Master Key Week Five – The Adventure Intensifies!

Wow – What a Ride!

So here we are in week five.  Is it just me, or is time moving faster and faster?  And things are changing even FASTER!  It’s been a very full week for me and several people on our team.  We just got back from our Global Convention with LifeVantage.  What a rush!  Several things happened that tied directly into what we are learning on our journey with the MasterKey Class.  There just seems to be too much for it to all be coincidence…

Everything is Connected

It is so cool that many of the things we are learning through MKMMA (MasterKey Master Mind Alliance) seem to be getting  reinforced from other places.  One of the speakers at our convention was Mel Robbins who did an amazing TED Talk a while back. She spoke to us about her five second rule.  When you have a thought to do something, if you do not start moving to do it within five seconds, your mind will start talking you out of it and you will never get started.

Sound familiar?  Do It Now! Do It Now! Do It Now!

Why Are We Doing What We Do?

One of our Corporate Officers also talked about Simon Sinek and how he teaches to Start With Why.  I’m thrilled that this is becoming part of our corporate culture!

Most companies and most people spend most of their time and energy talking about What They Do.  A few spend some time talking about How They Do It.  Only a few Start With Why, and yet this is the key.  What does what you are doing mean to you?

For example, the biggest selling MP3 Player is of course the iPod.  But did you know that it was not the first to market?  Creative Labs, maker of so many sound cards in our computers, came out with a 6gb MP3 Player a full year before Apple came out with their 5gb iPod.  But Creative marketed theirs as a “6gb MP3 Player” (WHAT it did) while Apple touted theirs as “One Thousand Songs In Your Pocket” (WHY you would want it) – and the rest is history.

What Does That Have to Do With Anything?

Part of the MasterKey course has been focused on writing our own personal DMPs (Definite Major Purpose) and tying them to our PPNs (Personal Pivotal Needs)  That looks a lot to me like “Why are we here?”  Not just what do we want, but WHY do we want it?  What NEEDS are being fulfilled?  How do they feel when they are fulfilled?

So, here is the question… WHAT do you want?  And, more importantly WHY do you want it?

My PPNs are Legacy and Liberty and it feels AWESOME to be attracting people and circumstances that support them!  Thanks to all of you who are a part of that!

Week Three – The Master Key Adventure Intensifies

Habits are Interesting Things!

“In truth, the only difference between those who have failed and those who have succeeded lies in the difference of their habits” – Og Mandino

We all have habits.  We may label them as “good habits” or “bad habits,” but in truth they are all just habits.  The goodness or badness is in the eye of the beholder.

Many, if not most of our habits lie beneath our level of awareness.  Without awareness, we cannot make choices about them.  Some habits support us in getting more of what we want in our lives and many may get in the way.  Cause and effect being such slippery things, at times we may not even know which habits are which.

What we are learning is that the world within creates the world without, and sitting after reading our DMP (Definite Major Purpose) helps us to reset that world within.

But my old patterns are not giving up without a fight – Aaaargh…

New Patterns are Dawning!

Og Mandino says that we are slaves of habit.  He goes on to say that “only  a habit can subdue another habit.”  As we read the scrolls from Og, our DMPs and other assigned pieces, old patterns begin to fade and new ones begin to emerge.  We begin to see and experience things in a new light.

Morning Mist

The most important piece is to focus our attention on what is preferred – on what we are moving towards.  As the habit of paying attention to where we are putting our attention gets stronger, the old habits begin to dissolve, like the sun burning away the morning haze.  Just as the haze disappears and everything comes into view, so it is with our newfound thought patterns – we are born again into a fresh day with a new lease on life.

More Good News!

Here’s some more Good News!  By becoming increasingly aware of my thought patterns and habits, I realize that I can now choose which habits to embrace and which ones to replace.  My conscious mind is becoming the gatekeeper to what gets passed on to my subconscious mind.

Just like a computer, as good information goes in, good results come out.  My new dominant thoughts, coupled with emotion, are beginning to change my beliefs.  New beliefs result in new actions, which in turn manifest new results.

And guess what?  I’m already getting more done.  Hurray!

Self-Esteem and “The Sit.”  What We can Learn from our Cats.

Business Doing His Sit

Our cat Business has never had any issues with self-esteem.  He sits still several times a day, contemplating who knows what?  Watching his stillness helps inpire me to be still as well, and the results are beginning to show.  We are in week three and my wife Terri is already noticing a difference in me.  And (no big surprise) she likes it – as do I…

Staying on track with these new disciplines has definitely not been easy, but it’s oh so worth it!

