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Mindset Followup: A [visual] framework for abundance

[scroll down for visual guide]

I used to think books with “daily affirmations” were goofy new-age baloney.

Why would reciting some sappy self-help mantra change anything?

I still don’t own a book of daily affirmations but I’ve learned a lot about transformation.

Plus, the recent empirical scientific data shows what many of us who’ve studied spiritual formation already knew from a long record of wisdom writings and human history:

“As a man thinks so he is.”

3D brain scans verify that our thoughts, habits, and patterns (physically) change our brains, down to the cellular level and even into our DNA!

Prayer works like focus. Meditation works like concentration. And yes, affirmations can truly transform attitudes.

All 6 can, and do, change us for the better. It comes down to effort.

With practice, bad habits get harder to break (not so great), but new thoughts and actions build new cortical pathways (hope for betterment!).

I have some firm beliefs that I’m bent on making a potent reality:

1. My perspective can determine my actions.

2. My attitude can improve my life.

3. Reminding myself of the truth about abundance can transform me.

4. Connecting to a positive version of reality can revitalize me.

5. Hope is my choice.

I decided to create a handy guide to make each day better.

If you ever struggle with being positive and hopeful, I hope this makes it easier.

It’s really helped me to see the path visually.

I’m hoping to improve how I determine and live out my outlook and actions each day. How about we do it together?

Sure, we’ll fail sometimes, but maybe some guidance will steer us right again, soon.

Skeptical? Give it a chance.

Seriously. Try it for a few days:

1. Use this visual guide to help you.

2. Remind yourself throughout the day about your choice of a scarcity or an abundance mindset.

3. At the end of each day, review and see if you lost track of your perspective–then recommit to keep at it.

3. Note your mood and attitude throughout the day to gauge your progress.

4. Share your progress and this guide with others, if you’ve been helped.

I made it for you to ebed at your website, or share on Facebook or pinterest.

Want to pass it along? I’d love that.

Want in on the upcoming goodies and posts? Whoot! Sign up in the right sidebar!
Interested in brain science?
I recommend this:

Are you using a GPS? (advice to communicators and startups)

We tend to think that we operate out of our values as if it’s like a default setting on a washing machine.

The truth is, at best, we are consistent at that stuff only sometimes. Not because we are horrid cads, but because we get busy.

If you are a person of faith or want to live from a set of important values, you can’t take this modus operandi for granted.

You have to do some groundwork. (I’ll get to specifics in a moment.)

First, the short story of Jackie will help us out.

taxes

Jackie is tax consultant. She had worked for a national brand firm in town and was striking it out on her own–almost by accident and not all at once.

It started when she kept noticing that some of her friends and family members didn’t know what they were doing. In a panic, usually at the end of March, they started asking her for help. Most of them didn’t know enough to get the best refund, and she heated the idea of that.

She picked up some side work, and within two tax seasons she had herself completely booked at tax time. About 20% of those clients needed accounting help throughout the year for their small business. She also found a few non profits clients too. She really needed help by the third year and had left her other job by then.

Like you would expect, she hired help and plunged into her work.

I didn’t put too much weight into the particulars of hiring. I was so busy with the details of getting the work done. So, the most important thing got steamrolled by the urgency of my work.

Things started going badly.

Out of the 3 part-time workers, only one of them actually had the same values as she did. She realized this too late and it created friction and a tense working environment. One person left and started bad-mouthing her in her small town. The other position seemed like a revolving door of employee turnover. She almost quit the whole thing. It was keeping her up a lot at night.

Jackie didn’t have Human Resources Training or organizational management training. She just had a bunch of work and she was good at those skills. She needed to clone herself.

It didn’t come to that, of course.

Fortunately, a mentor gave her some great advice. She said,

Back up a bit. Sit down and put your most important values and business aims down with ink on paper. It’ll work like a compass or GSP. It will help with both the route and destination.

It worked. Her commitment statements guided all her business decisions after that. Hiring, training, working with clients, getting new clients, and getting her little company running smoothly needed that solid foundation.

