark later how well your son is doing in school.  I heard he almost made the honor roll.
"Well. . . yes. . . but he's having some problems in math that we can't seem to solve."

     So he's not enough.  Even your beautiful son is not enough.

     Because the worm can't stand up, let alone fly.  And a linear life, a life that simply lives out a story, is a horizontal, worm's life. Yet we humans learn to get up off the ground early in life.  We learn, as fast as we can, to walk.  So we are no longer physically on the ground all the time.  We are up now.  We rise up so that we are now pointed---our bodies are!---to the heavens.  To the stars.

     We were not meant to be horizontal.  We were born to rise up and take to the stars.  To stand.  To walk tall.  To dance and sing.  To whirl.

     Yet here comes our story and down we go.  "We are all worms.  But I believe that I am a glow-worm," said Winston Churchill. Sometimes just standing up will take you out of your horizontal story and into the universe.  The act of standing forces oxygen into your system that wasn't there before.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, "He who breathes more air lives more life."

     Ask your class to stand and take a breath.  Look how the stagnant story they were stuck in disappears and they look so fresh and relieved.  Relieved!  Relieved of thought.  Relived of a mind mired in the tales from the crypt. So I began to see parallels between the underlying system in a company and the underlying belief system in an individual.

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    Many of you have asked if the free eBook I offered to you could be shared
with friends, family and co-workers...yes....if you could put it on your own blog for your readers...yes...Joe Vitale of The Secret recently did...and you can too...if you can print it out and hand it out on street corners in the big city so people don't worry so much....yes......the feedback I have been getting is that this eBook helps people eliminate worry from their day...worry is so unnecessary...you were born to enjoy yourself, here it is:

   
Here's a free eBook I thought you would especially enjoy…

                                              POWERFUL GRACEFUL SUCCESS
                                                         By Steve Chandler
                                 The Secret Key to Mastering Time, Love and Money
                                       http://www.stevechandler.com/Free.html

FLYING MONKEYS IN YOUR LIFE?

       There is no lack of courage. It's there. You don't have to have it granted to you. God grant me the courage? Done, says God, because it is always already done.

     Courage is the life force. It pushes the flower up through the concrete. That flower didn't have to apply for a grant. The courage to push up and break through is always already there.

     The problem a coward has is not a lack of anything. A coward doesn't have a lack of courage. He has too much of something. Too much fear. Too many worries.

     Consider one of the most blatant forms of human cowardice on display in today's news reports. The uncommitted super delegates. They fear committing to one candidate over another. They are waiting until one of the candidates is so mathematically totally eliminated that there will be no anger. It won't matter whom they commit to. Until that happens they fear making someone mad. They fear her flying monkeys, too. Vengeful and unspeakably scary.

     Fears get added to our perfect courage. When I wrote Fearless it wasn't a book about how to add courage. It wasn't about "building up" your courage. It was about erasing fears. It started with worries (they are not full blown fears yet, but they're gettin' there). Drop the worries. Now let's drop the ridiculous fears.

     Soon you realize that monkeys can't really fly. Deep down in your natural courage you allow yourself to know that.

 

http://www.SteveChandler.com/eBooks.html 

FEARS ARE NOT WORTH YOUR TIME

    "Fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward."

                                                 ~Amelia Earhart

      Our fears are horrible when we indulge them in the mind. Inside the mind a fear looks real. It looks threatening. It sends a cold liquid chill through my whole system, making even my lungs feel cold.

     But put it on paper! Put it on a white board! Put it out on the table for my coach to look at and discuss, and all of a sudden it is reduced to a thought. A simple thought. And then the more you look at it the more you see that it's not even a true thought.

     The best process I've ever seen for this is Byron Katie's process called "The Work." But negative thoughts, worries and fears can also be deleted by using Martin Seligman's disputation method, a version of the same thing. Seligman wrote the great book, Learned Optimism. His studies covered 20 years and over half a million people. He proved scientifically that optimism can be learned. That happiness is a thing to master, like the piano. It's not a personality trait. It's not a character flaw to be fearful and worried all the time. It's a failure to practice.

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     If you have a religion, if you have a practice, increase it.  Don't wonder why it's not taking you anywhere.  Don't wonder why it's not doing anything for you.  Increase it.  Step it up.  Really get into it.  Because the more you do, the more spirit comes into your life. 