Like I said, the adventure intensifies.  I can hardly wait to see what shows up next…

Week Two – The Master Key Adventure Continues

Where do I Start?

I am so excited to be a part of the Master Key Course – it’s such a dynamic experience, even though there is still a part of me that wonders just what I’ve gotten myself into.  I have already begun revising my Definite Major Purpose write-up with the feedback from my MKMMA guide.  The class is already impacting how I interract with other people too!

I am doing my daily reading and my sits.  Most of you reading this post will probably be fellow explorers, but for those who do not know, the sits are quiet times of self-reflection.  The daily reading consists of scrolls from Og Mandino’s Greatest Salesman in the World (a far more spiritual volume than the name implies) along with a Blueprint Builder designed to help reprogram our sub-conscious so that reading our personalized DMP will have a profound effect on how we see ourselves.

All of it is designed to get us thinking, but none of it is about what we should be thinking – that’s totally up to us.  I already knew that the only thing we really had control over was our thoughts – about where we put our attention.  This course is already helping me to GET IT at a much deeper level than I ever have in the past.

OK – So Our Thoughts Impact Our Beliefs

Our thoughts not only impact our beliefs, they also impact our feelings, which will have an additional effect on our beliefs.  Beliefs in turn effect our actions which will then manifest as the results in our lives.  The bad new is that the blueprint from our old thoughts, feelings and beliefs has, to a large degree, predetermined our actions.

If we are unaware of this dynamic then we drift along in life, repeating the same types of challenges over and over again.  We may even begin to think of ourselves as failures and/or victims and see ourselves as helpless.  Such thoughts will inevitably have an effect on our feelings and beliefs and the direction from that is pretty clear – without awareness, it is pretty much downhill.  Just as water will seek the shortest path to the sea, relentlessly eroding everything in its path, our thought patterns will do the same to our lives.

The Good News!

The good news is, that unlike the river tumbling ever lower and lower, we have the gift of awareness – when we remember and choose to use it.  We DO have control of our dominant thought patterns, and through learning to exercise that control, and infusing it with feelings, our new beliefs will begin to chip away at the cement that has bound us into our “Lives of quiet desperation…”  And, unlike the erosion of the river which creates deeper and deeper chasms, the erosion of our old thought patterns and the rebuilding of new ones lifts us higher and higher.  Our new habits will build a new blueprint – a solid foundation for our dreams and aspirations.  From here we can build on solid bedrock!

In other words, we may still be “up the creek,” but it’s a beautiful creek and we now possess a very powerful paddle.  As I said – the adventure continues.  In truth, it’s just begun.

Week One – The Master Key Adventure Begins

Hello Everybody!

I like writing but…

I like to write, but for some strange reason, the thought of writing a weekly blog is a bit terrifying to me.  I am fairly competent about doing things online, but I had a hard time even logging into the WordPress site to get started.  I’m guessing I have some resistance there…  I think part of my hesitancy is that in being held accountable for doing things I don’t like to do.

I’m very excited about the MasterKey/Master Mind Alliance (MKMMA) course and blogging is a requirement to maintain the Pay-It Forward scholarship I was fortunate enough to receive.  Without that requirement, I would not be here.  But I am sure that there is a great reason to do this, so here I am.

So, a little about me.

                  Sunset on My Past

I have been self-employed since 1978.  I’ve done a number of different things during that time.  I’ve been an electrical contractor, owned a video arcade games route, sold manufacturing services, and had partners in both a bakery and real estate investments.  I have been a seminar leader and an ebayer.  I am also a professional network marketer – part of a great company, an amazing team and learning skills from an amazing teacher.

Being my own boss has been a mixed bag.  There have been times when it has been very rewarding and times when it has been very difficult.  I’ve made very good money and other times I’ve struggled.  I have joked that my boss is a slave-driver and how I bargain with him about getting a raise in pay – probably not great things to do since I know that words have energy to them.

In my seminars and my networking, I coach people on using exact language that depicts better images of the things that they would prefer to create.  Now the folks who are coaching us are going to be taking that to a whole new level.  I am very excited about that part of the process.

Pay-It-Forward

I have also been a big fan of the Pay-It-Forward concept for a long time and look forward to being an even bigger part of that as well!

So here I am – I am excited, I am scared and I am blogging!