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Warning: the biggest learning is in the PS!
I could make enemies with this article. But don’t worry: I won’t, unless by accident.
The success or business gurus, whose business will suffer if you follow this path, aren’t in the habit of checking what people say about the stuff they teach. They are so sure they got you, hook, line and sinker, that they will never suspect that they lost you to some other theory of success.
And they will be right.
In what, you say? In their approach. Not to business, but to you, my success or money seeker reader.
What is it about you, you ask, that makes you such an easy prey to success and business gurus?
Simply put, the fact that you are a machine, that swallowed the ‘party line’ already, hook line and sinker. That ‘party line’ prepared you for these gurus unethical teaching, teaching stuff that doesn’t work for you, can’t work for you, won’t work for you.
And what is that? you ask?
The notion that you can get from A to Z, in one fell swoop. Or that is even a straight line!
Or that you can map out the steps from A to Z and follow the steps, like a blueprint, and you’ll get there. That this is the way that you will become thin, rich, healthy, and happy.
But it is not so, I say.
People write sales pitches making the end goal really pretty, really sexy, really desirable, and you buy the product hoping that it will do it for you.
I had a few really amazing experiences to prove this lately.
I got on a call this week, because an associate of mine was going to be grilled on it. It turned out to be a strategy session: creating a strategy, a business plan for this associate of mine.
It was brilliant. And it was sparkling. Amazing. A tour to force. A masterpiece. It sold a few seats in the strategist’s 6,000 dollar a year program. But it will be useless for my associate.
EVEN IF HE BUYS THIS STRATEGIST’S YEAR LONG PROGRAM FOR SIX THOUSAND BUCKS!
Wow, Sophie, now you are exaggerating!
I am not. Let me take you through the logic that made me make that outrageous statement.
A 6K dollar program normally makes you learn all the basics of a business model: recorded calls, pdf’s, and maybe even live group coaching sessions will not likely to take you to where you want to get to.
A prefab, ready to go course doesn’t take your strengths and weaknesses into consideration.
It doesn’t take what you know and what you specifically need for YOUR business to happen into consideration.
To sell something for so cheap (a 6K a year program is cheap!) it has to be a one-size fits all program.
I, accidentally, know the strategist: she is my mindset client. We trade. We talk once a week. I teach her for an hour, she coaches me 10 minutes at a time.
Why does this arrangement work for me?
Because
- 1. I already have been in my business, and in business for a long time. I have the skills, technical, sales, and marketing skills I need to make this business grow
- 2. Because I only want to accomplish one thing in those 10 minutes: I want to use it to share what had opened up as a result of the previous week’s actions, and strategize to define the following week’s action.
Wow, wow… that is horrible, would most guru say. You need to have a business plan, you need to have an action plan ahead of time. Why? Who said so? Everybody, they say.
And as usual, the majority is always wrong.
But, you say, isn’t that what the Law of Attraction people say? Yeah, and they are wrong.
They are wrong. In every area of life.
This wrong theory is underneath the 50% divorce rate, the 98% business failure rate, underneath why the masses that are sick, tired, and poor.
The problem with the current ‘plan your work, work your plan’ theory is that it designs a structure for the machine to go through, unconsciously, unaware, un-looking, in-flexible.
The easiest to prove my point are relationships.
You have this plan to get a serious relationship that will lead to marriage.
You know the steps: write a list of yes and no characteristics for the ideal person, blah blah blah. You know those idiotic plans that you read about to get married, don’t you?
The trouble begins when you find/meet someone. It looks and feels good in the beginning, and you decide: ‘this is the one.’
The machine, your machine, heard you and says: ‘you got it!’
And that’s when the machine completely takes over. You look at all the things that justify your decision, and minimize the things that would tell you to run the other way.
Werner Erhard, the founder of the est training had a big organization. When people in his organization wanted to get married, they were asked to get an audition with Werner. Come to the interview with the person they intended to marry.
He always asked just one question of each: If you got divorced what would be the reason? They never had to look, the answer was right there. They knew it, but they had never considered it as a big NO before the audition.
Those big NOs were swept under the rug, only to come out years later and destroy the illusion of marriage, the illusion of the relationship.
