iMindShift with Steve Chandler

WE CAN SHIFT TO A DIFFERENT LEVEL

      "I think the difference between first and second place is clear intention.  Intention is the magical word.  When you go to a golf tournament you need to ask yourself, 'What is my intention? Why am I here? Am I here to have a good time, am I here to play a level of golf never seen before, am I here to make the cut, am I here to make some money to pay the bills?'  You need to tune that intention to a level that is just slightly out of your reach.  That's the secret of really being great.  If you lengthen your stride and you even hurt a little bit once in awhile because you're striving for one more level of excellence, your eyes will be opened and you'll gain more intelligence and you'll gain more understanding The players who do that, who become great, are the ones who are willing to take a gamble on a shot where everybody thinks, 'You shouldn't take that gamble. It's safer to go over here.'  Then everybody plays safe or they choke into the water.  But the player who wins tournaments is the one who's willing to say, 'My intention here is not to play smart, not to play safe, but to win.'  My intention is to do what others are not willing to do, and sometimes that equates to a tough shot over water to a tight pin. You can do it.  It's in your repertoire, and if you can pull off those shots, that's what makes you win tournaments.  A lot of people accidentally win tournaments on the tour.  The great champion wins tournaments. He clearly goes out and wins the tournament.  People don't say, 'Well, he was lucky. He got a good break. He double-bogied the last hole, and backed in.' You just go out and you win because you have the formula."
         ~Johnny Miller

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      Imagine you were a child, and your parents wanted you to get busy advancing your life along.  Move it or lose it!  Come on, lazy bones, up and at 'em!  School day!

    And you wanted something more than a linear life lived along a horizontal plane inching, inching along like an inchworm

     Draw a line on a piece of paper.  On the left end of your line put a big B for birth.  Then at the right end of the line put a big D for death.  Then find where you are.  How much life is there left?  It's scary to live this linear way.  It's scary for a human to live like a worm on the horizontal ground crawling on its belly trying to live up to other people's expectations.

     Living in a linear way means that life is just one damn thing after another.  Soon the wheels start coming off the bus.  You are now worming your way across the horizon into old age with a host of new-found fears and worries.  Grumpy old man (or woman) is soon the best front you can put up.

     But this is the true story of you? 

     This is life when you buy into the flat-lining linear story.  You're born.  Things happen.  And you die.  Tragically.  In an untimely way.  Because linear life leads to untimely death.   How could it be timely? Who would ever say it was really timely?

    Living life as a story is not easy.  In fact it's somewhat terrifying.  So your parents want you to get started quickly.  Just hold your nose and jump in.  They give you a name.  They make it up.  It means nothing.  But to you it will soon mean everything.

     In fact, in one of the motivational seminars on salesmanship I took once the instructor told us that if our sales prospect ever seemed to lose interest in what we were saying, we were to use his name. 

     "So, Dave, what do you think?  Is this a car you would like to be seen in, Dave?  Can you picture your family, Dave, watching you drive up and yelling, 'Oh my Goodness---look at what Dave's driving!'"

     That is the proven alarm clock for someone hypnotized into their story.

     But you can be bigger and better than all that. Have a higher purpose. Have a huge spiritual intention that infuses every little moment. But you've got to mindshift out of the story.

     Or as Byron Katie puts it, "If we don't survive our reality on one level, we go to a different level always available to us within ... and we are served always."

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     So here's part of an interview I did for an online book review magazine:

Rebecca: When we're children we're all good artists yet once we're grown-ups, we're not! What happens to us?

Steve Chandler: We have talked ourselves into being artless.  We have decided that we are no longer powerful and extraordinary and so we have quit. However, with most of us, quitting is eventually too painful to live with. So we find a way to wake up and live again, and create again, and write again, and love again, and paint and sing and dance again and life improves quite beautifully. Life always begins again.  Every moment is a fresh moment.

Rebecca: What do you encourage us to do when someone bald-facedly (isn't that a strange phrase!) disagrees with us? When someone gets something wrong, say they've forgotten to fax my Rx to the pharmacy and I really need the medication now, instead of blowing my stack what do you suggest?

Steve Chandler: I suggest you use that occasion to appreciate how much pain that person is living in. Incompetent people are living in a lot of pain. Nasty and irresponsible people are not at all happy with themselves, and they don't know how to fix it. Help them.  The more you practice helping them, the more your emotions will be under your control instead of under the control of people who are hurting. Why let your emotions be upset by other people's internal dysfunction? You are not the target. You are never the target.

Rebecca: What on earth is the "Intention Deficit Disorder" you write about and how do I know I've got it and how can I cure myself?

Steve Chandler: It is a lack of direction. It is a lack of purpose. The best thing you can do to cure yourself is to constantly ask yourself, "What is my intention?" Before you go meet with someone, ask yourself what you intend. What would you really like to have the relationship be like? 

Rebecca: You suggest that giving comes from someplace other than the heart, where and why?

Steve Chandler:  Giving comes from a combination of the mind and spirit. That's why we call our favorite gifts, "thoughtful."  We always say, when we are most touched, "That was so thoughtful of you." We never say, "that was so emotional of you."  You don't have to wait until you feel like giving to give.  That is a crippling superstition brought to you by people who want to sell you your feelings as the primary energy centers of your world. They simply are not. And thinking that they are will lead you to a messed up life. Use your mind and spirit.