It’s a great lesson. If you aren’t using a GPS you’re going to get lost.

Before you take on side work. Before you hire someone. And most importantly, before you get busy, do the ground work so that your priorities and core guiding principles are something that flow out and throughout all your interactions, not get tacked on afterword.

If you value honesty, joy, compassion, and persistence, for instance, make them the anchor for all the skills you execute and all the projects you take on.

Have you initiated your GPS? Do you have your guiding principles on paper and operate from them?

I hope that was helpful.
Do you know someone who might need this advice?

Please share!

The Letter X: The Key to understanding the Bible (tribute to Dave Dorsey)

This post is part of the continuing series I’m doing to honor the late Dr David Dorsey.

Don’t forget to read the others:

1. Faith = Eggs in a Basket
2. Follow Mosaic Laws?

The letter X.

It’s the shape of something. It’s the shape of the structure of how the Pentateuch (and Joshua) was composed. It was authored carefully with a structure that helped ensure it was remembered in a world where people memorized stories and rarely wrote them down or read them.

Chiastic refers to the letter X (“X” is Chi, in Greek, of course).

Check out the wikipedia article on ancient literary structure:

a field that Dave contributed to that is likely one of his most enduring legacies.

It shreds the 18th century theory, borne out of cultural ignorance and literary ignorance of ancient texts. One that has prevailed for too long: The Documentary hypothesis. (This theory came about when a French medical professor (Jean Astruc) thought the Pentateuch was very oddly written. No, he wasn’t a biblical scholar or historian, sadly, but he read the Bible and wanted to postulate. (Soon after, German liberal scholars jumped on his theory, expounded on it, and proliferated it as it aided their objectives in the 19th Century.)

Reading the non linear narrative form had him confused. He postulated that multiple authors at different times probably wrote the text and then it was cobbled together. After all, some things were mentioned twice, but how could that be? Must be a mistake or proof of multiple authors lending their two shekels.

Modern narratives are written in a linear form, usually, hence the puzzlement.

Astruc was a bright man, but his acumen was clearly restricted to the medical sciences. He had never pieced together that all the ancient texts tended to be written this chiastic way as a memory aid because they had been transmitted orally at first, sometimes for many hundreds of years. The book of Job is a very good example of this. It dates back to long before Abraham.

Thankfully, our understanding of the ancients is much improved now and it’s easy to spot this same structure in ancient tales like the Iliad and the Odyssey, for instance. Perhaps it is because of the stronghold of liberal bias in the scholarly world that this poor rabbit trail tends to still be esteemed. (Truth be told, its prevalence also works toward discrediting or tempering aspects of the Bible which is a happy agenda for a great many scholars.) So, this 18th century misunderstanding still prevails.

As one understands the chiastic structure of the bible, the main points are easily underscored. The Mosaic Law for instance, centers on the importance of protecting the weak (in that culture: females, foreigners, the the poor classes), the marginalized, and the outcast. The Law then, is an excellency picture of the heart of God that should be the same as ours.

So Remember:
The climax and thrust of a passage in the first 6 books stands out in the middle and the supporting text flanks it on either side. A sandwich of meaning: the meat is in the middle.

If you’d like to understand it for yourself here’s the best book for that:

In my final tribute post, I’ll share about Dorsey’s most famous archeological discovery. It’s a great story!

Supercharge Your Message with these 3 Secret Powers

Robert was a guy who wanted something. You could tell.

He wanted what a lot of people want. He wanted his idea out there. He wanted to get noticed and get recognized and make a better living. As an accomplished amateur guitarist he loved music and created a service focused at musicians. But, he couldn’t seem to get much traction.

After looking at his business and his marketing efforts I noticed something.
It was just below the surface but it tainted just about every Robert did.

Stinginess.

I didn’t come right out and tell him this, “Hey, friend, you’re stingy. People hate that. It’s like client repellant.” But, I did ask him a few questions and he stumbled onto the conclusion himself.

