iMindShift with Steve Chandler

You grieve ... you learn

"You grieve, you learn,  

You choke, you learn,  

You laugh, you learn,  

You choose, you learn,  

You pray, you learn,  

You ask, you learn,  

You live, you learn."

~ Alanis Morissette

What I love about the lyric of Alanis is that it describes so well the third category of experience identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb as anti-fragile.

The first two categories are 1) fragile and 2) resilient. When a box is marked "FRAGILE" that means it breaks easily and is vulnerable to shocks.

The second category, resilient (sometimes called robust), means that it can withstand a shock. If you ship champagne glasses mark the box fragile. If you ship a bowling ball you don't have to mark the box because it is resilient.

Most people live their lives in the first two categories. And by most, I mean 99% because they do not even know of a third possibility. That's why there is no word for it.  

That's why Taleb had to invent the word antifragile.  

For the package bearing something antifragile would be marked "BENEFITS FROM SHOCK."

A candle is fragile to a strong wind. The wind blows the candle out. But a forest fire benefits from a strong wind. It is not resilient to the wind, it grows from it.

Most people are either fragile or resilient to rejection...to hearing a NO. They either get upset and depressed (fragile) or they learn to be okay with it...to withstand it without being upset (resilient).

But there is that 1% who have learned to benefit from a NO.  

They learn from it.  

They grow from it.  

They even welcome it. They are anti-fragile now, and they are powerful as a forest fire.

Same is true with divorce. Most people are only seeing the possibility of the first two categories. They are either devastated and depressed over their break-up (fragile to it), OR they have learned to "get through it," withstand it and survive (resilient).

But what if there were a third category?

And what if we could learn to go there?  

 

Allison Pescosolido

Allison Pescosolido has created that third possibility for people "going through" divorce.  

She calls it a reframe.

And when you have done her intensive program, you are no longer merely resilient to your divorce.

You are stronger for it.  

You have reframed every aspect of it. You have used it now to improve dating skills, improve your sense of freedom and maturity, and to strengthen your independence and your capacity to apply your love to all of life.

She calls it DIVORCE DETOX and you can find her here: http://divorcedetox.com/.

In my own world I work with a lot of coaches. I had a coaching prosperity school for years. Today I have a very intensive three-day workshop that I put on with master coach Rich Litvin that teaches coaches to move out of the first two categories into the third. The next seminar is May 17 - 19 in Los Angeles....Marina del Rey, actually. If you are a coach whose career, practice and prosperity have been going from fragile to resilient, you can register here to begin your move to antifragile in the category of prosperity: http://thatconfidenceguy.com/prosperous/.

Why should we live our lives in the first two categories only? Either fragile and vulnerable (a weak victim) or resilient, and withstanding things (a stoic victim).

Why be a candle in the wind, when the very real possibility is to grow like a forest fire?

Can I not find such a fire in my heart?

ANTIFRAGILE: Things That Gain from Disorder

 

What's missing from my life?

On October 6 thru 8 there will be a great LIVE event in Los Angeles that Michael Neill (pictured above) and I are going to be speaking at (along with two great speakers, Mandy Evans and Rich Litvin).... and it will be rewarding to attend.

I dedicated my book Wealth Warrior to Michael Neill, and one of the early pages reproduces a Facebook post he made awhile back that I saved:

From Michael Neill:

Question of the Day, with thanks to Clarence Thomson:

What's missing from your life and how do you keep it out?

                                                 * * *

I'll say it a little louder: WHAT'S MISSING FROM YOUR LIFE AND HOW DO YOU KEEP IT OUT?

I love to take these questions personally. Instead of pretending that this is something I already know all about and I'm going to teach YOU about.

Not credible. As a place to come from.

For most of my life I would ask this question a little differently: What's missing from my life and who are the people responsible for keeping it out? My parents who didn't teach me how to be a billionaire. My partners who weren't appreciative. My government. My planet. My religion. That was me. That was me in the corner, losing my religion and everything else. Including most of my marbles.

Because that's what the mind of an entitled victim does. It becomes so open-minded, all the marbles are lost and only the insanity of disappointment remains.

Michael Neill (www.supercoach.com) is great at changing all that for people. Here he is in a youtube video clip about the big live event October 6-8:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT9yP3IAEOg

                                                 * * *

Here is something from the new book:

Yes there actually IS a cure-all:

"Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness,  and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all."

                    ~ Tim Ferriss

 

 I love learning from people younger than I am.

Tim Ferriss is one of my favorite authors and teachers, and I can say that he has, in many ways, improved my warrior status when it comes to creating a life.

Are you trying to make money in a way that is not exciting for you?

 Step up the excitement factor. Watch the effect it has on your income. Stop shooting for happiness.  

You are aiming too low.

http://www.stevechandler.com/wealth_warrior_movement.html  

 

(They say it's not bragging if you can do it:)

My Personal Internal Commitment is my new book's name WEALTH WARRIOR. I am the Napoleon Hill of the modern age. I create wealth for other people with my coaching, training, audios and books. I am a soldier of fortune, and a warrior of wealth. A spiritual mercenary. I transform sales teams, fundraisers, small businesses and individuals in personal coaching and consulting practices by teaching them 100 Ways to Create Wealth (my previous book on this subject). I regularly draw strength from Deuce Lutui and our mutual coach Steve Hardison and share that strength with my clients and the world. WEALTH WARRIOR is now available and it IS the bestselling of all my books and it FLIPS the entitled mindset of the financial victim to the mindset of an OWNER OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT.

