Free Your Conscious Mind For Subconscious To Work

Your subconscious mind works best when your conscious mind is asleep or pleasantly occupied. In between intending and manifesting must be a temporary period of forgetting. If you want a good parking spot, give yourself enough time to forget about your intent before you get there. The sooner you think about something else the sooner reality can get to work. There is no easier way to take your conscious mind of something than by keeping yourself busy with something else.

There are times when you have a question about what to do make but can’t seem to find the answer. You don’t have to force yourself to come up with the decision in the moment. You can take a break and go do something else so that your subconscious mind can work on it. The answer will come to you as your subconscious mind pieces together the information it knows to develop the best choice that you can act on. You will become a lot more clear about what to do when that happens.

The people who accomplish the most are the ones who seem to work the least. That is because the ones that work the most are only working with half a mind. They spend so much time working consciously and not resting to let their subconscious work instead. The ones that work with a full mind do so by switching between working with their conscious mind and subconscious mind. They are able to focus their thoughts on a matter and then let it go free for awhile before returning back again.

You can be happy to know that to be successful, it is really essential to take more time for enjoyable diversion, instead of working longer and harder. Working smarter means working with your whole mind. Don’t do more work with your conscious mind than is necessary or you are wasting energy. Hold your mind on what you intend to manifest and then go do something else. The more you rest by freeing your conscious mind of a matter, the more your subconscious gets to work on it.

Take time off to go do what you enjoy. Relax and have some fun. Play and chill out for awhile. Your subconscious mind will direct you in your work, making it better, easier to perform and far more pleasant. This is what it means by doing less and achieving more. There is less and less conscious effort required as everything just goes into a flow. What you do becomes easy and effortless. This is the optimal way you want to accomplish things.

The intelligence of your subconscious mind is infinitely far more than all the intelligence of your conscious mind. You don’t have to worry when you do not think you have all the knowledge and awareness you need to handle a particular situation. That is the time when you can receive inspiration instead. You can never know everything consciously but you already know everything subconsciously. Worry hinders you from doing the things that would otherwise solve what you are worrying about.

Your desire sets intent in motion, which in turn attaches a line of force to your target. Now you must be drawn together like a fisherman and the fish. Once the line is cast, desire is forgotten allowing the universe or subconscious to reel you and the goal together with the least possible effort or resistance in between. Consciously you can not possibly calculate or predict completely what is required to reach your desire. Detachment and forgetfulness allows you to be led.

Detachment is the ability to close the doors of intention, to put out of the conscious mind once the working is complete. You focus your intention to perform the work and then you set it aside. Let the subconscious take over and carry it out. When you think too much about something consciously, you trigger conscious thought processes which interfere with your subconscious manifesting.

If you want something too much, and you’re constantly thinking of it, you will end up pushing it away. You interrupt things just as they’re about to be given to you. Once the intention is in the subconscious mind it will operate unaided. If the thought or desire comes back into your conscious mind, suppress it. Do whatever to push it back out of your mind. Don’t consciously dwell on it.

The autopilot and the pilot cannot control the plane at the same time. Ease of perfection in accomplishing anything depends on how much you are able to let go of conscious control over it and allow yourself to act automatically and effortlessly. When you free you conscious mind for your subconscious to work, you are allowing God and the universe to work on your behalf and to do the work through you. Free your mind and it will do wonders for you.

~ Enoch Tan ~

Interview Bill Harris and Jack Canfield (Part 3 - End)

BILL HARRIS: You know, I used to always tell people how they were unconsciously creating their reality and then it occurred to me to add that they were creating it unconsciously and unintentionally because no one would intentionally create poverty for themselves or create feeling bad a lot or create being lonely and alone, things like that. No one would intentionally do that.