They were these 2 transformative questions:

1. What are your doing out of pure kindness to your target group?
(What are doing to simply serve this group, without hoping for or gunning for something in return?)

2. Are you empathizing fully with your group and their needs?
( What are their biggest needs and how does that make you want to respond? What will you do about it?)

A big shift happened. A light in a dark room moment.
(That’s what I LOVE about good questions. They shift things.)

It was like a wall broke down for him. He started thinking. Really thinking. Then he starting looking through a new window (perspective & worldview). New options and possibilities came into view. Discouragement vanished.

Instead of being centered on scarcity and never having enough (money, clients, opportunities, options), Robert started remembering how much good he could do.

Doing good felt good. Soon, it actually made him a better person for it. This new spirit didn’t extend to just clients, but his friends and family benefitted as well.

The new generosity of spirit made all the difference.

His empathy supercharged his efforts.

His message got out better this way.

Here’s what happened:
He started offering some of his services for free, no strings attached. This was valuable. Several musicians caught on and passed along his information. One of those leads provided consistent income almost right away. Then he reached out to a few local non profit groups and gave them some great work for free. They gave him some positive public testimonials and a few direct referrals. (He wasn’t helping them so they could help him in return, but after he gave of himself so generously, they wanted to help him out.)

His old message came off like this: “I have something and you need it. You should want this.”

Result? Dead ends and closed spirits.

His new message consisted of actions that worked like a megaphone. They said, “I’ll come along side you. Everything will be fine. I got this. No worries.”

People started searching him out. He didn’t have to work as hard to be noticed because his actions were secret super powers.

• Empathy

• Kindness

• Generosity

It drew plenty of attention. The right kind of attention. People were happy to pay him because they saw more value in his service. The stingy people that didn’t want to fork over any money for the value he brought them faded into the background. The more he invested and gave to the 80-90% of the folks that valued him, the better things got.

CONCLUSION:

Remember your Secret Super Powers.

If you’ve hit a wall with a project there’s a simple fix: If promotion, marketing, exposure, or getting your message out has stalled in any way, revisit your levels of 1. empathy, 2. no-strings-attached-kindness, and 3. generosity.

Reinstitute a lot of that back into your efforts, let go of the wheel, and see what happens. These secret super powers only work best if you put your true heart into it and live it out fully.

They are fertile things that birth the same spirit and goodness back to you.

Now some questions for you…

What message are you trying to get out right now?

(A project, a book, an album, a class, a service, a product, etc.)

What’s a way you can be more empathic and generous?
(In that spirit, let this be your first bit of exposure. You can share that here, if you’d like.)

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Thanks for visiting and thanks for being awesome.

-L

The humor of Self-motivation

There are all kinds of reasons for doing things.

In the end, I wonder if it comes down to just two: avoiding fear & pain or making ourselves feel better, which is sort of the same thing.

I loved this photo (below) for it’s weirdness.

What’s more exciting than running on to the field when a soccer match is in progress? Taking a picture of yourself doing it…but wait…

I wonder…would this girl have run onto the football pitch in the middle of this match if she had left her mobile phone at home?

Would the notoriety feel real if it could not be captured on her camera phone?

Is her fear “not mattering”?
Or maybe the motivation was to get some quick attention on Facebook, pure and simple.

Perhaps she was self and selfie motivated. Could it be crazy fun, or just crazy?

Of course we can only speculate.
In speculating alone, we will only distract ourselves from our fears. And those fears are the ones we live with each day. They are the ones that matter. So let’s transition…

As you prepare yourself for the new year, consider your motivations and your fears. What are they? Jot the big ones down. Be brave.

They will last the whole year long, likely, but you can move toward mastering them, yes? That said, you probably won’t be able to if you take a lot of selfies. It seems there’s something of a dead end in that preoccupation.

Did this photo make you laugh or cringe?

If yes, share to say you care. :)

HAPPY 2014!