 

How to mix work and play

     "The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both."

~James Michener
Author of Hawaii

*     *     *     *     *     *

     Rich Litvin and I are doing a "seminar" for coaches in Hawaii later this year unlike anything we have ever done. Rather than the typical two-day programs, we are expanding it to five/plus. We asked ourselves after sellouts at our London event, our Marina del Rey event, and after my own Coaching Prosperity School filled up and
sold out, WHAT CAN WE DO THAT IS SO FRIGHTENING AND EXCITING almost no one will come?

     We are tired of turning people away.

     So we came up with this plan code named: HELL WEEK. We'll be welcoming people into the room the first day with Elvis singing his disturbing song, Only The Strong Survive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUKP8SF-mYs

*     *     *     *     *

"We say we waste time, but that is impossible.
  We waste ourselves." 
~ Alice Bloch 

     It's time we get honest about this thing called time. Because honesty has a much- deserved reputation for liberation. 

     Working with what's really going on sets us free from our negative imaginary future, and allows us to act now. Bold courage. That's what I advocate, and not for you so much as for me. 

     Because I had a past history of lazy passive inactivity and pure cowardice. Then something shifted and I saw the possibility of making a turnaround. I began to act. Just a little here and there but one does build inner strength this way. And the more one acts the more fun life gets... don't trust that... test it.  

*     *     *     *     *
God is Alive, Magic is Afoot



From Leonard Cohen:

This I mean to whisper to my mind 
This I mean to laugh within my mind 
This I mean my mind to serve 
Til' service is but magic 
Moving through the world 
And mind itself is magic 
Coursing through the flesh 
And flesh itself is magic 
Dancing on a clock 
And time itself 
The magic length of God

*      *      *     *     *

     NEW AUDIO OFFERINGS AND PACKAGES:

     Check these out:

http://www.stevechandler.com/audio.html

 

Grant me the courage? Really?

 

     Steve Hardison sent me this YouTube video.

     Can I thank him enough?

     Maybe you have seen it. But watch again anyway.

     It reveals something to me about courage and inner strength. For years, decades even, I have been a fan of the Serenity Prayer's portion that says GOD GRANT ME THE COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN. Those words were a big part of my recovery from alcohol and addiction… and those words have lived on inside me. You even see them at the top of my website! 

     But not for long. Because I am having them taken down.

     My life these days has proven that those words can be transcended, and I can come from a much more powerful place.  Ken Wilber taught me not to make old beliefs "wrong" but rather to "include and transcend" them. Which I now do with "God grant me the courage..."

     Because I am no longer applying for a grant.

     I've had clients in the nonprofit field who do nothing but apply for grants. Instead of creating major gift relationships, they ask for grants.

     Nothing wrong with that.

     But a nonprofit's income will SOAR when they set aside applying for grants (God grant me!) and transcend that behavior and rise up to creating relations that lead to major gifts.

     I don't need a grant. I don't need to spend my days grant-writing or grant-praying.

     Courage can be built. It's a matter of developing inner strength. Just like outer strength (the body's strength) is built through resistance training, inner strength is built the same way. Resistance training.

     Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "He who is not every day conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life."

*     *     *     *     *     *     * 

     A person in one of my seminars came up to me during the break and pointed at the title of my book Reinventing Yourself and told me she was offended by the title.

     "What's so wrong with me that I have to reinvent myself?” she said.

     "You don't have to reinvent yourself," I said. "And nothing has to be wrong with you for you to do it."

     Fear of change is the root of all unhappiness.

     Companies are like this as well --- companies who stay stuck in old ways of being clinging, clinging, clinging as long as they can to comfort zones.

     Like Border's book stores…"We're going to do it our way.  We're not going to try to meet the new age.  Forget the internet.  The internet is just kind of a passing fancy.  We're going to have old book stores with a limited selection of books and nasty customer service people. That worked for us in the past, and we're going to keep doing it."

     Well, Border's is shut down because of a refusal to reinvent themselves.  Now Barnes and Noble isn't totally shut down..yet… because they decided half way through their decline to start reinventing themselves after finally seeing what Amazon was doing and seeing the power of it.  Oops.  Oops, maybe we should do the same.  Look at the Kindle.  Maybe we should create something.  Look at On-line.  Oops, maybe we should offer books on line.

     So, yes, in kind of a catching-up way, they too are now reinventing themselves and is it too late to succeed in a business sense?  We'll see, but for you and me let's not wait.  Reinventing yourself is something that's really fun. And extremely lucrative and profitable. For you as an individual. 

     So what's the answer to the question, Why should I reinvent myself?  It's kind of like you are at the high school reunion, you are sitting at the table and they are playing all the songs that were popular when you were in high school and somebody comes up and says "please dance with me" and you say to yourself and to them "Why should I dance?"  Well, that's an absurd question.  Dance just to dance.  Dance just to have fun.  Go on out there on the floor and dance and you'll see why you should dance.

     The same feeling is true with reinventing yourself.  Reinvent yourself and you'll see why you are doing it...the real fun, the real joy is in reinventing yourself. It isn't in figuring out why.