So what is there to do when you are building or running a relationship or when you are building or running a business?
Never delegate any tasks to the plan. Stay alert, stay present, and decide on the next step from the DATA you got from your previous week, not to some plan.
In my humble opinion, and in my practice, we should always keep the goal in mind, but put 99% of our attention on the results of the tests we run.
Life is a test. A series of tests. When I do this — this happens. When I do that — that happens. If I eat this, I say this, I wear this, I make this facial expression… and track the results.
Getting a no is far more valuable that getting a yes. Remember the Anna Karenina Principle?
Saying a no brings more clarity than saying a yes.
Most of our life is given to the areas where we should say no, but the machine is running, and it is using our life. Using it up!
Once you have the courage to say no, the yeses are much more productive.
This associate of mine, before he could contemplate putting that brilliant plan to action, will have to say a lot of painful nos. And unless he will, he can forget it. And the urge to say yes will just come, even when you have thought you are done. Where do they come from? Your environment, from the culture, from TV, headlines, shopping… everywhere.
It takes a no-saying ‘machine’ to win in life.
Your yes has no power if you say yes to useless crap, distractions, false starts, and to pleasing others.
The Heaven on Earth remedy helps you stay clearer, helps you have to courage to say no, helps you look where it matters (results) instead of looking in your flighty feelings.
You can navigate the most dangerous, treacherous waters with the help of the remedy, if you commit to the end result (the context) and decide on the small steps: the how from the results. And it helps you to be diligent at saying no where you need to.
This is yet the most counter-cultural principle I have ever taught.
The Tree of Knowledge is everywhere, killing Life.
This knowledge is straight from Source… worth following. And to get more guidance, learn how to communicate with Soul and Ego on the Connection Calls… they are free and they are great.
And get your Heaven on Earth… below. Do it now.
Get the great emotion sootherEverything can be cut up, chopped up, to tiny steps. But that is not the ESSENCE of what I am teaching.
Listen up, or you won’t hear it.
Every step produces a result. It is either in the direction or away from what you intended.
After every step look at what it produced and if needed, check to make sure it wasn’t a fluke… so repeat it. one time.
And design the next step from what you learned.
This requires presence of mind, awareness, astuteness, and looking in reality, not in your desires, which live in the mind… unreality.
And for god’s sake, don’t make rules! All rules are made to allow you to live your life with your eyes closed!
A client of mine wants to increase the profit of her business. She wants it to increase her peace of mind. She has been doing ‘peace of mind’ steps, and no steps to increase the income of the business. And at the end of the month she finds herself stressed: the bills are bigger than she can pay.
So, is she stupid? Yeah… but even stupid people can do the right things: the most important thing in her business is to increase the revenues. Increasing the number of customers, increasing average transaction size, increasing the frequency of transactions per customer, and raising your prices
What doesn’t increase revenues is balancing your checkbooks, correcting the book-keeping errors from years ago, i.e. apple polishing. and that is what she has been doing, proudly.
There are plenty of small steps in any one of those four ways. But she has been doing no steps there…
I, as a coach, have to let her hang herself. Why? Because you only learn from your mistakes.
I hope she reads this article.
PPS: When I set up my hero program, this is the kind of activity I had in mind. The kind I did with that woman with the 6K course.
You set a direction. For example: increase the revenues. Or find my strengths. Or learn to look in reality…
And then, daily, you take tiny steps, and look if they were steps that took you closer… or further away.
From the way people are using the hero program, it is clear to me that this, what I taught in this article, is not something people know… So now you do. Read and heed…
this article kind of reminds me of something else you wrote Sophie about NOT doing something JUST for the money … the most successful people who I listen to anymore talk about embracing the PROCESS … build a solid foundation with the process and the results will follow … Malcolm Gladwell talks about 10,000 hours … I would think most successful people have have dedicated many times 10,000 hours before they truly become a “outlier”
You are correct Scot about the similarity between the articles.
I know Malcolm Gladwell, of course, and he is right about the hours, but, as a teacher, I can tell you, most people never put in 10,000 hours that are useful… they are so fragmented, so trying to avoid being found out as a “fraud” that they really don’t have the knowledge to be successful. Many of the soul corrections are about that.