A member of my favorite support group (a club called fearless) sent me a song to play. I can't stop playing it. Usually someone sends me something nice, and I play it and thank them.
But this one is mesmerizing and I got more lost in it every time I played it.
There are those among us who will object to this song because they believe it only applies to followers of one religion. But they would be politically correct (and morally wrong) once again. This touches the spirit and the soul of all living beings. Anything that has a heart.
Then send it around to everyone who might be feeling a little helpless this bleak midwinter. The helpless are forgetting, of course, the heart that resides inside.
Helplessness is a learned state, and never "caused" by circumstance. It comes from repeatedly giving up, day after day. You learn it.
Dr. Helen Smith is a forensic psychologist in Tennessee. She writes, "A reader emailed me today to ask if the American people were experiencing a kind of learned helplessness ..........much like the dogs in psychologist Martin Seligman's studies. For those of you unfamiliar with learned helplessness--it is a technical term that "means a condition of a human being or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected."
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On an unrelated note (or maybe not), I have ONE more opening for the January coaching prosperity program for those of you who are coaches and want to start 2010 off with a major dose of increased prosperity..(....and learned optimism.) Email me if you're interested: StephenDChandler@CS.com.
The Woman Who Attracted Money is a murder mystery with a coach as the central character.
Dale Dauten recently wrote this, and it went into a lot of newspapers, and so this book has made its move.
This is what Dale Dauten wrote:
MOSSI: Are you some sort of consultant?
CHANCE: Life coaching.
MOSSI: Of all the phony-baloney fake professions that we're so proud of in California, that one takes the cake. What, people don't know how to live? They need a coach for that? What are your credentials? I bet you don't even need a license to do it.
CHANCE: No, it's not psychotherapy. It's just coaching. That's why they call it coaching.
MOSSI: Just another racket, in my book. For people who don't want to take the time to get a degree in psychology.
CHANCE: It differs greatly from psychotherapy.
MOSSI: In what way?
CHANCE: You have to get results.
That bit of dialogue (altered a bit to make sense out of context) is from a new mystery novel called "The Woman Who Attracted Money." What makes the book more than just another murder mystery isn't that the main character is a "life coach" but that the book is by Steve Chandler, who's written a number of impressive leadership and motivation books.
Coaching, outside of sports, has always garnered easy cynicism. If you are fortunate enough to have people around you who have the time, insight and interest to regularly enlighten and inspire you, then seeking out professional uplifting might be unnecessary.
Meanwhile, many people I admire have coaching help. (Harvey "Swim With the Sharks" Mackay once told me that, at that time, he had 18 coaches.)
But while I can see how some people would be anti-coaching, no one is anti-wisdom. And it's Chandler's wisdom that makes "The Woman Who Attracted Money" special. It manages to be a case study in coaching, inside an intriguing and fascinating story that arises out of this simple predicament: A life coach has a dead client.
I've been writing about Chandler for more than a decade now, and along the way, we met and became friends. (Indeed, in his novel, my new company makes a brief appearance, when a character mentions having settled a business dispute by seeking mediation at Agreement House.) Further, I confess to being a bit skeptical when Steve first told me he was starting a series of detective novels. I didn't doubt his writing ability; I hated to see him take the time away from his nonfiction work. I shouldn't have worried.
The book's title comes from one of the hero's coaching clients talking of her unsuccessful efforts to "attract abundance." The main character, Robert Chance, asks her, "What if, instead of trying to attract abundance, you are simply earning money?" He adds, "Rather than the law of attraction, we went to try on the law of cause and effect." He then persuades her to stop passively hoping for success and start undertaking practical experiments with a new career.
There is other advice on the theme of "just start," including this: "Stumble right in. Take some small, immediate action. Do it wrong if you have to, but do it. Fail forward. Don't worry about how you're coming across, because it's not about you."
Later the narrator tells us: "He felt a little flurry of butterflies in his stomach. Go toward it, he thought. Whenever there is fear, go toward the fear, because it wants to show you something."
Well, I feared Chandler was making a mistake by turning to fiction, but Chandler shows us something — something more than entertainment and more than instruction. . . . He shows us that wisdom is a good story.
Opinion by
Dale Dauten
Dale Dauten is co-founder of AgreementHouse.com, a company that resolves business disputes. Write to him in care of King Features Syndicate, 300 W. 57th St., 15th floor, New York, NY 10019, or at dale@dauten.com
this is a great site about the new mystery religion! http://www.moneyteachers.org/Egyptian%20Religions.htm
Posted by: paul | January 04, 2010 at 02:45 PM