     People often ask me about the best mind shifts I've ever seen. And I talk about more than 30 ways to execute a mind shift in the new MindShift CD series (www.stevechandler.com) ... but the best way is to have a practice that introduces more and more spirit into your life.   

      If you don't find such a practice, borrow one.  Go along with somebody.  Have someone teach you.  Do something, but have spirit be a part of your success plan.  Don't leave it out.  Don't have it be only a flat land, linear life that you are going to follow. Some anxious horizontal rat race where you think it's enough to go from having no money to being a millionaire because it's an empty game. 

     When you get to the end. It's empty. It's a betrayal. You end up like Donald Trump with a bad haircut, a nasty disposition and an empty-headed trophy wife. It's like, "OK, I've got my million, now what?" 

     Have your heart grow, along with your mind and your body.  Have your soul grow too.  Whatever you come to find that to mean.  Go into spiritual literature, go deep and allow yourself to have an experience.  The beautiful part about the reality of spirit is that it connects on the experiential level.  It is an experience.  It becomes an actual experience. 

     It becomes more real than what you think is real.  And if you choke off your connection to spirit, if you deny it and turn your back on it, you are actually flattening yourself out to the most meaningless shallow, linear life imaginable.  And that's why there are so many people who have to make other things into their religion.  There's a longing in the soul for spirit.  For a manifestation.  Spiritual growth.  Conscious contact with a higher power.  There's a longing for it.

     When that longing gets shut off, by whatever means they use to shut it off, to deny it, to say it's ridiculous, to say it's an ancient myth---I'm not falling for it.  Anything I use to shut off the very reality of that experience is going to lead me to make something else the religion, and you've met people like that. People who now have money as their religion.  Or power. Or growing their business. Or building their second home. I know people, who other people would call successful, but who are just absolutely obsessed with finding new and better ways to make more and more money.  Not stopping to smell the roses, not stopping to hug their loved ones.  Just boom----BOOM! ... off to another country---there's an opportunity there---and it's just a mania--well, it's a religion 

      So why not have the religion, whatever it is in your life, be real. So that what it brings is enlightenment, spirit, grace, salvation----all the things that are just so beautiful and that don't exist on the linear plane so can't be proven in a linear way.  They are bigger than that.  They are more real than that.  It's not that they're unreal---they're more real.

     Some people warned me not to talk of these things in my MindShift program. They said to keep it secular and flat and safe. But then how would the mind truly shift? And without spirit, how would it keep shifting? My experience says that it wouldn't. And I don't much care if the audios I make from now on don't fit the current culture. My purpose is to have some fun. And by fun, I mean real fun that lasts.

    Oh, and in case you missed it last time, here's a free eBook for you that gets into this subject in an even more exciting way: http://www.stevechandler.com/Free.html

      

ONE SWEET SLOW GOOD THING AT A TIME

     "I know how busy you are," someone said to me the
other day. I said I wasn't. I told him that if I was, I would
be making a mistake. A busy person is a frightened person.

     Isn't that really true?

     When I'm "busy" (as I sometimes am....by mistake....) it means I have been afraid to say "no." I've been trying to please everybody and win them over – making myself a doormat to people out of FEAR of not being liked. From that busy-ness I can't truly serve. I can't serve God or people from there.

     But fear is my profession. So I am privileged to be able to understand this all day. I journey out and help people define their fears. I help them look inside themselves instead of looking outside, because inside is where they find the answers to questions of success. Inside their own fear.

    Most respond to their lives and sinking hopes and sinking fortunes and sinking ships and their sinking fearful feelings by rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That's what most people do with sinking of any kind, including their sinking hearts. Me? Me too? Yes, but only for about 50 years.

    But then I learned to get into the world of creation. I learned to woo combinations and inspirations into being. Like Mozart. Who said he never wrote an original melody - ever, but just created combinations of pre-existing folk melodies, which is all we do when we dream. 

    Dreaming well and efficiently while awake is like shifting the mind, which is like shifting while in a Porsche.  It's a rolling motion in the wrist - not some huge effort.  It brings freedom to glide and flow-------not out of control, but simply less encumbered with less drag.  Your car tells you when you are too long in one gear, and so does your mind.

     The gears get stuck in the adult mind.  Almost like the hardening of the arteries. When a problem appears, the freeze sets in further.

