Category Archives: podcasts

Turning your life around on a dime. Become a winner in life

In this article I am going to illustrate a method of turning your life around, going from mundane, boring, safe, and probably unhappy, to a life that excites you, a life of adventure, and joy.

The example is real: I went through this just about an hour ago… so it is real and it’s fresh. Here you go:
I have been waking up every morning disappointed that I woke up. And I had the
‘I only woke up in the morning because I didn’t die the night before’

This morning I sat on the edge of my bed, looking at this mood, curiously. The ‘I’ that was watching, was sympathetic and compassionate to the miserable ‘I’ that was sitting on the edge of the bed.

‘But it makes no difference,’ the miserable ‘I’ said. ‘People are set in their ways, the dark side wins by numbers, and no matter what I do, it makes no difference… not really!’ it continued its whinging.

‘OK, time to break out the big gun’ the observer ‘I’ said then, and then we both looked.

So what game would be worth playing, that would transform this morning scenario into eager ‘I can’t wait to start my day’ scenario?
We didn’t have to wait long for the game to emerge. No thinking, no forcing, it just popped out: ‘How about the game of being a winner?’
It’s a perfect game because it doesn’t have one big result and when you have to invent another one to win again. What makes a winner is winning, just like what makes a leader is leading… it is not possible to fake. You either win or you don’t. We will consider winning at this game if the results in real life match the criteria as winning.

Winning in business, winning in relationships, winning in health… perfect game. It will give us an opportunity to celebrate every win, big or small, and in order to celebrate, we’ll have to notice it all. We won’t be stingy like we have been: winning won’t be our natural state, winning will be our milestone. It will never be taken for granted.

With Landmark Education’s wording, we would say it this way: ‘The possibility I am inventing for myself and for my life, is the possibility of being a winner.’ We like that. Because it includes both the experience and the facts… the facts of actually winning.
So how do you win? Winning requires rules. Of what is considered winning.
In golf you win if your ball goes into the little hole in the ground.

So, in my life, the rules will be: I will set my sight at something. If I accomplish it, it’s winning. if I fail to accomplish it, then it’s not winning.

I will pick my games carefully but yet boldly. The word “accomplish” indicates that the game must be not easy to win, and that I will need to apply myself, grow, learn, get clever, take risks… I like it.
I just had an insight: every time I can say to myself ‘I am proud of myself!’ is a win.
Example: If you can replace one cup of coffee with a glass of water, because you’ve been wishing to do that… you can be proud of yourself.

Remember that babies take their first steps and everybody
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Where does the energy come from that you ‘spew’ Sophie?

Is the energy from the practitioner, or is the energy from Source?
I first experienced energy from someone else back in the year 2000.

Just like many others, of course I have experienced the energy between my two palms when you are slowly separating them… but although that was quite dramatic to my Communist addled brain, I didn’t make it mean much.

But what I happened in 2000 was dramatic and made me change how I viewed the world from thereon.
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What your teacher is learning is how to deal with YOU!

I am learning (from this famous marketer) that you need to address your product you want to sell to the hardly 7% ambitious ones in your market… or you likely won’t make many sales…

Ambitious means that you want the result enough to actually do something for it.

It doesn’t mean what it meant in the former Soviet Block countries. There it meant that one only cares about himself, and willing to climb over dead bodies to get it. That is what ambitious meant in Hungary, and it wasn’t a nice thing.
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The biggest leap to happiness, health, wealth, love…

If you wanted to make the biggest leap up… happiness, health, wealth, love…

What do you think you’d grow?

Some measures are easier to grow than others.

Some measures, like everywhere in life, will grow easily, but  overall their effect will be small.
While others create an avalanche-like result when you grow them even just a little bit..

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My first ever webinar in 2009 on getting unstuck

Life is like a spiral staircase… Every problem, every issue will come back to be addressed on a hopefully higher level… Issue like getting unstuck.
I once read a story about Gandhi. A woman came to him with his child. He asked Gandhi to tell the child that eating sugar is bad for him.
Gandhi listened, and then said: please come back in two weeks.
The woman and the child left… and supposedly traveled for days to get home, and then come back again.
They came in, and Gandhi simply said to the child: Don’t eat sugar. It’s bad for you.
The woman piped up: why couldn’t you say that a week ago?
Gandhi answered: Two weeks ago I myself was eating sugar…
This is the story that came up for me this morning.

I am in the middle of a two-day course I am taking (the recordings, of course). A course that teaches people about sales, and why people buy and why people don’t buy. Fascinating, insightful. Fantastic insights already…

I suddenly understand why I bought a course to learn how to put up virtual summits, and yet decided that I am not going to do it. It was an expensive course. Oy.

What I’ve gleaned I had been unfamiliar with.
The belief that I can’t do it, that if I tried to do it it would be a disaster.
There have been things before, things I bought but didn’t even try, but never before had I the clarity that a belief tells me that I can or can’t do.

