John Lennon wrote these words that I LIVE BY "No short haired yellow bellied son of tricky dick is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me with just a pocketful of hope."
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Hey....TIME WARRIOR is now available in audiobook format!
GO HERE to get your audio:
http://www.stevechandler.com/time_warrior.html
The violence in the words "time warrior" was intended. For although the work you do can be slow and easy, you must pull out your sword ahead of time to carve out periods of space and silence.
Devoted time.
It's your war is against interruption and distraction. Because if you can bring gentle sustained focus to a task, you'll never regret the results.
As my friend and colleague Dusan Djukich says in his marvelous book, Straight Line Leadership, we stop. We start something and then we stop. When Dusan coaches his clients his recommendation is this: stop stopping.
The more space we open up for ourselves the more problems we solve. The faster we achieve our goals. The great philosopher Voltaire observed, "No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking."
The key word in Voltaire's observation is "sustained." We don't sustain. We don't take long, thoughtful, sustained walks. We don't sit quietly in space and solitude until a problem disappears (which it would) because we are too busy.
Or, we think we are. Same thing.
We think we're busy, especially today, with the way our "phones" hook us up to the whole nagging planet. We are so connected now! We never have to be alone again!
This is good?
In most ways, it is. It's fun and exciting when I sit in my Arizona office and get an urgent text from a client in Scotland. The phone beeps and I grab it and check it.
But what happens when I do that? I interrupt my meditative train of thought and it might have been a train that was taking me to a HUGE breakthrough solution to a major challenge. Beep, beep, beep! And I stop. I am on to something beautiful if only I would continue, but I stop.
Are you a good piano player? No? But you took lessons, once, didn't you? Yes? What happened?
"I stopped."
Have you ever looked back on your life and wondered what would have happened if you hadn't stopped? Piano, a foreign language, studying a certain subject, a distant love, anything.
Management and efficiency studies in the work place tell us that one hour of uninterrupted time is worth three hours of time that is constantly interrupted.
Or, as the old saying says, winners focus, losers spray.
So the warrior element in how you relate to time is how violent a swordsman you are going to be before your day begins. How much uninterrupted time will you carve out for yourself? Will you be a true time warrior? Because if you will, you'll love your timeless time. You'll be amazed what you can create when time not an issue.
I travel differently now than I used to. When I go on a speaking trip I build extra time and space into my journey. In the past, it was different. I raced around like most everyone else, booking flights that left right after my speech was over. Running through airports, chattering on my phone in taxicabs, coaching people on the fly! It was a chaotic storm of a life. It was frantic and even unfulfilling, always unfinished and incomplete. I was racing against time, trying to get ahead of myself, trying to break the sound barrier so that I could get into my own future.
Do you know people who live that way? They try to live faster than the speed of sound. And then they wonder why they never hear anybody.
What couldn't they hear? They were going so fast they couldn't hear the universe whispering to them. What was the universe saying? The universe was saying "yes" to whatever they might ask for.
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"Some people have learned to live by keeping themselves under the constant threat of poverty, abandonment, and self-hatred if they don't perform up to whatever standard they have decided upon. The problem with this motivational strategy is simple: If you keep putting a gun to your head, at some point you're going to want to pull the trigger."
~ Michael Neill
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The new Coaching Prosperity School starts July 29 and 30 in Phoenix. Please express your interest.
One of the most illustrious graduates of this school is Michael Neill.
"To bankrupt a fool, give him information."
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People make the mistake of stuffing their heads with words and numbers. They pile in more and more information hoping that sooner or later they'll have enough information to finally succeed at something.
But information only goes so far…and if you get too overloaded with it, you can go bankrupt learning to succeed instead of going out there and succeeding.
Some people spenf their whole lives preparing to live.
Which is why the programs life coaches offer always have a lot of action in them. Transformation works better than information, and you can only transform through practice.
Author/coach Michael Neill and I recently co-presented a six month seminar for 22 people from all over the world. It was called "Financially Fearless." During one of the last sessions, we passed out the above quote from Nassim Taleb on how to bankrupt a fool.
We wanted to draw a dramatic distinction between information, a gluttony of which can bankrupt you, and transformation, which will leave you leaner and stronger. Most of the people in the room were coaches by profession. They were in the business of delivering transformation, so they got the point faster than most people would.
I work with coaches every day. They have become my professional coaching focus. I love the work they do in people's lives. My role in coaching them is to help them build strong practices and make a good living so they can go on serving people in the profound way they do.
Because it's hard to be good at coaching people to succeed if you are not successful yourself. You don't have a lot of real world experience to draw on. It's mostly theory. You mostly chat.
Most coaches are so busy helping others reach their goals and live their dreams that they neglect their own financial strength. They forget to set up a strong system for growing their practice. That's where the work I do comes in. I've done a number of coaching prosperity schools where I help coaches gain a mastery level of business prosperity. They learn to acquire clients easily.
In my school, there is no information.
Why bankrupt these coaches?
It's transformation or nothing.
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My old college professor Bill Roecker (on the right) is now a fishing coach. He takes people fishing and coaches them on how to make a big catch. He's the happy guy on the right.....better than being locked in a classroom with a student like me.
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish (a good coaching session is really a fishing lesson) and he eats for a lifetime.
I just remembered a few variations on the "teach a man to fish" concept that I've always liked:
"Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today.
Teach a man to fish; and you will not have to listen to his
incessant whining about how hungry he is."
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"Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today.
Teach a man to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks."
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"Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today.
Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.
Teach a man to sell fish and he eats steak."