JACK CANFIELD: No, people are always attempting to do that which they think will make themselves feel better. A gang member on a street in southern LA, who is robbing a 7-11 store is doing it because he thinks it’s going to make him feel better. He is going to have money, he is going to have respect of his gang, etc. The problem is, he does not have the same awareness of ethical training that you and I have. He doesn’t have the same skills that he might have not gotten in school because he was dyslexic or dropped out, or got kicked out, or his parents were coked out, so he has some brain damage, or whatever. In other words, he is doing the best he can to meet basic psychological and physical needs and when we give that child better skills and resources and awarenesses, through education and rehabilitation, they will choose to do better, but we cannot expect them to do better, ourselves or anyone else, unless they have new skills, resources or tools.

BILL HARRIS: Well, and when you look around you in your community, whatever that is in your life and you don’t see very many different options, then perhaps robbing a store looks like one of the better options.

JACK CANFIELD: Yeah, and for some people it may be the only option that presents them with the solution to their problem. Unfortunately, our society is not very good, especially in our inner city and urban schools, in really empowering kids with the tools they need, for example things I teach on success principles to give them the skills and resources to actually be able to go out in that world and be effective.

BILL HARRIS: So, tell me a little bit more about this new idea you mentioned earlier for another book.

JACK CANFIELD: Well, we have been talking about it all along, basically I think the power of our mind is so much greater than the mere power of our physical efforts. One person I interviewed recently said every hour of mental work is worth 17 hours of physical labor in terms of producing manifested results in the world.

Now, I don’t have a way to validate that statement yet, but a lot of people who are spiritually aware and who have been in this world of manifestation with less effort and so forth, and there are a number of people out there teaching that right now—the law of manifestation, laws of....what do I want to call it?

BILL HARRIS: Abundance?

JACK CANFIELD: Yeah, just prosperity consciousness. All that stuff that basically there seems to be a coherence in the field of theory that this is the way it is. So, one of my great gifts has always been to take things that seem to be a little woo-woo and far out and write them in such a way that the average person living in Iowa, Nebraska, and Oklahoma can relate to it
as well as the people living on he West Coast.

I have been applying it to my own life with great success so I want to tell my own story. I want to interview lots of other people, both anecdotally and people who are doing it as their entire life philosophy. Guys you and I know, like Joe Vitale and others. And, to then write it in such a way that the average person can understand it and apply it.

BILL HARRIS: Yeah, I think that is a really important change that needs to happen in the world, is for more people to understand this. There are way too many people that are creating miserable lives for themselves and they don’t really realize that they are doing it.

It’s really a shame. You know, looking at this thing in New Orleans, obviously the whole thing is very tragic, but one of the things I am struck by, and this is just a superficial observation that may not even be true, but it is what it kind of looks like seeing it on TV, it looks like a lot of these people don’t feel like...there is no way they can do anything so they are just kind of sitting there waiting to be helped.

JACK CANFIELD: I think that is true. A lot of people feel like there are no options. They have no alternative scenarios that they can play out and, again, we are looking at many people at the bottom end of the socioeconomic ladder, many of whom did not complete school, etc., so we go back to lack of awareness and lack of education. I think it’s a great wake up call for society to see how many people really are in that situation. We tend to forget about them, drive by their neighborhoods on the super highways and not deal with it, so I agree with you. I think it’s a sad commentary on the state of consciousness of a lot of people and again, I won’t hold them responsible, other than that all of us have to wake up at some point, hopefully, but usually we don’t wake up until someone like a teacher comes into our life, or an event like the hurricane that can be the teacher and say, “Wait a second, maybe we can do a better thing here than what we have been doing.”

I also think it is a grand statement about our government’s lack of preparedness, both on the state, local and federal level that we don’t plan for the negative. In other words, you have to have a positive attitude and focus on what you want, but I think you also have to be realistic and say, look let’s not deny that there are going to be category five hurricanes and if it were to happen, how are we going to deal with it. You and I are constantly thinking about what if this happens,
then how would we deal with it. If there is an obstacle to overcome, what are our strategies. I mean, you and I learned something from Dan Sullivan called strategy circles, where you anticipate every possible negative scenario and come up with three things to overcome it,
so again you focus back on getting to what you want.