*     *     *     *     *     *

     I have an apprenticeship opening up. If you want to be my apprentice, contact me at stephendchandler@cs.com.  Remember that this is not an internship. It requires a significant coaching fee.. and it requires more than that. It requires that you give yourself to it for a full year and use it to thoroughly learn and master everything I do (with me by your side), and learn to do it yourself forevermore thereafter at a major career level.

     In the full apprenticeship my apprentice receives full access, training and certification in teaching all my seminar material, and full copyright permission to use it as their own. Some apprentices have used a lot, some don't use as much. They create their own.

     I download into my apprentice everything I know how to do as a coach, teacher and facilitator.

     Some of my apprentices also write a book in their year with me, which I edit and coach them through.

     My apprenticeship is a huge challenge and is the equivalent to a coach that medical school or law school is to a doctor or lawyer. It's a big investment, not only of money, but of heart and time commitment.

     Which is why I don't do many of them. I audition people very carefully to gauge their level of heart for this because I don't want to be stuck with an uncommitted person for a whole year. 

     Let me know if you qualify.

Just throw your fear away

"Every time God's children have thrown away fear
in pursuit of honesty...
trying to communicate themselves,
understood or not, miracles have happened."
 ~ Duke Ellington

     I thank Rich Procter for sending me those words by the Duke.

     Some of us are in the profession of helping other people communicate themselves in pursuit of self-honesty and the miracle.

     Those people, our clients, develop their own power. And people who are coaches and trainers  and seminar leaders, ... that's our job, to help you find how good you are, how good you can be  and what your power is and help you learn to use it.

     The dynamic is like that of a sports coach.

     If I'm running a quarterback camp for high school kids in the summer... kids who want to be good college quarterbacks, my job is to develop them as a quarterback and to evaluate them and help them get better and better.  It's my job.

     So, our job in the field we are in is to help people develop and get better and stronger. It's our job. We're not psychotherapists, we're not there to hear grievances about past history, although sometimes that can come into coaching.

     If past history becomes an obstacle to inner strength, we will work with it.

     But we're really there to help people find their own courage and creativity so that they can create and produce whatever they like.  Now I am going to share with you a very common question I get from clients.......

*      *      *     *     *     *     *

     HOW DO I LEARN TO TRUST THE ABUNDANCE OF THE UNIVERSE?

     If I'm a true time warrior... in other words, if I'm not overwhelmed by outer strengths but I continuously develop inner strengths, then I don't really need to trust things.

     I'm willing to test them because I have energy and I have a sense of exploration 
and discovery that's thrilling and fun.

     If I wonder if there's gold in the hills, I'll go find out. 

     LET's GO FIND OUT is the operating principle. 

     It's not "I guess I'll just have to trust it."

     Forget about trusting it.

     Where I had my greatest wake-up moment on this issue, was when I was working with a client on various aspects of selling. This client had a major mental block, a psychological barrier, to selling. Somehow, deep down, he felt that selling was a used car salesman's job and not his.  

     And therefore he never felt good about selling or taking money. Finally, I gave him some options and we worked on some things he was willing to experiment with and I told him if he were willing to do things a different way, that he would end up loving the selling process.

     And he said, "I guess I'll just have to trust that."

     And I said, "No, you don't have to trust that and you won't have to trust that. Why do you think you have to trust it? Why not just test it and verify it?"

     And he said, "Well, what do you mean?”

     And I said, "When you add LEARNING TO TRUST to your list of things that you're going to have to do before taking an action, you've put one more obstacle between you and the action.  

     And that is not only unnecessary but it works against you, because you're never going to be able to trust it ahead of time. You just won't trust it."

     If I give myself the task of learning to trust the abundance of the universe, I have given myself trouble. (If the universe is abundant, I can either discover it or not. I can celebrate it or deny it. But I won't have to trust it, ever. Because it either is or it isn't. Trusting it won't make it more abundant.)

     Why give myself that task when the task is not possible to do?

     I'll never fully trust the abundance of the universe, if I make that a prerequisite of testing the abundance of the universe.

     I never made trusting electricity a prerequisite of fooling around with light switches as a child. I tested things and found out about them. No trusting necessary. (This is why children are so ACTIVE and adults are so passive... kids are testing everything, and adults are stuck and frozen inside trying to trust them.)

     If I have to try to trust abundance, then I've given myself an impossible job to do prior to interacting with people, exchanging value and creating wealth.

     Why would I want to do that?

     I've even heard of people who go to seminars to learn to try to trust the law of attraction!

     Trusting is the impossible task that you put between yourself and doing something.

     And that's why I'm always using the example of a child learning to swim or a child learning to ride a bicycle. When we did that, we never trusted the bicycle or the water ahead of time. If we had had to fully trust that the water would hold us up or fully trust that the bicycle would not tip over, none of us would know how to swim or ride bikes today.

     Without trusting the water, I got in the water.

     And without trusting the bike, I got on the bike.

     And that's how I learned to ride a bike and learned to swim.

     So, go do it without trusting it because trusting is not only an unnecessary job but a hopeless job and really overrated in life as something that needs to occur.

     It causes us to remain passive and miss all the fun. 

*      *      *      *      *     *

     THIS IS AN ELOQUENT CRITICISM OF ME VIA EMAIL ABOUT MY "HYPNOSIS OF CIRCUMSTANCE" BLOG POST:

     A wonderfully motivating blog, aside from reinforcing every wildly inaccurate stereotype people have about hypnosis and hypnotists.