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      The Coaching Prosperity School that begins in October is starting to fill up...a little early.... they usually fill up in the last month prior to the school when coaches and consultants start to realize they really COULD be making a lot more money if they could get a clue about how others do it. I know some coaches who make five times more than others who are as good as they are. Why? If you want to attend this school and find out, email me at 100Ways@compuserve.com, and I'll send you the two free CDs I have on coaching prosperity.

   

EVERYTHING IS FINISHED?

"There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning."
            ~Louis L'Amour   

  As I receive postcards and letters from Terry Hill from Mexico, I often glance up at a photo of him on our kitchen wall, from Mexico, from many years ago, when we were down in Mazatlan, drinking beer, and acting wild as always ... fighting waves as they came in … he and I and Fred Knipe going into the water and actually trying to battle the waves and turn them back out to sea. (Hunter Thompson would get this immediately … the importance of being a wave-fighter.)

     Then came this missive from Hill while he was in in Sayulita ... hand-written and not designed for a book but for my eyes and Kathy's (to whom I have not sufficiently explained the importance of wave-fighting) … I laugh as I read it, and drop it down to the coffee table then later hear her laughing while reading it, so I insist that I put it here, because it is about death … about death's opposite, Dylan Thomas's request that we not go gently, that we rage against the dying of the light:

"Steve,

Do not think I did not hear the whispers.
He is sixty, they said; he has lost the
alertness, perhaps the courage too.  The
waves look bigger when one gets older.
And these last three years he has only
fought in fresh water, which is not
the same is it?

And yet, as I stepped on the beach
in Sayulita to once again fight Pacific
Waves, I saw my duty clearly and
felt the strength within me rise.
The waves are relentless, but so too
the wave fighter.  I did my job.  How
well?  That is for others to judge.  But
let me just say that had I been in
Indonesia at Christmas, I believe
hundreds, if not thousands, of lives
would have been saved."

Yours in the brotherhood,
Terrence N. "Terry" Hill
WFI - Wave Fighters International
33 years service - and counting.

      Our book TWO GUYS READ THE OBITUARIES studied many obituaries for the secret of death. Terry and I woke up each morning and read them and wrote about them. Some were terrifying. Some were inspiring.

      Here's an obituary that I read this week!

      THE ECONOMOST in London, "IF, ON any day over the past few decades, you had chanced to be strolling in the early morning at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, you might have seen a wiry, determined figure power-walking in the sea. Keen as a whippet, his thin arms pumping, he headed into the prevailing swell. In his 80s, he would do an hour of this. In his 90s, he still managed 25 minutes.

     Sir John Templeton spent his life going against the flow. In September 1939, when the war-spooked world was selling, he borrowed $10,000 to buy 100 shares in everything that was trading for less than a dollar a share on the New York Stock Exchange. All but four eventually turned profits. In early 2000, conversely, he sold all his dotcom and Nasdaq tech stocks just before the market crashed. His iron principle of investing was “to buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are greedily buying”. At the point of “maximum pessimism” he would enter, and clean up."

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TWO QUESTIONS SOMEONE ASKED ME:

Q. When we are speaking to our staff, what is a better word to use than "should""....ie: You should have....."

SC:

    "Another way I've seen that done is..."

    "I used to do it that way, but what I discovered is that......"

    "Can you see any other ways that it might be done that would help us to....?"

      By the time you learn all the words of victimization, you will begin to realize that the spirit of victimization is just as important as the words. Any language that sends the message of criticism and "you're doing it wrong!" will make staff less likely to warm up to the suggested changes (or to you). Any time you can allow staff to discover for themselves, in conversation, what a better action might be, you are way ahead of the game. Any time you can share your own personal experience with how you used to do it ineffectively, but now do it more effectively, you have made a more supportive communication. If all else fails, try this: "My recommendation, based on my experience, is that we do it THIS way.....anybody else have ideas on this? My goal is to support you in getting this done in ways that are more efficient and easy for you. But I don't need to be right about it. Anyone see a better way than this?"

Q.  How do you manage time?

SC:    People really don't manage time so much as they own their energy.  They make investments of energy based on taking OWNERSHIP of their commitments and agreements and, especially, promises of achievement they have made to themselves.

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OR MAKE YOURSELF STRONG

                                "We either make ourselves miserable,
                                      or we make ourselves strong.
                                  The amount of work is the same."
                                           ~Carlos Castaneda

      A lot of people ask me (quite often) to re-tell the story of how I
came to know Arnold Schwarzenegger. So I will!

     Arnold was not yet famous in 1976 when he and I had lunch together at the Doubletree Inn in Tucson, Arizona. Not one person in the restaurant recognized him.

     He was in town publicizing the movie Stay Hungry, a box-office disappointment he had just made with Jeff Bridges and Sally Field. I was a sports columnist for the Tucson Citizen at the time, and my assignment was to spend a full day, one-on-one, with Arnold and write a feature story about him for our newspaper's Sunday magazine.

     I, too, had no idea who he was, or who he was going to become. I agreed to spend the day with him because I had to-it was an assignment. And although I took to with an uninspired attitude, it was one I'd never forget.

