Monday, October 1, 2007

Step 4: Success is not About Skills

by James Arthur Ray

Your knowledge is not impressive...

As a national sales and management trainer for AT&T, I used to pour my heart out giving people sales tools and techniques. Yet, only a small percentage of people would use them.

Keep doing the same old thing...

The majority would just keep doing what they'd always done. This taught me that success and achieving Harmonic Wealth™ is not about skills. Clearly, if know-how were all there was to being successful, every salesperson that had attended my training sessions would have become a top producer.

It's not about hard work either...

But, ultimately, achieving Harmonic Wealth™ is about something else entirely. What's the missing piece? You may be thinking it's just a matter of hard work, but that's not it, either. There are plenty of people who work incredibly long and hard, yet they are barely making ends meet.

Is it intelligence?

Many incredible scholars are flat broke! If it were intelligence, then the PhDs would be extraordinarily happy with their lives and making all the money in the world, but I know plenty of scholars who are crusty old coots who can't rub two nickels together.

Your beliefs create the fact...

Then what is the answer? The key ingredient is mindset, the combination of conscious and unconscious beliefs, your values, expectations, and experiences. I also call this the "Total Belief System," or TBS for short.

In the last e-mail lesson you received, you learned to recognize a "good story" as just that: a reasonable sounding excuse for lack of success, but an excuse nonetheless. This is a crucial first step to uncovering any limiting beliefs that are hobbling your TBS and, therefore, your success and wealth in life.

Change your beliefs... change your life...

If you find yourself telling good stories, it's an excellent indicator that you need to change some underlying, unconscious beliefs if you hope to achieve wealth — however you may define it.

Refining and revitalizing the TBS creates the whole thrust of my curriculum in The Power to Win Weekend. In this event, we work to create a great rapport between the conscious and unconscious mind so that we can produce the results we desire in the real world.

If you don't like the program, change the channel.

You see, if the unconscious mind is calling all the shots, then we are left to our old "programming," the conditioning of our childhood. We are at the whim of our child's mind, which contains antiquated and often detrimental ideas about our abilities and possibilities in life.

What did your environment hand you?

I believe we are born into greatness and conditioned into mediocrity. That conditioning comes from good people who just don't know any better and who do the best they can. Still, they're bound to tell us we're limited, and in so many ways they tell us what we can't do.

We're conditioned with that from the time we are born. And then we show up as adults, with those things out of our conscious awareness, and that conditioning still drives who we are and what we do and do not.

To change results you must deal with the cause...

Go straight to the source. Most people want to throw solutions at the effect (the lack of results), rather than at the cause (the mindset). In other words, they look at their lack of wealth in any area and ask: How can I get more skills? How can I learn more? How can I work harder? But by definition, the result is the effect, the manifestation of a greater cause. The cause is at the level of consciousness. So in The Power to Win Weekend, we back up and ask:
How can we uncover limitations in the unconscious mind, clean those out and replace them with more empowering ideas and build communication between the conscious and unconscious so that the cause and, therefore, the effects are both changed?
You will never harvest corn if you have planted potatoes.

Imagine the unconscious mind is the soil, and the results we experience in the physical world are the plant. If we have a weak plant (or weak results) the real solution is usually to amend the soil. That doesn't mean that conditions like the amount of sunshine and attacks from bugs are not factors, but they're not really the determining factor. Similarly, mindset or TBS is the determining factor in your Harmonic Wealth™, not the circumstances of your life.

Another analogy I use frequently is that of the movie theater. Most of us will sit through almost any film, good or bad. Instead of getting up and leaving the ones we think are horrible, we stay riveted to our seats and continue to view. How like life!

Those who are dissatisfied with their lives simply continue to sit there and watch the results they don't like. Why? Because they've paid for the ticket; they're invested in seeing how it all plays out. Some people will complain about the movie, or throw cans and bottles, but that doesn't get them anywhere; it doesn't change the film. Yet there are those unique few who go back to the ticket counter, ask for their money back and see a different movie. They realize that:

The results on the screen don't change until they change the film.

Your Coach,

James Arthur Ray

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