     I spend most of my time re-educating people from this same peasant superstition.

     I would respectfully request that as a thought leader in the field, who clearly has some exposure to hypnosis (I'd guess grinder) that you don't create a rod for the backs of us who try and help people use their full mind.

     MY REPLY WAS THIS:

     You are correct... I'm actually using an old B Movie 1940s stereotype… quite inaccurate, but used for dramatic effect....

     I have huge respect for hypnotherapy, and have my own hypnotherapist, Lindsay Brady, ….. I wrote the foreword to his book..... http://www.lbrady.com/

     I've used his services countless times and endorsed him multiple times and I even bring him in to work with my mastermind groups...

     So, in truth, I'm a big advocate and beneficiary. I will post a notation in my next blog to clarify the difference between misguided theatrical metaphors and respecting a profession I actually respect.

     Thanks for raising the alarm.

*     *     *     *     *     *

     RECOMMENDING RON WILDER:

     If you are a coach, and you are serious about growing your practice and MASTERING the art of the CLIENT CONVERSATION with your coaching prospects, then you ought to look at Ron Wilder's upcoming program.

     I've worked with Ron, and co-facilitated with Ron for awhile now, and he really knows how to teach this stuff.

     I'm going to put his offer here in his own words, and because I only endorse things like this when I know that they REALLY WORK and REALLY DO WHAT THEY SAY THEY WILL DO, I am already happy for the people who take advantage of this.

     If cost of entry to the program is a showstopper for you please ask yourself two questions: 1) How many clients would I have to get to cover my fee? and 2) How much TOTAL VALUE would this program have if what it taught me was something I could use in my profession for the rest of my life?

     Here's Ron:

     I decided to create a special event called Mastering the Client Enrollment Conversation to work with just six coaches over two days in an intimate setting, focused exclusively on designing and rehearsing powerful enrollment conversations. I decided to limit it to six people to ensure maximum hand-on interaction.

     After these two days, you will have your own unique, custom designed enrollment conversation framework that you can use with your ideal prospective clients. You will rehearse it so that it flows naturally and gracefully. (And you will get an incredible VIP experience at the Umstead Hotel in Cary, North Carolina.)  You can read all of the details here:

http://www.alignedaction.com/mastering-client-enrollment-intensive/#

     The six spots will be filled on a first come, first served basis, so please move quickly if you have the desire to really master your enrollment conversations.

     Best regards,

     Ron Wilder

How to apply what you read

     People tell me this quite a bit: "I love that book, the problem is applying it."  

     Well, my answer to that is the application is everything. Loving the book is nothing.

     It isn't how many books you read, it's how many you apply. You are better off, therefore, reading one book four times than reading four books one time each. Most people try to accumulate knowledge.

     But it doesn't accumulate, it makes you fat and paralyzed. A friend recently told me of 100 books to read.

     Rather tell me the ONE BOOK I should read 100 times. The difference is between a life that is changed, and a life that is weighed down with heavy immobilizing knowledge. 

     Because we can sit and ponder philosophical concepts forever and it won't help our lives.  What really helps is to test things, experiment, try things out and take all these concepts, take the conceptual excitement and put it into IMMEDIATE ACTION! 

     A lot of times, a fire starts internally when I read something (like Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do) and it starts in my mind and in my heart and I get all excited. Then what I always want to do after that is put some kind of process in place where I monitor myself to make sure I'm going to do some application.

     So, in a funny way, when somebody says "I have a problem with application," my answer is, well, then do more application. 

     There's really no problem, unless you're being hypnotized by circumstance.  Let's say I read a book about Bruce Lee and exercise and I get real excited and it says that if a person takes ten thousand steps a day, their blood pressure… all these biomarkers (or vital markers?) improve … they're going to live 10 years longer and have a better quality life than the average person who only takes three thousand steps a day. Now, I read about that, the fire starts inside me and I think that would be fun, that would be great, I need to do that.  I'm starting to get excited.  But application is everything here.

     So, I buy a pedometer, I put a chart on my wall and I start tracking how many steps I take each day. How long is it going to take me to find a way to get to ten thousand and I create a game around it but I do some tracking and I keep score.

     Not because I need to be a competitive alpha male winner but because the game element has a funny paradoxical effect on human beings.  Number one, it introduces accountability (because you're counting things,) which is really needed.  That's why people don't apply, there's no accountability.  But, on the other hand, it counter balances that with a game element.  

     So, for example, in charting how many steps I take, I had a little game that I would take more steps in December than I took in November.  So, I played a game called 'Me in December versus Me in November' and I found out one morning that I won.  It's over. I can take a knee, the game's over, I've beat my last month's number! 

     The game element in anything that you put into application adds a wonderful sense of play. You've got accountability, there's a scoreboard, and you also have a sense of  gamesmanship, like it's fun, and I'm winning.  That's true for anything. Not just physical exercise.

     It's really true for people who sell or market their services.  The minute they start accounting for how much time they put into sales and marketing, their sales and marketing results get better.

     So, that's why the person who says I have a hard time applying, my answer is that's because you're not applying. That's why you have a hard time applying.

     If somebody says, "I just joined a new health club but the problem is I have a hard time getting myself to go."  My answer would be, well, go. Go to the club.  

     See why I get paid for coaching people? I always have the answer.