     Perhaps the most memorable part of that day with Schwarzenegger occurred when we took an hour for lunch. I had my reporter's notebook out and was asking questions for the story while we ate. At one point I casually asked him, "Now that you have retired from bodybuilding, what are you going to do next?"

     And with a voice as calm as if he were telling me about some mundane travel plans, he said, "I'm going to be the number-one box-office star in all of Hollywood."
I tried not to show my shock and amusement at his plan. After all, his first attempt at movies didn't promise much. And his Austrian accent and awkward monstrous build didn't suggest instant acceptance by movie audiences. I finally managed to match his calm demeanor, and I asked him just how he planned to become Hollywood's top star.

     Mind you, this was not the slim, aerobic Arnold we know today. This man was pumped up and huge. And so for my own physical sense of well-being, I tried to appear to find his goal reasonable.

     "It's the same process I used in bodybuilding," he explained. "What you do is create a vision of who you want to be, and then live into that picture as if it were already true."

     It sounded ridiculously simple. Too simple to mean anything.  But I wrote it down. And I never forgot it.

     I'll never forget the moment when some entertainment TV show was saying that box office receipts from his second Terminator movie had made him the most popular box office draw in the world. Was he psychic? Or was there something to his formula?

     Over the years I've used Arnold's idea of creating a vision as a motivational tool. I've also elaborated on it in my corporate training seminars.  I invite people to notice that Arnold said that you "CREATE a vision." He did not say that you wait until you RECEIVE a vision. You create one. In other words, you make it up.

     A major part of living a fearless life is having something to wake up for in the morning---something that you are "up to" in life so that you will stay hungry. The vision can be created right now---better now than later. You can always change it if you want, but don't live a moment longer without one.

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          Terry Hill and I were in his Greenwich Village apartment a few weeks ago finishing up our work on the book TWO GUYS READ JANE AUSTEN. It is the third in the series that started with the critically acclaimed Two Guys Read Moby Dick followed by the morbidly ridiculous Two Guys Read The Obituaries.

      When we were in high school Terry and I double-dated.  As boys we played on sports teams together. He was at shortstop, while I played third. Our teams were difficult for other teams to beat. We once sang as a folk duo in a bar.  We've been whaling, delivered newspapers together, given toasts at each other's weddings and now it has come to this … reading Jane Austen. What was there left to do?

     And for me, I'd made it through sixty some years without reading Austen at all and so I thought I was pretty much home free. What guy, really, wants to read Jane Austen?
   
      I mean, Moby-Dick was one thing.  A manly adventure, containing no women at all!  Reading and writing about the tall tale of courage and madness on the high seas would be fun - and indeed it was.  Two Guys Read Moby-Dick got such a surprisingly enthusiastic response that we decided to do more books this way.  The fun was just beginning.

     Then came death. Or, rather, the obituaries.  Terry was an avid obituary reader, often clipping them and sending them to me over the years, especially when the deceased was someone from the world of music, sports or literature. These have been shared interests of ours since we first became friends in 1955.  For the obits book we read the obituaries every day for a year and commented on them. We explored the meaning of life and death … in our way. Deep stuff, as you can imagine.

     And now our third book, the most dangerous territory yet, the world of Jane Austen.  Do real men really read Jane Austen?  We were fearless in the face of that question.

     Even though I had a degree in English, I somehow managed to navigate through a lot of authors in college without reading Jane. No I was not a misogynist. Don't lump me in with them. I wasn't a guy like Pat Robertson who once said, "The key in terms of mental ability is chess. There's never been a woman Grand Master chess player. Once you get one, then I'll buy some of the feminism."  (I would hand that lip-moving, mouth-breathing charlatan cathode-ray minister a copy of Emily Dickinson so he would indeed be in the presence of a true chess master. But I get ahead of myself.)

     Before this assignment - reading Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park - my only exposure to Jane Austen had been through film.  There were so many good movies based on her books, movies like Sense and Sensibility and the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice of the BBC and even the funny movie Clueless which was based on Jane Austen's book, Emma.  Such good movies! But that was enough Jane for me. I had no desire whatsoever to read what I assumed was chick lit that had simply translated entertainingly into chick flicks.

     So when Terry's wife Miranda and my wife Kathy both suggested that Jane Austen be the subject of our next book I thought it would be a hilarious romp of mockery. Like me and Terry sitting on the couch with beer and chips yelling funny comments at the stupid love scenes before switching back to the Michigan-Ohio State game. I was locked and loaded, ready to fire even more ridicule than he and I fired at Moby-Dick.
    
     So now we have two grown men in their early sixties (sixty is the new thirty, remember) reading Jane Austen together!  It sounds like something an army psychological warfare unit would turn to if waterboarding were outlawed. As a way to break a man. Break him down and surrender his manhood forever.

     In a recent writer's workshop delivered in Mexico, Terry quoted J.D. Salinger who said only two questions should be asked of a writer after he'd written something - "Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?"

     Those are questions Jane Austen would have to answer for me.  And in the book that follows you'll witness the rather amusing spectacle of my encountering something I certainly had not expected.

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     ""I'm standing up, applauding while typing, a feat inspired by just finishing Two Guys Read Moby-Dick. I was reluctant to start it... the topic did seem a tad unusual... but I ended up being reluctant to finish, wanting it to go on and on. I wish I could go out and buy many more "Two Guys" books. I think they have a wonderful franchise started. The idea is just funky enough and the writing is dazzling, charming and witty."