BILL HARRIS: Yeah, every time that I do any kind of a project, I and some of the other people here, we sit down and we think of all of the things that can go wrong and some people would see that as focusing on the negative, but as soon as we think of something that could go wrong, we think about how we are going to keep it from going wrong, how we are going to counteract it if it does happen and that keeps a lot of things from getting in the way so that we can go forward
toward where we want. Ultimately, we are focused on where we want to go, but we realize that shit happens and if you are not prepared for it, it really can take you out.

JACK CANFIELD: That’s absolutely correct and you do have to have contingency plans and that is what allows you to be masterful.

BILL HARRIS: Well, it is like you said, a lot of these people at the lower end of the ladder are kind of ignored. People do not like to even be reminded that those people exist and those people sort of fall through the cracks.

You know, because you have spoken for this group, one of the things dear to my heart is an organization called Self-Enhancement, Inc., which is an organization in Portland, Oregon that helps disadvantaged inner city kids and their motto is “Life Has Options.”

JACK CANFIELD: I like that.

BILL HARRIS: And, that is exactly what they do with these kids. They show them that the small number of options that they see in this ghetto community are not all the options and that the other options that they have never heard about, or if they have heard about, they dismiss them as being impossible for them, they are possible. And then of course as you get more and more people going through a program like they have and coming out the other end, going to college and becoming a doctor or starting a business, or whatever, then other people that are in the pipeline somewhere else, say hey, other people are doing it. It is doable.

JACK CANFIELD: Oh, it is so true and I think that is one of the things if there is anyone listening to this is a parent, one of the reasons I take my kids around the world, every year we go to some other country. Last year I took my 14- year-old son to Spain and to London and France. At the
end of that trip, he said “You know, I think I want to live in Paris for a year when I graduate college or graduate from high school.” That option didn’t exist for him until he saw it and so we want to constantly expose our kids to new options. When I was teaching in an all black high school in Chicago back in the 1960s, most of my kids had never been more than three blocks away from their home. They had never been downtown to the loop, downtown Chicago. They literally thought everyone in the world was black, except the people on TV. You know, we used to take them on field trips to the zoo, to downtown, just to get them to see that there are other
options available to you. So, we have a responsibility to ourself to take ourselves places we have never been and expose ourselves to new people, new ideas, new cultures, new kinds of music, etc., so we are constantly seeing that we can expand into those arenas.

BILL HARRIS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. You know, the big ah-ha for me in this conversation has been what you said a little bit ago, that you can’t be responsible for something you are unaware of.

JACK CANFIELD: Right.

BILL HARRIS: To me, I mean I can sort of wangle that around and think, “oh yeah, I have been saying that in another way for a long time,” but the way you said it, it was kind of a new idea to me and I think that’s really a very brilliant statement. I hope you don’t mind if I steal it and teach it to people.

JACK CANFIELD: You can’t steal it because I am giving it to you.

BILL HARRIS: Okay, all right. Well, we are getting pretty close to the end of our time and I was hoping that perhaps you could, since this is what you are best known for, maybe you could end by telling a couple of your more favorite Chicken Soup for the Soul stories.

JACK CANFIELD: Oh sure, I will share two stories with you. One about the power of love and the other about the power of believing you can do anything.

One of my favorite stories of all time was in the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book and it was called “Puppies for Sale.” It is about a little boy walking through a mall and he sees a sign on a retail store, not a pet store, and it says “Puppies for Sale.” So, he goes inside and asks the owner if he can see the puppies and he asked him how much they are. He says, “Well, I have about six of them and I am selling them from anywhere from 25 to 50 bucks, depending on the dog.” The little boy said “Oh good, can I see them?” So, he said sure and he whistled and out from the back of the store came this dog named Lady with five little tiny balls of fur behind her. The little boy noticed that one of the puppies was limping and he said “What is wrong with that puppy?” He said “Well, that puppy when he was born, we had him examined and his hip socket is malformed and he is never going to be able to run, jump and play like the other puppies.” The little boy said, “That’s the one I want. How much?” He said, “You really do not want that dog.” He said, “No, I really do. How much?” And he said, “Well, if you really want him, I will give him to you free.” He said, “No sir, that dog is worth every bit as much as the other puppies and I will pay full price.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out $1.87. ”I will give you $1.87 down and I will give you 50 cents a week until I have him paid for.” The owner says “Son, you are not listening. That puppy will never be able to run and jump and play with you like the other puppies.” At that, the little boy reached down and he pulled up his left pant leg all the way up to his knee to reveal a very badly twisted left leg with a big metal brace on it. He looked the owner in the eye and he said “Well, you see mister, I don’t run so well myself and the little puppy is going to need someone who understands.”