     There isn't really a lot in between wanting to go to the club and going to the club. We think there's a lot between those two things, but we are wrong, and we pay a terrible price for that miscalculation. We put illusive barriers between wanting it and doing it, and that's where the hypnosis of circumstance comes in.

     Recently a guy said to me, "I broke up with my girlfriend and therefore I haven't worked out in a month.  I just haven't felt like it. I've been depressed." 

     Well, okay, here's the circumstance: I'm no longer with this person! I give a lot of meaning to that. I make that mean that I can't make a relationship work or I've been betrayed. I add a lot of meaning and now I'm hypnotized by a circumstance and the hypnosis keeps me from applying anything.

     Therefore I want to watch out for being hypnotized by circumstance.

     If there were an evil hypnotist on the loose in town and everyone said "Watch out for him because if he sees you, he's going to wave this little crystal in front of your eyes and hypnotize you and make you do things you don't want to do."  If you saw that person coming, you would avert your eyes or go to the other side of the street because you don't want to be hypnotized and made to do what you don't want to do.  

     But that's exactly what circumstance does to us, and we don't realize it.  We just don't know we're being hypnotized by the circumstance and the meaning we give to it.

     But once we can see, then we can break out of the hypnosis, clap our hands, (yell: "WIDE AWAKE!") and we're wide awake now, we're no longer under the spell of the breakup with the girlfriend, whatever it is that has hypnotized me into a state where I'm not applying anything.  I'm not doing anything.  I'm just meditating and brooding upon things.

     That's why I believe coaching is such a powerful profession, because if you know you're going to go see your coach in a week and if you know that you and your coach agreed that you'd take certain actions this week to see how they turned out, you're going to make sure you take those actions because when you sit down with your coach again, you're going to be reporting in on how they worked.  That's the beauty of coaching.  It introduces the accountability, the game element and the word "coach" comes from sports, it doesn't come from any kind of psychological or spiritual field.

     Once you see all of this you can become the DIRECTOR of the movie of your life. You choose your activity, and then you yell, "ACTION!"

*     *     *     *     *     *

How to be a non-idiot

     WATCH THIS:

 

"All my life I've known only idiots. I define an idiot as a person
who makes less of himself than he could be by blaming his actions
on something, or someone, outside himself. The only non-idiot I've ever
known, the only person I've seen who exercised his abilities,
whether physical or intellectual, to the highest possible degree
is Bruce Lee."

~ Film director Stirling Silliphant  

*     *     *     *     *     *

     The words that motivate me each morning are being passed along to you for FREE now when you sign up for my E-MOTIVATORS... you also get a free audio when you sign up and other cool goodies....my E-MOTIVATORS are motivational messages are now available for you! Subscribe by visiting the www.IMindShift.com page and you will receive brand new messages from me two to three times a week, each and every week.

     As a thank-you bonus, you can download and experience my latest audio program, TESTING versus TRUSTING. This is a teaching distinction I have used with great results with large groups and individuals...it has never before been put into an audio program. It snaps people out of the futility of trusting things and moves them up the ladder into testing things... FAR MORE ADVENTUROUS AND RELIABLE. 

*      *     *     *     *     *



"MAN. THE LIVING CREATURE.
THE CREATING INDIVIDUAL.
IS ALWAYS MORE IMPORTANT
THAN ANY ESTABLISHED
STYLE OR SYSTEM."

~ Bruce Lee

How to know it's time to monetize the fire

     My accountant was anxious.  

     "Do you want to mortgage your house to pay this?" he urged. "Do you want to do something even more drastic?"

     No, I'll just pay it.

     "Should I set up a payment plan and go to the mat with them to avoid action on their part?"  

     No, I will just send them all the money.

     So after a bit of action the project worked.  It was lovingly created and it gave such profound benefit to the people who attended that everybody won.  Creating versus reacting.  Reacting never wins.

     But is that true?

     Sometimes reacting does win out, in a way, because reacting takes over when I forget to create.  I forget to shift, and the gears grind and the engine howls, and the car catches fire in the driving rain as I spin out on the road into the canyon. Laurel Canyon!  How did I get here, anyway? 

     (By reacting. By not creating.)

     (Laurel Canyon was where Crosby Stills & Nash sang together for the first time in Mama Cass Elliot's living room; where Joni Mitchell wrote her masterpiece "Ladies of the Canyon" and Nash wrote the CSNY classic "Our House"; where Frank Zappa held court in a log cabin and Jackson Browne slept in the laundry room of a benefactor; and where Byrds, Turtles, Animals, Steppenwolves and Doors shifted the mind of popular music worldwide. All this and more in Michael Walker's delightful book, Laurel Canyon.)

     So it's my life's work to teach people shifting lessons, the same way my coach and music teacher teach them to me. The mind that is open will then shift. That fire in you just burns the mental gearbox down when you don't shift. You can take your begging bowl to every institution in society, or you can find the fire within and turn it into loving individual service that pays you for delivering it so creatively.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *
DYING
to
LIVE
*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

     REBIRTH, REJUVENATION, and REINVENTION by DYING to the OLD PATTERN YOU CALLED YOU

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"Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
~ Mary Oliver

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     Each day we demand more from society so that we can demand less from ourselves (Don Colacho's Aphorisms).