- Dale Dauten, King Features Syndicate

 

WHEREVER THAT DREAM MAY LEAD

    "You've got to follow that dream, wherever
that dream may lead."
                        ~ELVIS PRESLEY

      Victims have a hard time dreaming. It's because they have a hard time with focus. They have a hard time with clarity. Victims think, "I'm totally pre-occupied.  I'm thinking of a million things, I'm sorry, I wasn't listening to you, I've got a hundred things on my mind." 

     If I've got a hundred things on my mind and I'm not listening to you, we probably won't have a very good conversation. In fact,  I might have to go back and fix that later.  And, because I didn't have a good communication with you,  I now take a hundred and one things with me to take to someone else.  And everywhere I go, I've all these things on my mind, and I have to go back and fix things everywhere I've been because I wasn't focused when I was there.  It's an endless cycle. It's a life of fire-fighting and problem-solving and cleaning up unfinished business.

                                         "...The secret of my success...."

      There was a sales person in Long Beach that I had the pleasure of training and working with. He was the top sales person in the history of his company, and during our training he became very enthusiastic about this subject of ownership and said, "This thing you're talking about and teaching us is the secret of my success as a salesperson.  I've always done this. Any time my mind gets any kind of distraction, or if I feel myself pulled off center, I always handle it right away. I always take care of it. Because my commitment is to total focus. When I go talk to a customer I am totally focused.  If I'm talking to a customer and I'm worried about my son and begin to think I'm not spending enough time with my son, or this or that, the chances of my having a great experience with that prospect are diminished--- they are cut in half!  So if I'm driving down the road and I'm starting to worry that I don't see enough of my little boy these days, I pull the car aside.  I get on the phone, I call my wife and I say let's schedule some time this weekend for me and  Tommy.  And she says, 'All right, great, how about Saturday afternoon?  You can take him to a movie or a game.'  I say. 'Great, let's do that.  Tell him I'm doing that and we're going to do that,' and I hang up the phone and my mind is clear again.  I'm focused again. I will not take a mind that can't focus into any encounter with a client.  That's the part of the secret of why I lead the team.  I see other salespeople running in, unprepared, pre-occupied, a hundred things at once going on in their minds, and that's the difference."

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      "Until you can put your attention where you want it you have not become master of yourself.  You will never be happy until you can determine what you are going to think about for the next hour.
                                              ~Emmet Fox

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     "I have more fun, and enjoy more financial success, when I stop trying to get what I want and start helping other people get what they want."
                            ~Spencer Johnson (author, The One-Minute Sales Person)

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     When  you  SAY  you  fear  death

    "When you say you fear death you are really saying that you fear you have not lived your true life.  This fear cloaks the world in silent suffering."
                                          ~David Viscott

     It does not take a person of extraordinary courage to change from a life of fear to a life of purpose (as proven by the fact that I myself have done it.) We become what we think about all day long.  Our thoughts project pictures and those pictures create the neural pathways in the brain that we live into.

          Notice the roads your thoughts walk you down.  When you catch them going down the road of "What do I dread the most?" deliberately bring yourself back with the question, "Do I really want to go there?"  Go where you want to go. Do what you want to do. Think what you want to think. Live how you want to live. Be who you want to be.

      Huge things can be accomplished by focusing on one small action at a time. Novelist Anne Lamott recalls an incident in her childhood the memory of which always helps her "to get a grip."

    "Thirty years ago," she remembers, "my older brother, who was 10 years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.' "

    Human beings have enormous intellectual resources, energy resources, when they make their minds up to achieve something. You've seen it in your kids, you've seen it in everyone you've ever known, you've seen it in yourself.  Every time you absolutely, without going back on it, make your mind up to achieve something, I defy you to think of a time you haven't achieved it.  When you absolutely think, "no going back, burning my bridges, I am going to do that no matter what," I defy you to think of the time you haven't done it.

    So what's generally and in most cases MISSING from the path to success is a commitment to myself, a clean and clear decision to myself that says I'm doing this.  I'm hitting that number, I can count on it, you can count on it, the universe can count on it.

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      IF YOU LIVE IN CALIFORNIA READ THIS...

     Mastermindshift comes to CALIFORNIA:

   An express elevator for your mind, the Mastermindshift experience, anchored in the work of Steve Chandler, will consistently bring you to your most creative thinking and boldest action. Begins September 13, 2008. For more information, go here.

     ********************

   October's COACHING PROSPERITY SCHOOL is FILLINGUP! Email our website to receive a free CD called "How To Double Your Income as a Coach" and sign up now for the school that begins in OCTOBER, it is filling up nicely, and we only take 9 coaches.......

                         A word on the Steve Chandler Coaching Prosperity School:

     "As a coach, it has been difficult to find a truly genuine and predictable approach to selling my services. I’ve maintained a 6-figure practice the past few years, but, until Steve’s course in Coaching Prosperity, the genuine arrival of new clients has been a mystery to me.

     I spent hours of time and thousands of dollars to “GET CLIENTS NOW,” and learn the latest and greatest from all the books, marketing boot camps, and seminars only to find more spins on that ancient and inauthentic practice of Guerilla Marketing. I’m not against these techniques, they have produced great results for my own companies and my clients, but, coaching is a bit different.