Now that story, which I just shared with you, I want to share a little wrap around with that. A woman came up to me at a conference about two months ago and said she was a homeless woman living on the street. She was about to commit suicide. She had already picked out the place on the railroad tracks where she was going to kill herself. She was pregnant and she was
described by the locals as mentally ill. She was eating out of the dumpster behind the McDonald’s and she walked by a library the day before she was going to kill herself and she said “you know, if there was a solution to my problem, it might be in a book .” She went into the library and they were just putting out a table of inspirational books and there was one called Chicken Soup for the Soul. She said “I picked it up and I went over to a table and I started leafing through it and I found ‘Puppies for Sale’ and I started to read it. And she said, “When I finished that story, I broke into tears and I realized that puppy was broken, but it didn’t mean he was not valuable.” She said “I realized I am like that puppy. Just because I am broken, does not mean I am not a valuable person.” She said from that day forward, she decided not to kill herself. She went and got some help. She got off welfare. She now has a house.

She actually brings other homeless people into that house and works with them. She is now a professional speaker and she has been on television. So, the healing power of a story is very amazing.

BILL HARRIS: Yeah, that’s a great story. It is amazing that you can tell some of these stories without breaking up yourself.

JACK CANFIELD: Well, I used to not be able to tell that story without crying.

BILL HARRIS: You know, I have several stories that I tell and a couple of them are ones that I heard from you and I get choked up telling some of them.

JACK CANFIELD: Well I will share one more with you. It is about a guy named Roger Crawford, who literally was born with what I like to call a bummer of a birthmark. I always precede it with this very funny cartoon where there is this deer with a bull’s eye right in the middle of his chest and the other deer says “bummer of a birthmark, Hal.”

Anyway, Roger Crawford was born with one finger on his right hand, a finger and a thumb on his left hand and his left leg had to be amputated from the knee down when he was 11. His parents believe like you and I believe that anything is possible if you believe it. So, they said to Roger, “Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something. What is the something that you want to do?” He said “Well, I want to play football.” So, his parents got down and they trained him how to play football. He was not going to be the quarterback, but he could definitely tackle and block, so his dad who had played football, taught him all that. He went out for the team and they eventually had to sue the school system to even let him try out. He was so good he made first string defensive end and his goal was that one day he would intercept a pass and run for a touchdown.

He practiced after school every day on how to do that. He got good at it, but he never had the opportunity present itself in a game until the next to the last game he ever played, which the quarterback faded back, threw the ball into the flat a little too short and Roger intercepted it and
started running toward the goal. He got six yards from his goal when someone grabbed his left leg. Roger said “I pulled, he pulled and my left leg came off because it was a prosthetic device.” He hopped on one foot the final six yards over to the goal. He said “better than the six points
was the look on the guy’s face holding my prosthetic leg.”

The point being that it doesn’t matter what scenario you have as a current reality. Everyone is saying, “Well you know, I am poor, I am black, or I am born in the south and I am a woman and they are sexist down here,” whatever it might be, the reality is if Roger Crawford can learn to play football and go on with one finger and learn to become a tennis champion by duct taping the racquet to his arm and eventually, he was able with a new graphite racquet, to stick one finger in the groove right at the head of the racquet and wedge it back with his other hand. He went on to become captain of his high school tennis team and captain of his college team, winning a full scholarship to Loyola Marymount and winning the NCAA championship doubles tournament that year when he was a senior.