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

     But if you find you ARE ALIVE then the job is to C A T C H  F I R E:

     . . .and learn How to MOTIVATE YOURSELF, to turn up the flame on your BURNING DESIRE, light up the night and monetize the FIRE.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *



"Live like you're already dead, man. Have
a good time. Do your best. Let it all come
ripping right through you."
~  Jeff Bridges

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

     "When he died, Christ did not leave behind documents, but disciples. A person left behind new people." (Don Colacho).

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     URGENT MESSAGE TO COACHES:

     And now if you are a coach looking at my COACHING PROSPERITY SCHOOL I will send you a gift pack and a starter's kit for CREATING CLIENTS given that it's my obsession that coaches become prosperous professionals (they can help more people that way).... we have NOW created a temporary way for you to enroll in the school for just 900 Yankee dollars down.... the rest in payments...too easy so it will disappear soon like words written on water…

     All you need to do is go to my main website (www.stevechandler.com) and send me your name and mailing address and the gift pack of starter tools for acquiring clients comes your way. You can also ask for a phone appointment with my colleague and sometime teacher at the school Janelle Light (pictured below); and even if you do not enroll into the school I promise you that just talking to her will CHANGE how you get clients...

     Janelle Light is a Certified Advanced Transformative Coach, having studied in Michael Neill's Super Coach Academy two years in a row. She is a colleague of mine and sometimes teaches at my Coaching Prosperity School. Janelle also has a Certificate in Personal Coaching from New York University and is a Certified Neuroscience-Based Coach, having studied and worked under Dr. David Rock at the NeuroLeadership Institute. She is extremely successful at life coaching, business coaching and sales training. Set up a phone session so that she can talk to you about client acquisition and answer any of your questions about the prosperity school membership.

     You can't coach a client you don't have.

From victim to owner

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,
it is time to pause and reflect.” 
~ Mark Twain

     We are encouraged to cultivate our inner victims. A friend wrote to me this week about a friend of hers whose young child died due to a mistake made by the hospital. The doctors and nurses tried to fix the mistake but it was too late and the little child died.

     The friends of the grieving parents urged them to sue the hospital. SUE! What a case you have! Make them PAY you! 

     But the parents did the opposite. They decided to donate money to the hospital. "They did everything they could to save our child... they worked so hard. We don't want to sue them."

     Donating money transformed the situation into a courageous creative act of generosity. In which the parents were doing the acting.

     Suing would have had the parents deepening their self-concepts as aggrieved victims of unfair fate and victims of human error as well. 

     In the words of Dorothy Parker, "What fresh hell is this?"

     For years I have worked with people to shift their minds from victim. And shift the world around them by doing so. Once you shift you can ACT: I OWN my spirit. I OWN my response to the hospital tragedy.

     Victimization is like alcoholism. There are two useful metaphors for it. One is the disease metaphor. In other words, it can be very contagious. People will spread it. Hang around victims for a long time and you'll need an antibiotic.

     The other metaphor is what people call "an addictive personality." In this metaphor, victimization becomes addictive. People go on whiney websites to get their fix. The Left has websites to go on and comment about the evil Right. The Right has websites to go on to complain about the evil Left. But these people aren't DOING anything about it. They are just wallowing, in a fetid, toxic bath with other victims. They are on the site complaining with each other.

     No one on either of those sites has donated to a hospital lately.

     When you do the OPPOSITE of what is expected of you, you are back in the driver's seat.

*     *     *     *     *     *

     One of my favorite coaching clients over the years  has been Regena Thomashauer.

     She has given me permission to tell you she is my client, and what a PLEASURE our relationship has been over the years because I have been able to see the effect she has on women.

     Women who had pretty much given up on themselves (in very subtle but devastating ways) until Regena brought them into her school in Manhattan and made them young at heart again.

   So I am going to give you a link to her TED Talk.

   And the notes for her talk describe her this way: She is a revolution: an icon, teacher, author, mother and one of a handful of pioneers on the planet researching the nature of pleasure and dedicating her life to the discipline of pleasure.

    Self-taught in the social, cultural and economic history of women, including the ancient Goddess religion which dominated for 30 - 50 centuries of recorded history, Regena uses her more than 20 years of research and her knowledge of female pleasure to open doors for women today by giving them a context in which to maximize their power, passion, enthusiasm and creativity.

    The result is a curriculum, including the Womanly Arts Mastery Program, Inner Circle Program, Pleasure Bootcamp and SisterGoddess.com. Mama Gena's programs teach women to discover the power of pleasure and create their dreams.

     In addition to being the Creatrix and CEO of the School of Womanly Arts, Regena is the bestselling author of three books published by Simon & Schuster: Mama Gena's School of Womanly Arts: Using the Power of Pleasure to Have Your Way with the World (2002), Mama Gena's Owner's & Operator's Guide To Men (2003) and Mama Gena's Marriage Manual (2004). She has been a frequent guest on NBC-TV's Today Show and has appeared on 20/20 (where one of her segments garnered a 20/20 record of more than one million website hits), many appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and Rachael Ray. Regena's programs at the School of Womanly Arts have been profiled in The New York Times, Elle ...etc.

    You get the point: here is her TED talk:
    
http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxFiDiWomen-Regena-Thomashaue

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Attention: All LIFE COACHES and BUSINESS COACHES:

Join Steve Chandler on Thursday, DECEMBER 29th

when he hosts two conference calls

- one at 8 a.m. PACIFIC and one at 5 p.m. PACIFIC -

for coaches who are NOT in his coaching school

but want to know more about it.