     Great coaches lose power when they fake it or try to “play the odds” with all the flyers, brochures, advertisements, and tricks. It’s not carpet cleaning we are selling. We’re not selling a piece of furniture, or changing appearances; we are changing lives.

     THANK YOU for your training and your guidance during the first 2 days of the school. You have helped me establish a truly authentic and predictable approach to filling my practice. When I applied just two things you shared on the FIRST DAY of the Coaching School - it brought in $9,000 in new business in less than 5 days…and the referrals continue to show up."
                                                 ~Justin Rohner

LIFE SHRINKS OR EXPANDS

   "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

                    ~Anais Nin

     Anais Nin was a prolific writer known for making fascinating books out of her journals.  One of the entries to her diaries said, "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

     I know what it is to remain tight in a bud.  I did that for so many years in so many aspects of my life.  My music, my writing, my speaking, my profession, my relationships, my education . . .  all tight in a bud.  My world was shrinking in proportion to my lack of courage, which was profound. If a lack can be profound.

     Once, when I was in basic training in the army, we had to do this obstacle course.  I was an okay athlete when I was younger, playing a lot of sports (tentatively, never really full out) so I was able to do almost all of those physical obstacles ... except one.  There was one that I was terrified of.  It was way up in the sky!  It looked like a rope ladder to the moon!  I got dizzy and sick to my stomach even looking up at how high that monstrous wooden tower stretched.  We were supposed to climb a rope ladder all the way up and then . . . oh no way! . . . slide down the other side of the tower on a pulley on a rope!  I froze with fear.  This would not happen.  It would not be possible.

     Soon our platoon was marching toward this next obstacle.  What was I to do?  I really had to think fast.  Right next to us was another platoon marching to a different obstacle station, one that we had already done.  As they marched next to us I started marching closer to them until I was right next to their outer line of people.  I had to think fast, so I forced a stumble, a half-fall down to the ground, and as I spun and pivoted in the gravel I got up and back in line . . . in the other platoon's line! 

    I kept marching along hoping no one would catch on, and they didn't!  I was now a part of the other platoon---and as I went through their obstacle with them (an easy one, crawling under rope nets with your rifle, like a spider) I kept an eye out on my own platoon---my real platoon!  My friends!  I saw them!  They were going up, up, UP! That godawful tower!  And then sliding down!  Poor souls!  How do they do it?  And when I noticed that they were finished and were marching off to their final obstacle, another easy one, and I ran over to the back of their formation---the sergeant leading them yelled at me.

   "Chandler!  Where were you?"

   "Sorry, Sergeant, I fell.  I fell in the gravel back there.  I'm okay now."

   And the sergeant never said another word.  Later that night in the barracks as we were getting ready for "lights out" some of my friends asked me, "How did you like the tower?"  And I said, "Didn't do it."  They were astonished.  I told them the whole story and they laughed like crazy!  I was surprised.  I thought they would hate me for my cowardice, but they liked me all the more!

    This phenomenon has always amazed me.  The more I tell people about certain shameful acts of cowardice I have done, they laugh and say they feel closer to me now.  How is that?

    I used to be so afraid of public speaking that I literally could not do it.  I would seize up.  My throat would close.  I would feel such a pressure on my chest that I couldn't catch my breath to speak.  When I did speak my voice was so shaky it sounded like I was talking through a window fan.

    When I gave my first seminars I was so scared that I could not bear to have the people in the room looking at me.  Look at their eyes!  Staring at me like WHO'S HE?  WHY IS HE IN FRONT OF US?  WE HATE THIS GUY!

     So I would pass out little Xeroxed hand-outs and I'd pass them out front to back . . . I would start my speech as I was handing them out . . . so they were not looking at me, they were occupied with the hand-outs.  Here, I have one too many in this row; are these two stuck together? 

    But me? I kept talking and talking about my subject as I moved back, back, from the front of the room to the back.  Soon I had handed the last sheets out to the back row and now I WAS IN THE BACK OF THE ROOM STILL TALKING AND ALL I SAW WAS THE BACKS OF THEIR HEADS!

     I would then move slowly up the middle aisle, still talking all the way, and as I got to the front of the room I was okay.  My initial butterflies were gone, and they had nice expressions on their faces, and I knew I would now be just fine.

     What a process fear can put us through.  What a dance we dance with the devil himself by the light of the moon.  But then how nice to finally know that it is possible to be fearless.

 

DON'T CURE ME

      There is a radical, powerful poet whose poems I love----his name is Frederick Seidel (pictured above.) At the beginning of a recent book I wrote I used his lines:

"Don't cure me. Sickness is my me.
My terror was you'd set me free."

     I think those lines express so beautifully what happens when we go to a coach or a counselor or a mentor. We don't really want to be cured of our defects because we think "that's who we are!" We get confused and think our sickness is our identity. Lose that and we are nothing.

    This is especially true about people who we experience as constant complainers. They want to tell you their victim stories. They are victims of how other people treat them. They are victims of circumstances. They are lost in their victim drama and have totally identified with it. It's who they are. Don't cure me. Sickness is my me.