Anybody can do anything. I always say, you hear a story like that and you go “what’s my excuse?” Give it up. You can give me any excuse, blind, quadriplegic and I can give you a story of someone with a similar condition who has gone on and created an incredibly impactful and fulfilling life.

If somebody else can do it, it must be doable!

So, we always want to remember to be inspired by people who have gone for it and keep ourselves motivated.

BILL HARRIS: That is another great story. It reminds me of my attorney, Leonard DuBoff, who is blind and not only is he blind, he has a prosthetic right hand and his other hand has two fingers and a thumb. Leonard was in chemistry lab in college and somebody made a mistake and there was an explosion and he lost his sight and all of this sort of stuff. Now, he is one of the top intellectual property attorneys in the world and he has had clients, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and other really big name clients and his books he has written about intellectual property law are used in most law schools and you would never think that this
guy had any kind of a handicap at all. In fact, he loves to tell blind jokes.

He is a really remarkable guy, and he has every excuse about being on disability of some kind and doing nothing, but he lives in a house in the richest part of Portland and most of his neighbors are professional basketball players.

Helena Nyman: I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did! Jack and Bill are right:

I believe that anything is possible if you believe it!

What is the something that you want to do?

I would love to hear from you! If you have a dream that you would like to share with me, please e-mail it to: nyman@consultant.com! (Thank you!)

Interview Bill Harris and Jack Canfield (Part 2)

BILL HARRIS: You know, one of the things that I have noticed and I know you have noticed this too is that people will go to a seminar or training and they will leave with “seminar high” and they have the best of intentions then for going out and creating whatever it is that they want, but then within a short period of time, a week or so, their old habit of focusing on what they don’t want most of the time reasserts itself and that whole intention that they had kind of goes away and it seems to me that a good seminar is one in which the seminar leader manages to get the people that are at the seminar to focus on what they want, but a great seminar is one that manages to get people to continue to focus on what they want after they leave and I think that is one of the things about your work that makes it stand head and shoulders higher than a lot of other people, is because I think you are able to do that. Can you give some explanation of how you try to make this more permanent?

JACK CANFIELD: Sure, I think one of the things that we do that’s unusual is that we provide people with a mastermind group, or a set of what we call accountability partners so that as you leave the seminar, it is kind of like everyone makes New Year’s resolutions to exercise.

It’s much easier to keep them if you sign up for a gym and you have a partner you are going to go with and a coach you are going to meet when you get there, because then you have people saying “come on, lets go, lets get in our suit, lets do 50 "pushups”, whatever and you know on our own, we would tend to fall away from that.

We teach people how to create and maintain a support system that keeps them focused on their goals.

We also teach them a set of habits that we expect them to do for a minimum of 40 days, because research shows if you
keep something going for 40 days, you are more than likely to keep it going and then we also encourage them to keep it going for a whole quarter to three months if they really want to be sure, so what happens is, things like the mirror exercise, where every night at the end of the day before they go to bed, they look in the mirror and out loud they talk to themselves and appreciate themselves for everything they did that day.

What that does over a 40- day period, is it creates a habit of self-affirmation, self-validation, focusing on what you did do rather than what you didn’t do, so it creates some new mental habits.

Everyone leaves with a set of affirmations, which they put on 3 x 5 cards or put on their screen saver that they have to read every day. We ask them to do that for an entire year, then once a week they are talking to their mastermind group. I recommend that people hire a coach and study with the best!

One of my friends said that "training without coaching is entertainment", and I think there is a certain truth in that because a lot of people can relate to going and getting that training high you talked about and then a month later it was like they were never there.

Once we get the breakthrough, we need to sustain it, so it is like teaching a kid. You don’t expect them with one intervention to develop a new habit, like keeping their elbows off the table or chewing with their mouth closed, or going to bed on time, or studying with the radio off, but if you reinforce that over and over and over for days and
months, eventually they internalize it and it becomes a habit, and what I am looking to do is create what I call habits
of success and disciplines of success that become second nature.