Steve will explain how the Coaching Prosperity School works…

…how so many coaches have gone to high six figure practices

…what the THREE biggest MYTHS are about getting clients

....and how YOU can DROP them from your thoughts and actions

…and by doing so, BOOST your coaching income whether you attend the school or NOT

…and answer coaches' questions about creating clients and producing prosperous practices immediately

...AND when you sign up to be on the call(s), we will send you a brand new article by Steve called COACH and GROW RICH.

Reply to me today with SIGN ME UP...and I will send you the
information necessary to access the call:

deb.jonsson@gmail.com

....and receive Steve’s COACH and GROW RICH.

with blessings...

Deb Jonsson

Steve Chandler’s Coaching Prosperity School

RETURN TO ME

  This is a picture of my wife Kathy in a restaurant in Chicago where we held a recent two day seminar-workshop meeting of the Coaching School.

     Kathy is a writer (and a blogger) with a great sense of humor, especially when it comes to making me look hilariously inept as a human. The problem is that she is unerringly accurate. You who may have admired me in the past can experience a fun mind-shifted reversal on that opinion by reading her blog here:  www.girlsinwhitedresses.blogspot.com

    She calls her blog In My Humble (but always correct) Opinion.

   (Her other stuff is fun and funny too. How did I get stuck with the happiest writer alive?)

 Chicago is cloudy and windy and we were on a boat today doing one of the "architecture tours" up and down the Chicago river and out onto Lake Michigan, taking in the skyscrapers and hearing all the stories about the Fire and the rebuilding of Chicago. I knew this tour existed because of the movie The Breakup wherein Vince Vaughan played a tour guide on one of these very boats.

    Notice how movies affect our travel.

    The movie Return to Me was filmed in Chicago in 1999 and Kathy has seen it many times. It's a heartbreakingly romantic film starring David Duchovney and Minnie Driver. Minnie has literally just received a heart transplant, and I won't give away the rest except for the fact that most of it is filmed in a charming little restaurant, where, of course we went to eat. It's called the Twin Anchors. Turns out Sinatra used to eat there. He would always order their famous ribs (which I ordered) and the story was that he would say to the waitress, "Ribs... and keep 'em comin'!" This little story was on the menu and I was tempted to say the same thing but I did not, and I was glad because one huge serving was more than enough.

     Kathy took notes for a future blog as I ate my ribs.

  Speaking of blogs. Tom Wolfe, in an essay about Marshall McLuhan years ago described a "digital civilization, in which all of humanity will be wired up and online so that geographic locations and national boundaries, or so it’s predicted, will become irrelevant."

     And in a way this has happened. Because we went to the Lincoln Park zoo (which I had already seen in movies,) and this zoo, like the whole Chicago scene, was extremely familiar from digital sources, like movies and TV.

     But just how "real" is a movie? Or a live streaming video cam on my computer just now? Or Skype? I often work with clients now on Skype, and they may be in London, England, but they are LIVE to me on my screen in the office! Am I actually seeing and experiencing them in London itself?

    If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there, does it make a sound?  I have always wondered about the IQ of people who ask that question and then get that faraway metaphysical look in their eyes as if pondering a deep zen koan. Of course it does NOT make a sound if there is no one there, because "sound" is a vibration's interaction with a human or animal's ear. With no receptor ear to capture the vibration and translate it into "sound" in one's brain, there is no sound. Is that so hard to understand?

    But here's where it gets interesting for me. My experience of you, on voicemail is a result of my ears hearing a vibration made originally by your voice. Your voice vibration was "captured" by the voicemail receiver and now I play it and it sounds exactly like you sound when you are "really" there.

    If we get more technical, it's not the "real" you I hear even when you are live at the other end of the phone. It's an electronic transmission of your vibration made at the point of origin.

    Welcome to a digital civilization in which my travel reports are more about the movies about Chicago than they are about Chicago itself. (Although most of that is because I am such a poor descriptive writer.)

   Take enough LSD and a movie can be experienced as more real than reality. (Certain films, like Alligator People or The Exorcist, are films you never want to see while on acid.)

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

     JOHN GROBERG IS BRILLIANT

   Have you ever considered doing yoga, because you've read that many great pro football players and actors and dancers and triathletes do it? And then you realize that it is going to take a lot of time to go to your lesson and come back? And your fulfilled day doesn't have the space in it for yoga?

   There is an exciting solution.

   My friend John Groberg has solved the problem.

   You MUST check out his exciting new system called SPIRAL UP YOGA (http://spiralupyoga.com/) that only takes five minutes a day to do. Here are his own words:

    There comes a point in everyone’s journey of personal growth when they realize that creating and maintaining a self-care practice is an essential foundation for continual growth, health, well-being and creative inspiration. It is also a source of resilience, strength, perspective and peace of mind during particularly challenging times when things aren’t going the way you might prefer.  

     By “Self Care” I mean more than just an exercise program. I mean a daily, sustainable practice that feeds and nourishes body, mind and soul. Practices that only include one or two of the three elements are good, but not complete- and are usually not sustainable in the long run because if either the body, the mind or the soul is neglected enough, the whole system of You becomes unstable- like a three legged stool with one or more weak legs. 

