After completing nearly two thousand 6 Advisors™ Assessment Reports and 5,000 hours of one-on-one interviews with individuals who are seeking success through business opportunities, we have made a break through discovery.  We have identified what I call the “fulcrum” or “pivot point” that determines whether a life tips toward success or slides toward failure.

This discovery is so profound that I have decided to write a new book on the subject (well under way) entitled, The Seven Laws of Abundance – principles, practices and promises, and have created a speech on this subject that I will begin delivering starting  with a group of aspiring real estate investors in Chicago on February 9th. This morning, I have come to the office very early desiring to share a few thoughts about this pivot point.
 
Many have suffered the “bruises of failure and the wounds of mediocrity” as described by Og in Scroll I.  Many seek to “begin a new life.”   Stressed and often burdened with debt, these individuals courageously set out to find freedom - an opportunity to reverse and/or even eliminate this destructive pattern.  Freedom is a worthy cause.  However, most do not know that they are standing at a critical crossroad. One path, the one to the left, is well-worn and enticing, the other, the one to the right, is “less traveled.”  The decision an individual makes at this “pivot point” may very well determine success or failure.  Let me give you a few hints about each path.
 
The path to the left is all about escaping and avoiding the rigors of life - a place that promises ease.  No more fear, stress, pain, or frustration.  A place where you can have a lifestyle that eliminates restrictive structure and work – you can do whatever you want whenever you want without having to be accountable to anyone.  This is a place where you will have so much money that you will never have to get permission from anyone to buy whatever you want whenever you want.  This is a place where you have so much money that you can buy that tropical island, fly there on your private jet and tell the world to go to “h@!%” – no more annoying people!  Does this place sound enticing?  For 97% of those seeking business opportunities it is. 
 
As a focal point of this quest, individuals are often invited to fantasize about what it is going to be like when they are rich. They are invited to visualize big houses, expensive cars, exotic vacations, and a life of ease.  Because of their desire to escape and avoid the rigors of life and armed with very specific over-focused systemic thoughts, these individuals often spend productive time in this space artificially counterfeiting the experience.  The sympathetic nervous system aids by releasing norepinephrine which is both a hormone and a powerful drug.  The experience can be euphoric and frankly addicting.
 
Three challenges.  One, a dream has been converted into an expectation – a concrete condition for happiness.  The experience can be so real that the mind has now adopted this expectation as reality.  When reality strikes and it always does, the body autonomically reacts to protect the expectation.  The sympathetic nervous system releases large doses of cortisol which kicks the norepinephrine off its receptor on a given cell. Cortisol then connects via its receptor and communicates feelings of anxiety and stress. The amygdala, the fight and flight center located in the limbic brain (the subconscious), releases fear dendrites that go up into the prefrontal cortex and rob the metabolic energy needed to maintain higher levels of consciousness. The individual has been prepared for war – but the enemy is reality.  The cure?  Escape and avoid by going back to fantasyland.  This undulation of high peaks and very low emotional valleys caused by vivid fantasy which is eventually interrupted by reality is the hallmark of individuals seeking ease.  I call it the ease dis-ease.
 
The second challenge is just as poignant. The pursuit of ease is antithetical to the realities of life and as you will discover in my new book, this pursuit is antithetical to receiving the blessings that flow from the laws of abundance. Bottom line: Ease does not exist on this planet – there is no such place - sorry, but it just doesn’t – and the pursuit of ease is not only futile it is counterproductive.  If an individual pursues ease equipped with the over-focused systemic thoughts present in 97% of this population, the mind will in fact create something that cannot be replicated in reality.  This generates almost unspeakable confusion and frustration in the extrinsic dimension of thought – reality – because that which is impossible to create is obsessively attempted - an “unrelenting and unyielding pursuit of the unachievable.”  Expectations have become the measuring stick for everything in the tangible world - and everything falls short.  Frustration, impatience, frenetic non-goal directed activity (dog chasing its tail), unhappiness, uncertainty, overwhelm and even anger are common emotions associated with this unsolvable disparity between expectation and reality.   
 
The third challenge is the most poignant.  So often I hear in initial coaching sessions, “Why can’t I have it? I can almost touch it. I can almost taste it. Why can’t I have it?” These questions are often punctuated with thoughts such as, “Something is wrong with me,” or “God must not love me!” and falsely believing, “Everyone else is succeeding!”  I have openly wept as a result of the pain caused by this deadly sequence – expectations created while fantasizing about ease, dissatisfaction with one’s life when measured against these concrete conditions for happiness –expectations - followed by self deprecation and even distain that can destroy any last vestiges of self-esteem. The desire to escape and avoid has deadly consequences.  How can an individual avoid this trap? We will look at the “path less traveled” in my next blog entry. 

Comments (2)

Show/Hide comment form