When you have that and have developed four a year, at the end of 10 years, you have 40 new success habits and you are home free.

Bill Harris: I know that one of your mentors was W. Clement Stone, who co-wrote a book with Napoleon Hill 'Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude' and was a multi, multi, multi millionaire. Was he a billionaire?

JACK CANFIELD: Well, when I knew him, he was worth $600 million and that was in his 60s, so if you were to amortize that out today as dollars, he was a billionaire, yes.

BILL HARRIS: So, what was it like being around W. Clement Stone?

JACK CANFIELD: It was quite exciting. He was always positive, I mean to a fault. You just began to question was he normal. But he wasn’t and that was his strength. I mean, he literally believed the world was plotting to do him good. We used to call him an inverse paranoid. Literally. I mean, I think he is the guy who coined the phrase, I have been told this and I believe it, “If life hands you a lemon squeeze it and make lemonade”, which was kind of a more common way of Napoleon Hill’s statement, which was “inside of every negative event is the seed of an equal or greater benefit” and he would always believe that. I mean people came in to rip him off and they would be so...he had a foundation when I worked for him where he gave away a lot of money and some people just came to see if they could scam him for the money and by the time they left, they were so impressed with the idea that he really believed that he thought they could do something legitimate that the would go out and do it and he was a character. He was a genius trainer.

He trained sales people not by words, but by actions, by taking them out an modeling for them and then he would say, “Okay, what did you see me do?” They would tell him and he would say that they missed three things and here is what they are. "Next time we go in, just watch for those three things", and he would take the person back, have another cup
of coffee and ask "Did you see those three things?"

They would say yes, so they would be walking into the next one, and just inside the door, he would say:" This one is
yours!"

The guy would freak, but he would do it and probably miss three things.They would go out for coffee , and he would say: "What did you miss?" If they knew, great, if they did not, he would tell them and then he would go and do those three things perfectly for them again. By the end of the day he had a perfect salesman who was confident and knew what to do.

Bill Harris: Anything else you would like to share with us about him?

JACK CANFIELD: You would see him and you would ask: " How are you doing? TERRIFIC!! The only answer that was appropriate was terrific and at first, it felt phoney to me, but after a while, if you say it long enough, things really are terrific, so you have to go through that stage almost of not believing a technique will work until it does and then all of a sudden you go, wow that is not faking it. If you make it, that really works.

BILL HARRIS: Well, I actually have a lot of people who when I talk to them about focusing on what you want, they will write me and say, “I tried this focusing on what I want, but I feel like such a phoney because while I am sitting there thinking about what I want to be, I know that I am a loser and that I am this, and I am that,” and then I get a chance for the second time to explain the principle to them, taking into account mis-perception. I cover every objection they can think of and they pretty much don’t have any choice but to start focusing on what they want.

JACK CANFIELD: Right, well you know one of the things that one of my mentors once said is that we give way too much credence to reality. Reality is simply something we created and as long as you realize you are a creator and we are all made in the image of the creator, if you believe any of the great religious texts in the world, then what happens is, the reality we are currently living with is simply one we created, so we get to either focus on that and have more of it, or focus on the reality we want and create that.

Most people think that statistics say that 80% of marriages end in divorce, therefore I have an 8 in 10 chance. So, that is what they start to believe and sure enough, they create it, as opposed to saying well that is just a statistic of what got created in the past.

I am different, we know more, etc... I am going to create it my way and that is what you do every day, that is what I do every day and it is what all of us that are teaching this stuff do. It is why we are the teachers, because we live it.

BILL HARRIS: It is really a challenge for people when they are going in the direction where they are focusing a lot on what they don’t want and getting it, to believe they are actually doing that and part of that is that they are really unconscious about what they are doing inside that is creating the reality. A lot of what I do is I try to show them that unconscious process so that they can go “oh.”

So they start looking inside their own head, and noticing what they are doing and the effect that it has. You know,
most people know intellectually that people that have been in personal growth, they know that beliefs manifest
themselves in reality. But until someone actually looks inside their own head and watches a belief create a certain
reality, they don’t really know it on an experiential level.