    GO HERE NOW: http://spiralupyoga.com/

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   NOTICE to ANY COACH reading this blog.....I have just finished recording the best audio recording ever done on how coaches can create clients, and because I am a huge advocate of coaches getting clients and thereby influencing the world away from its drift toward infantilism, impotence and mental victimization, I will send you this hot program if you email me and ask me for it: stephendchandler@cs.com

 

WALT DISNEY FAILS!

    Walt Disney tried to join the army but failed the physical exam. Then he joined the Red Cross and served in France for a year or so before coming home to start a little company called Laugh-o-Grams. He went bankrupt.

     And by failing at that he acquired the new directions he needed to become the successful Walt Disney and create the studios we all know and love.

     Without failure, no success. And it's more than that: failure is the very road to success. By trying things, being out there in life, we learn what does not work. And by knowing what doesn't work we get closer to what works. Every day.

     If we stay in the game.

     If we don't demonize failure or become superstitious about what failure means....  if we don't take failure personally we can continue to fail.

     To learn to play a piece on my guitar I have to first fail to play it. Then fail again. 

     This is why older people have such a hard time getting themselves to learn something new. Learning requires failure and grown-ups have developed a deep fear of failure that kids don't have.

     To learn a language, you have to embarrass yourself and fail to say the phrase properly and let people laugh at you. What grown-up wants to go through that process?

*     *     *     *     *     *     

     "Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness 
to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. 
That is why young children, before they are aware 
of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

~ Dr. Thomas Szasz

*     *     *     *     *     *    *

     Randy Stuart sent me a fantastic comment in response to my current blog on the secret power of FAILURE in my life.

     "My friend Marc, a fantastic photographer, was getting frustrated by not getting into any of the many photo contests he had entered. Not just not winning, but not even getting in. He arrived at a beautiful plan which he called the Epic Fail. His new goal was to try and fail as grandly as he possibly could. And if he failed enough, eventually he would fail at failing...and thereby succeed at what he was after to begin with. Fail so badly that you win by failing. Genius!"

*     *     *     *     *     *

ON TO CHICAGO!
 

    Now that we have had a little over two months of this Coaching Prosperity School experience (there were six schools before this one), I can say I'm more than pleased with how well we are achieving our objective.

    Our objective is to teach coaches how to get clients. That's it. Simple, pure and strong.

    And I am getting emails about successes coaches have already created doing this school, even after only two months (we've had a very uplifting LIVE two-day conference/workshop in Phoenix, twp phone-in Webinars, peer coaching, many daily messages direct from me to our coaches, and mailings of  books and CDs) ....

    You can join any time. Your year starts the moment you join. If you wait a day you miss that day's message.

    Why are coaches reporting successes already? Mostly because what we teach is radical and unorthodox, so it's an exciting experiment for a coach to try. So they actually try it. They DO things.

    Most other coaching-training programs get it wrong. I've studied most of them in the past year (hoping to learn things to add to our school) and I find that their systems for getting clients are old-school marketing ideas that would work ONLY if the service or product were a very low-priced item, like a CD series or an eBook or a Teleseminar. Their sales and marketing systems do NOT work for acquiring good coaching clients.

    In fact, they are counterproductive. In my many years of coaching coaches I have never even once seen a coach successfully use these marketing techniques for anything other than the lowest priced memberships, free sessions, eBooks, etc. I have never seen them work for getting coaching clients.

    We teach enrollment, invitation, conversation and demonstration. We teach it because it works when applied. We teach many levels and variations, and they all work. They've all been real-world successful.

    We also provide community. Real live colleagues to work with and develop lifelong friendships with. Coaches getting to know other coaches to create the bonds that strengthen confidence and a feeling of belonging.

    One of the downsides of being a coach is that sense of isolation. Being "lost and afraid in a world I never made." You don't want that. That will not encourage success. You want other coaches in your world building you up and cheering you on... even sharing their secrets with you on how to get clients, how to charge bigger fees and how to build a very prosperous career. In this school, we are family. At our workshops we learn a lot of profound things, but we also have fun. We go out to meals together. We even sing.

   This thing called coaching prosperity doesn't have to be such a dismal grind. It can be a real joy.

    As much fun as all this is, I never want to lose sight of the principal objective: clients. If you are a coach in my school, I want you to have clients; in ever-increasing numbers at ever-expanding fees so that coaching for you becomes as reliably rewarding, financially, as being a doctor or lawyer or company CEO would be.

    Why shouldn't the best profession in the world be rewarding?

     That's why I'm so pleased that the coaches in this school are reporting to me that it is happening for them. And we're only a couple months old. Wait till the Chicago workshops kick in! (end of October. You can still go.)

     If you're considering my school send me your address and we'll send you a gift pack. Email here: stephendchandler@cs.com.

    And yes we teach coaches how to fail. If you are in the right kinds of communications, failing to get clients much of the time, your practice will grow. Only fear of failure can stop you.

    Most coaches don't get clients because they keep trying to take short cuts. Our school teaches the LONG CUT.

    Most coaches never learn. They never get the knowledge necessary to build prosperity... in fact, they avoid that knowledge which is why they attempt marketing and PR and salesy SHORT CUTS to getting clients.

   We teach the knowledge of the long cut.

    H. L. Mencken once wrote, "The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex-- because it puts an unbearable burden on his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious."

     www.coachingprosperityschool.com