    So a coach sits down and talks to me about this problem of mine and sees how stuck in low gear I am. He asks a few questions that always paint a bigger picture. He tells me some stories and parables and soon we are off to the races.

   Shakespeare said, "Action is eloquence," and if there were anyone who you'd think would lobby for words being eloquence, you'd think it would be Shakespeare.  But even to him, action meant more than words.

  And that's what my coach does, he brings me out of low gear into action. The big painted picture can do this.  It can open the mind into its creative state.

    I was in California visiting my good friends and clients Drs. Ron and Mary Hulnick at the University of Santa Monica.  They teach the world's best program in spiritual psychology at their school and one of their most powerful teachings focuses on the low gear statement, "I am upset because…"  The minute I make that statement I am giving power to some external circumstance (or a person) ....the power to upset me!  It's a false power. A mirage. The true authentic power is spirit, and spirit can be found within, as in the scriptural "the kingdom of heaven is within you…"

     So now, finally my book FEARLESS is released and you can get the
eBook version here  http://www.stevechandler.com/eBooks.html.

     When you are fearless you don't have to pursue success. Success chases after you. Or, as Mother Teresa put it, "God didn't call me to be successful. He called me to be faithful."

CREATING THE PERFECT LOVE

"We waste time looking for the perfect lover,
instead of creating the perfect love."

                                             ~ Tom Robbins
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        I am reminded of the time I was getting ready to go to a football game and looking all over...and I do mean ALL OVER the house for my binoculars while they were, all the while, around my neck.

      We look for friends and lovers and contacts to reassure us that we are loveable and worth something. Instead of finding the love inside we have to give. Always already there.

       At one period in my life I went into therapy as a way to see if I could solve my problems. And it occurs to me now, that although I received huge unintended benefits from being in therapy, the therapy itself was not complete, because it was leaving something important out. It was trying to understand each individual's personal patterns of dysfunctional psychology, and then label those patterns, and then "work on" them. But it never fully "worked" for me because there was no accompanying attempt to understand the basic principle of thought.

     When a thought enters the mind and is seized upon and believed, a feeling is the result. And the process is that predictable.

     People think their way into trouble, and then study the trouble.  They think their way into anger or depression, and then they study the depression and anger.  Can you see the fallacy there?  The thinking itself is never studied.

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                            Your mind can have a calming effect

        "When anyone has even the slightest inkling of understanding of the role of thought in creating perception, it has a calming effect. One avoids becoming consumed in a spiraling intensity of their own perceptions. One doesn't get carried away and upset. One goes the other direction, tending to calm down, to get a little humble about it, thinking: Maybe I need to take a fresh look at this, let my intelligence behind my thought evolve my perception, see it in a more understanding, functional light. That is the nature of life: to create more options, more possibilities."

                                           ~ GEORGE PRANSKY
 
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                STRESSING  OUT  OVER YOUR LIFE RUINS  IT

     Stressing out over hitting my goals is not the same as caring about hitting them. No performer, when tense, or stressed, performs well. No leader does. No sales person. No fundraiser. No parent. No lover.

    A stressed-out, tense performer only has access to a small per cent of their skill and talent and intelligence. (Do you want a tense person shooting a free throw, or kicking a long field goal in the last moments of the game, or a confident, calm person?)

    Most people stress themselves out as a form of "really caring" about hitting their goals.  But it's not caring, it's stressing out. Caring is relaxing, focusing and calling on ALL of my resources, all of that relaxed magic, that lazy dynamite that I bring to bear when I pay full attention with total peace of mind. No one performs better than when they are relaxed and focused.

     Most people try double negatives and triple negatives as a way to motivate themselves.  They intentionally upset themselves over the prospect of NOT reaching their goals.  Selling or leading or building great relationships is not possible when one is that negatively stressed out.

    It is not necessary to stress. Only to focus and remain focused. Anything you pay peaceful attention to will expand.  Just don't spend your attention elsewhere. Spend it where you want the increase: in clients, customers, money, whatever. In a relaxed and happy way be relentless and undivided and peaceful and powerful. You will succeed.

    To help people learn this I've created a free, blessedly short eBook:

                              POWERFUL GRACEFUL SUCCESS
                                          By Steve Chandler
             The Secret Key to Mastering Time, Love and Money
                          http://www.stevechandler.com/Free.html