It is just information, and I see people all the time who nod and smile as someone like you or someone like me, or some of the other people we know express certain basic principles. Then, the group takes a break and I see them violating them two minutes after they were nodding their head about them.

JACK CANFIELD: Well, you and I know that information is not enough to change behavior. It takes an experience. When the body and the mind experience something better, it naturally goes toward that.

Give people seven days of experiencing what it is like to live in a constantly positive, loving, self-affirming, responsibility-taking, goal-seeking, reinforcing environment and as people do that, it internalizes. If we give them the tools to practice, they continue it. I think the other thing that I would say why I love meditation so much, and for years I practiced a form called Vipassana, which is a Buddhist technique of watching not just your thoughts, but any sensation.

Wherever your awareness goes, you watch your thoughts for 10 days in a row on a retreat and you become pretty
clear that most of it sucks. It is really negative, so you begin to become conscious and intentional about it.

Most of us are so out of awareness, we are not even aware we are thinking. So, the concept of meditation day after day, after day and learning to be in the witness position and the observer and then beginning to realize, wait a second, just because a thought comes through, I do not have to get on that boat and go down that river. I can let it go by and I can now choose to think a more conscious thought.

Our feelings re created by our thoughts. So, we are not feeling well, we are not getting what we want and the only question to ask is, “what thought would make me feel better? What thought would take me closer to my goal?”

BILL HARRIS: Yeah, when you pay attention to what is going on in your head, you suddenly begin to make the connections between what is going on in your head and what is being created in reality, and that is big. There are 60 or so success principles that you have in your book 'The Success Principles'.

JACK CANFIELD: My first chapter is on responsibility. Take 100% responsibility for your life and you are accurate, because I used to teach this, that you can’t take responsibility for that which you are not aware of.

In other words, if I am standing on your foot and I am not aware of it, and at some level, I am not going to change my behavior, but as soon as you say “hey, you are standing on my foot,” and I become aware of it, now I have a choice.

I didn’t have a choice before. Now I have a choice, either keep standing there or get off.

So, people have all kinds of self-destructive behaviors. They are not even aware that their thoughts are creating it. They are not aware that certain ways they interact with people make people pull away from them. They are not aware that the way they interact with money makes them have less of it instead of more of it.

So every area where you can increase your awareness, you increase choice. That is why I love to read books. I have learned a lot about finances and leadership, things I wasn’t aware of until I read them and then when I reflected on them and applied them to my own life, it made a huge difference.

BILL HARRIS: So, would you say then that this taking total responsibility for what you create is the most fundamental principle?

JACK CANFIELD: Well, you know, I put it in my book first because I think it is, but I would go back and I would have to concede to what you just said, that you have to be aware. If you are not aware you are responsible, then you cannot take responsibility. The first thing is that you have to become aware of these principles.

There are universal laws and universal principles that have been codified in religion and have been codified in psychology, N.L.P., you know all the different practices that exist in he world and if you study them and learn them and then you act in accordance with them, I mean just for example, if you save 10% of every dollar you make or are given, you cannot help but end up wealthy, even if you only make $25,000 a year, you will be a millionaire by the time you are 65 if you invested in any even conservative stock market portfolio, or real estate, or whatever. So, that’s
something I never learned until I was in my 40’s. No one taught it to me.

BILL HARRIS: Yeah, the miracle of compounding.

JACK CANFIELD: Exactly. So, there are laws like that, like you know the law of reciprocity, you know, what you give out, you get back. There is a law called probability. The more things you try, the more likely one of them will work. The more books you read, the more likely one of them will change your life. The more of these kind of calls you listen to, the more likely you will hear something that will improve your relationship.

The idea of abundant research, abundant exposure to new ideas increases the probability that something will happen that’s good. So, I mean, there are all of these universal laws that if you know them, and you are aware of them then you can utilize them. If you are not aware of them, then you know, you get the negative benefit if you will. They still work, they just work against you because you are focusing on the negative and so on and so forth.