    In the second line the poet says, "My terror was you'd set me free." I know that terror! I felt it before going to Byron Katie's nine-day school. People think Katie is some kind of spirit being, a new age priestess with feel-good gentle pseudo-spiritual rituals for the gullible. Well, no, not exactly.

    Her work asks that you bring great courage to the party. She calls it the "great undoing." What is it that I am undoing?  One woman stood up in the school and said, "I feel like I'm going to die" and Katie said, "Let's hope you do."

    How cruel a thing to say, maybe, it would seem to someone who didn't know that Katie wanted her identity ("sickness is my me") to die so that her true self would be set free to just LOVE EVERYTHING. Terrifying. My terror was she'd set me free.

    Then, in the same book I put in a quote from John Lennon. It's from a desolate song he wrote called Isolation. The lines are:

"People say we got it made.
Don't they know we're so afraid?"

    People thought John and Yoko had it made. They had fame and fortune. They could do anything they wanted. While you and I? Who knows us? And we do things because we HAVE TO! The Beatles had it made.

    So, why, then, were they so afraid? Why? Can you imagine the painful isolation that comes with fame? People loving you for all the wrong reasons. People loving you, not because of the work you have done, but because of the fame you have. The face recognition. Hey, look! Isn't that one of the Beatles? Can I have your autograph? I want to be able to show it to people back home. I want them to see that I saw someone famous. What? You're having dinner with your wife? What are you, some kind of snob, better than someone like me? Someone ought to show you someday.

     Don't they know we're so afraid.

    But the counter to all of this fear is so sweet, and so much fun to put into wordplay. The fearless life is no more than this fearless moment . . . and then later, simply . . . the practice.

    Happiness is not a reward for being good. It's not an outcome. It doesn't come from having made it. It's a practice. Happiness is a practice. How many minutes a day? You decide.

                               ********************

    People, really good people, are signing up for the Steve Chandler Coaching Prosperity School starting in October....please email me for your free copies of the two CDs, "Who Needs Coaching?" and "How To Double Your Income as a Coach" at 100Ways@Compuserve.com........

"When I heard about this weekend, I was both excited and a bit skeptical. I hold Steve in the highest regard, and at the same time I was silently like "$9K for 4 days - are you kidding?" I wasn't sure he'd even fill the class. Oops. My bad. :-) The class filled quickly, and he had to turn a lot of people away. And everyone I talked to felt it was an absolute home run.

       For me, it was life changing. I very well may have received $100K in value in just two days, and everyone I talked to felt it was a home run. We'll see what happens over the next six months...I set the commitment to double my income, and the intention to increasing it by even more."

     Steve holds a beautiful presence, and he is hilarious. Laughter and joy are very high vibrations, and it was a very joyful weekend. Plus, by enrolling some exceptional people in the group, the group energy fed on itself. If you do teach classes, please note that you don't have to hold all the energy yourself! For example, I love the energy of this group, and your commitment to yourselves and to each other. Much of the value of our class - and of Steve's class - comes from the energy field we create together. Then to top it off, Steve Hardison (Chandler's coach, who charges $150K/year and is one of the top coaches in the world) made a surprise appearance on Saturday afternoon, and took things up another 3-4 octaves. We went into the weekend as strangers and competitors, and we came out as spiritual family."

~ BRIAN WHETTEN, Ph.D., M.A.
Life and Executive Coach
www.corecoaching.org

GIVE US A FASTER HORSE

      “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” – Henry Ford

     How do people create great things? By listening to others? By taking orders? Or by going into the slowed down slacker silence of a goof-off day of loafing...a glorious day wherein genius thrives and a new idea bursts from the right side of the brain to the newly-harmonized left?

     Most people don't create great things in their day. They are too busy doing too many things at once. Most of the people I coach start each day with too many things to do.

     I started coaching Renata by asking her how her life was. And she said too many things to get done and not enough time. That's a formula, I said, for a very miserable, frustrating life. She asked why and I said it was because she was trying to live in the future.

     Like a fly bouncing against the window pane trying to get into the house. Did you ever see the horror film "The Fly?" That's how most people live. Buzzing and pounding against the glass trying to get into their own future. They think it's a better place. Peace and quiet and open air. Wait for them, somewhere.

     But now? Now is a mess. Now is chaos. Now is a million things to do as Renata fumbles with her cell phone in her car not noticing the light had changed. She blew her mind out in a car! All from having too much to do. And not enough time to do it.

     But true mastery (not to mention happiness) comes from not having too much to do. It comes from only having one thing to do. Just this one thing.

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     HOW TO GET REFERRALS

     How do you get anything? You plant it, you water it. You give it light. You cultivate it. You watch over it. You weed around it. You give it more water. And it grows. Inch by inch. Row by row, referrals grow.

      But not for the past six coaches I have referred clients to. Do you know why? They did none of the above. None of it. They had too much to do to do any of that nonsense. They had too much to do and too little time. They were horror film flies buzzing and bouncing against the window trying in vain to get into their own futures every day...in vain! You know why it's in vain. (Secret: the future doesn't exist.)

      People don't get referrals because they don't reward referrals. It's that simple. They don't cultivate referrals. They don't water them. They don't even turn the soil over.