Why did it come up now? Aren’t you curious?

For 70 odd years it didn’t come up, and suddenly it is there in all its ‘glory’… Why now?

And suddenly I saw: it came up like Gandhi’s sugar… Until I go through myself, it is inauthentic for me to teach it.

A few weeks ago I taught that if you look at life and everything in it as a process, you can get anywhere with enough desire to get there.
I said that as you go through a carefully crafted process, you reshape yourself and your beliefs…
One of my students who has never done anything in his life and that is how he knows himself promptly signed up to a program where I promise to teach that process…

He was really excited. Then. Then proceeded never to do the process. I think he didn’t hear it… I think maybe he already forgot that there is such a process.

If you want something, but you don’t do anything towards it, of course you won’t have it.
Do all courses, or most courses take you through a process to change who you are for yourself?
I don’t think so. And most people whose beliefs say they can’t do something, end up living their entire lives that way.

Now, back to Gandhi.

Gandhi didn’t feel right to tell a child to do something that he himself didn’t do. So he took two weeks to stop eating sweets and then he asked someone to do something that he had done himself: stop eating sugar.

I think my inner guidance threw up this belief, made it visible, so I can first have compassion for my student, and second go through the process of overcoming it, if I have big enough desire for what it would give
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The organs weep the tears that the eyes refuse to shed

Reality and fiction, reality and fantasy, reality and dreaming are occasionally hard to tell apart.
I may dream that I am getting up and even getting to my office… only to discover that I am still in bed, under the covers… It felt so real

I am lucky it is only on cold morning… Some people spend their lives on the border of dreaming and living.

Some books are intentionally written in a way that the reader can’t tell if it is fantasy or a skillful telling what happened.

Two books come to mind most: Anastasia, The Ringing Cedars of Russia that sold tens of millions of copies. I have them, and read them. I enjoyed them. Well written fiction, although some of it is bad as far as fiction goes.

Humanity, especially women, took every word of the book for a fact, and there are groups, quasi religious, the Anastasiasts…

The other book is Dan Millman’s book, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.

It’s of the same genre… fantasy is mixed with reality… skillfully, I admit.

I enjoyed that book too… but I am going to rain on some parades…
Fantasy believed is not good for you.
The followup book to The Peaceful Warrior, The Journeys of Socrates. The white haired gas station attendant in the first book is called Socrates. This book is one of my favorite books I read once a year. It could be true, except it is 99% fiction. Beautiful, moving fiction, but fiction. A likely story.

The original book is 40% fiction. The interesting part is fiction… Almost believable…
Humanity wants to, desperately wants to live a life that is NOT reality bound. Jump to spirituality, fantasy…
…because, as Freud so astutely said:
‘Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures… There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.’
Freud doesn’t say it here, but all religion, all religious ideas, belong to what he calls ‘palliative measures’. I would say they are substitutive satisfactions, as a category.

So there are more than enough writers are willing to jump on the bandwagon, and create fiction that tread the netherworld between reality and fiction, providing the much needed ‘opium of the masses’, the crutches for the weak and weak willed, the flimsy, the ragdoll.
Yes. Reality is hard.
And no one can realistically promise that life will be easy. Instead the job of a self-respecting human, maybe you? is to get strong so they can meet life as equals.

Jim Rohn, famed coach said: ‘Don’t wish it was easier wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems wish for more skills. And don’t wish for less challenge wish for more wisdom’.

Wishing won’t change anything, fantasizing won’t change anything.

I was taught early in my life that fantasizing
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The atypical brain, being on the spectrum. Genius? Moron?

I first heard about ‘the spectrum’ from a classmate of mine, in 1997. She is, was an advocate for his brother with Asperger’s… which is a certain level of atypical brain syndrome. The mildest is dyslexia, and the spectrum goes all the way to full blown autism.

We have lost touch since, but she has helped me to understand some of the differences I experienced. Differences from others.
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The entitlement anchor: what being ‘entitled’ really means

The entitlement is anchored deep, and unless it’s pulled, it will keep jerking you back and forth, like a puppet.

Because I never felt that I was entitled to anything. My entitlement genes turned off when they were supposed to. It was around age 2. That was actually a little early, but that’s when it happened for me.

I never suspected that the entitlement anchor is actually more predictive to the quality of your life, to your unvoluntary harmful actions than the anchor to doom.
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Compassion… why a coach needs to have it or else…

I cry a lot. Most of the time not about myself. I cry with people.

When I pull an anchor, decades of misery and sadness spill out. And I feel it. I feel your sadness. I feel your longing to belong, to be appreciated. And I feel that you feel that you have been mistreated. And now that we have uncorked it… you can grieve.

I recommend that you do. Grieve.
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