      I have a lot of people ask me for coaching these days and I like to refer them to coaches I know. But the coaches I know don't know how to treat referrals, so I keep referring to different coaches hoping I'll find one, just one who knows what to do. Are you that person? Email me if you are. I'll send YOU a referral, and we'll see.

      So I sent (we are changing names of course) Melissa a referral. She thanked me
and signed the client to a coaching contract. That was the last I heard. For me to know whether it was working out, whether my referral was happy, what was happening at all… I myself had to ask. It never occurred to Melissa to keep me informed. To let me know it was going well. To keep me in the loop. Therefore, when I had another referral to make I did not make it to Melissa. Not because Melissa didn't keep me in the loop, but because Melissa would NEVER know how to teach her clients how to get referrals.

     This isn't just with coaching. I talked to a business owner last month who said he got his best leads and best business from dentists. They referred people. I asked him what he does for the dentist when the dentist refers. He said he sends a nice card. Do you keep the dentist in the loop? Do you have the client referred get back to the dentist and thank him personally? Do you call the dentist three months later to let him know how you are taking care of his referral? (This is called watering and cultivating a referral.) No. Just that one card. That's it.

     What's wrong with the card? Everybody does it, so therefore it has no heart and no sincerity. It's what busy people do who don't slow down and become present to all the possibilities in their world. If a referrer keeps learning from you how the referral went, he will refer more and more people. Every client I have taught this to has THRIVED on referrals! Every one, every time.

    So this business started going back through their list of all the dentists who had referred people. They gave them written and verbal reports on how things had gone, and you know what? They started getting a wave of new referrals. People LIKE TO KNOW THEY ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN LIFE.

    If they referred someone to you, they want to know all about what happened. They LOVE knowing they made a positive difference in someone's life. Why not just send this thank you card? Because everybody else does that therefore it's meaningless. It's unconscious and robotic. It's self-focused. (It's about you. It's not about the person being served by all this. It's about you grateful for money, so it's basically sickening when you really think about it.) It's phony. It comes from a frantic mind trying always to get into its own future and never slowing down to be present to this precious moment. In business you get what you reward. But only always. How do you reward referrals? With genuine informative feedback...real news from real people being real with each other?

     So I referred another client to another coach I know. I heard nothing back. I heard, "Thank you" at the moment of the referral but nothing more. Even if the referral didn't work out, I would want to know that. Last week, even, this happened again. I referred someone to a good coach I know, and never heard back. I had to track the coach down and drag it out of him. How did that work out? Are you working with him? Why is this such a big secret? I know why. It's a busyness problem. Most people are too busy to succeed.

     That coach has no vision about how he might slow down, treat people in considerate ways, and grow his business like a beautiful garden. He is racing and pumping and pressing, trying to force himself through the glass into a better, kinder future. It's the ultimate time management mistake...having more than one thing to do.

      Just do one thing well. Just do one thing artistically, completely, lovingly and thoroughly. See what happens to your career.

       And when you're trapped in it, notice how sick a millions-of-things-to-do mind really is. Notice how ungrateful that mind is. And notice how broke that person is compared to how wealthy he could be. It's all related.

IF I WERE THIS BEAUTIFUL

      People wish they were prettier. If I were beautiful I'd be happy. If I were rich I'd be happy. If I were rich AND beautiful, like one of those models on magazine covers I'd be really happy. I'd have it all.

     But this beauty committed suicide. Twenty-year-old model Ruslana Korshunova jumped to her death from the ninth-floor balcony of her New York City apartment.  Troubled by her thoughts. Unable to not believe her thoughts.

    In the accounts I read of her death all kinds of people rushed around speculating on the circumstances that led to her suicide. A love affair gone wrong? Some major money setbacks? And try as they might they will never find the reason because the cause was a thought in her mind. A thought she didn't know how to not believe. That's always the only reason.

    The mindshift one makes to disengage from believing one's thoughts is so liberating that once you've done it it's hard to imagine the opposite. The velcro that keeps you stuck on the negative thought. No shift. No knowledge of the gearbox. Just pain. From thought.

    When I was a little boy growing up I was so scared of bullies. They never really hurt me, looking back. But they scared me. Because of my inability to shift away from the thought that they were frightening threats to me. It's a rare parent who can teach the shift. So the child...in this case me...looked for salvation elsewhere. Sometimes in comic books about Mighty Mouse. My hero. I pretended I was Mighty Mouse. Then I was okay. A new thought, a happy one. I wrote about my dependency on Mighty Mouse in my new book FEARLESS and some people have already responded to that by sending me pictures of mighty mouse. I wrote that just seeing his picture still made me feel good feelings, so people have sent me his picture, wanting me to feel those good feelings. I thank you. Mighty Mouse was fearless.

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"Pineapple princess", he calls me pineapple princess all day
As he plays his ukulele on the hill above the bay
"Pineapple princess, I love you, you're the sweetest girl I've seen"
"Some day we're gonna marry and you'll be my pineapple queen"

    Of course you recognize the lyrics above from the classic Annette Funicello song, "Pineapple Princess."  It's a song I play quite often, especially when I'm blue.  It never fails to pick me up...but not as fast as a photo of this young princess here, Lucinda Piper Freyer Jones. She is a good friend of mine who lives in California.

    Children like Lucinda spend most of their time in the Alpha brain wave state. That's why children learn so effortlessly, like the way they learn a second or third language. As Peter Ragnar says, "All an infant needs to do is listen and imitate. But adults, with an assortment of concerns and mental stresses, struggle with it as if it were a great task. An infant raised in a relaxed carefree, mentally enriching environment absorbs like a sponge."

                                                *********************

COACHING SCHOOL UPDATE:

     Two wonderful people registered this week for the upcoming Coaching Prosperity School in October. I'll share their names with you in a future blog, but suffice it to say that the attendees at this school will be learning how to build a coaching practice from people who have rather astonishing track records to share.....

    ........go to the COACHING PROSPERITY SCHOOL page on my web site to find out more http://www.SteveChandler.com/CoachingSchool.html and email me (100Ways@Compuserve.com) for a free CD called How to Double Your Income as a Coach...something that shouldn't be all that hard to do especially if you undercharge like most coaches and consultants do...you don't have to be a coach to attend the school, you can be a consultant or public speaker or any combination.....here are the words of a previous attendee....

     "I've had my coaching business for nearly 18 years.  For at least 12 of those, I've dreamed of having a full practice.  I've dreamed of having a waiting list.  A waiting list of one would be enough.

    I'm a successful coach, so I've been busy with lots of clients for years.  Yet I've never felt like I was close to declaring a BINGO...hold your cards...this business is full!!!

     I attended Steve's Coaching Prosperity School about five weeks ago.  In that time, I've added six new clients and have four others likely to start soon. The thing is, I don't have room for all four. I have room for two.  By the end of this week I'll probably be full. It's crazy.  I did it.

Thanks Steve!"

~ JIM EARLEY
Trailblazing Coaching

                                                                *******************

      "Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in one pretty and well preserved piece, but to skid across the line broadside, thoroughly used up, worn out, leaking oil, shouting 'GERONIMO!' "

Bill McKenna, professional motorcycle racer (Cycle magazine)

CHOOSING BETWEEN HORRIBLE and MISERABLE!

      During my past ten years as a corporate trainer, business coach and life coach I thought fear was a given.  I believed everyone had to live with plenty of fear. All that changed about three years ago when I went through Byron Katie's nine-day school and began working with myself and my clients to eliminate the thinking patterns that create fear.

    What I found in my own life and in my coaching sessions was that fear could be dissolved at the level of thought.  That it was unnecessary to spend each day avoiding fear or suffering through it. This was a tremendous breakthrough for me and my clients and I have captured all the elements of the breakthrough in my new book, FEARLESS.

     In the popular book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway Susan Jeffers asserts that fear will never go away.  That as long as you grow, you will experience fear.  She says, "Every time you take a step into the unknown you experience fear." Is that true?  Jeffers says that "fear is part of the package" and you better get used to it. But whose package is she referring to?  Many children and all adults try new, unknown adventures with no experience of fear whatsoever.  Some people fearlessly embark on projects while others run in the other direction.

      Her position is that you are simply always going to be afraid.  It's part of this scary human package.  So let's learn to overcome, push through and tough it out. Her final philosophy is that "pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the bigger underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness!"

     So these are our choices in life-1) Doing frightening things that scare me to do them or 2) Living with an even bigger underlying fear that comes from feeling helpless. Her choice reminds me of Woody Allen's statement that "Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable."

     In my years of working with my clients and myself I used to assume that fear was a given part of the package-and our options were about overcoming the fears with actions.  It worked. But then new fears would rise up and again the choice would be between the horrible and the miserable.

     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.  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."

    It is possible to live in fearless creativity.  In this moment, right now.  And when fear arises, it's not only possible, but proven enjoyable to dismantle and undo the thought that causes the fear . . . so that you return once again to a fearless state.

  I had learned this lesson once before-years ago-in the work of Dr. Martin Seligman.  I learned the lesson but forgot it as I became swept away by egoic pursuits.  Dr. Seligman proved in his research (chronicled in his book Learned Optimism) that pessimism could be disputed-on the spot-by anyone, and optimism could be thoroughly learned and practiced.

     The past couple years have been exciting to walk myself and my clients out of the dark regions of fear (imagining a future) and into the light (present moment opportunity).

    In my book FEARLESS I give you many anecdotal case histories of fear being lifted and fearless creativity being expressed.  The stories in the book add up to one conclusion:  your past history does not have to own you.  You are free.  Yes.  It is possible (and I know because I now see it happen every day) to have this day be fearless.

AND THE NEW COACHING PROSPERITY SCHOOL STARTS OCTOBER 10!

     So email me at 100Ways@compuserve.com for a FREE CD called How To Double Your Income as a Coach.

      "Steve Chandler's coaching school is the most powerful thing I have done for my business in over 10 years. My prior mid six figure income is now skyrocketing and at the same time I am enjoying more peace and calm in my daily business. I actually took off two days last week. This is how I imagined my consulting and coaching practice could be. Chandler’s six month school is both practical and magical. If you are fortunate enough to attend this class…just do it. Don’t let your reasons stop you. It would be like having a winning lottery ticket in your hand and then not scratching off the winning numbers to cash it in. I highly recommend you enroll in this class and move your business to 7 figures."

~STEPHEN McGHEE
Leadership Coach
and author of Learning to Believe the Unbelievable
www.MiracleLeader.com