BILL HARRIS: You know, I would like your thoughts on something else that just occurred to me too. One of the things that happens quite often when you first give people a glimpse of how they are creating their reality, particularly if they are creating something that is unpleasant for them and doing it, you know, chronically, they feel ashamed of themselves. They feel like they are stupid for having done this, or even they go into denial about it because they don’t want to admit that they have been creating it. Somehow, they take the fact that they are creating something negative to be a commentary about who they are as a person, rather than just that they had the wrong strategy.

JACK CANFIELD: Well, when we were growing up, we all learned unfortunately, I think, that when you got caught
doing something wrong you got punished, and it meant you were a bad person, go to your room, you are grounded for a week, whatever.

So, we learn to avoid getting caught and, unfortunately, we have applied that to self-awareness, you know catching ourselves having self-destructive behavior. I used to do parenting workshops and I used to have to always say in the beginning: “Look, I am going to teach you lots of ways that parents unconsciously destroy the self-esteem of their children, and I am going to teach you lots of ways to stop it, and I am going to teach you ways to consciously enhance the self-esteem of your child.”

You have a choice: You can either feel bad that you have been doing this stuff, or you can celebrate that you are now realizing that you don’t have to do it any more.

So, I teach people to celebrate the new awareness and let’s start creating it the way you want it. Don’t beat yourself up for how you used to do it, because I believe in what one of my great teachers said once:“You are always doing the best you can with the awareness, skills and resources you have and you always did.”

Literally, if you could have done better, you would have, but you were missing some awareness. You were missing some skill. You were missing some resource, but now you have a new awareness, you have a new skill, you have a new resource, so now you can do better!

People almost always choose to do better when they can.

So, we never blame people for the past, we simply say “you were doing the best you could with the awareness, skills, and resources that you had. Now you have new resources, let’s do better.”

Helena Nyman: Are you doing the best you can?

To read the end of this interview, come back next week!

The Masters of 'the Secret'

Interview between Bill Harris and Jack Canfield (Part 1)

Note from Helena Nyman, Success Coach: This Blog represents only the part of the Interview that is relevant to the Secret!

BILL HARRIS: Hello. This is Bill Harris, and I want to welcome you to the Masters of the Secret Series. Tonight’s guest is my good friend Jack Canfield. In addition to being one of the stars of the hit DVD movie, 'The Secret'...Jack is the originator and co-creator of the New York Times #1 best-selling book series Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has sold over 100 million copies in 39 languages, the last I heard, but Jack is certainly a lot more than that. He is one of the top self-esteem and success trainers in the world. His new book, The Success Principles, is a runaway best-seller. He has been on Oprah and Fox & Friends, and CNN and countless other
television shows and if we gave his whole bio we wouldn’t have time to have a conversation. So, Jack, welcome...I am really happy that you are here today.

JACK CANFIELD: It is always fun to be with you Bill.

BILL HARRIS: I don’t want to embarrass you by this, but there is something so human and warm about you and so approachable, that it’s almost hard for people to believe that you have had this mega success that you have had. How have you managed to maintain so much humanness in the face of all this success?

JACK CANFIELD: Well, I always say that success or money amplifies who you already are, so if you are someone who is an idiot and you make a lot of money, you can be a really big idiot, but what happened for me was that I spent a lot of time before I was successful working on myself, taking lots of seminars. I think, one year, I think I went to 38 weekend workshops from Gestalt therapy to Transactional Analysis, meditation, yoga, Tai-Chi, you name it and literally did a lot of clearing out of as much of my ego and as much of my self-defeating behaviors, etc., that I could.
So, by the time I was successful, I don’t feel like I am any different now than I was when I became successful, other than I have a lot more money and a lot more influence.

BILL HARRIS: You know, you have hit on of course, one of the success principles you teach, which is to find other people that have already done what you have done and to model what they have done and that is something that I have always done and it was kind of a revelation to me. I think it was maybe when I was 35 or something where I finally realized that most people don’t do that. It just seemed like common sense to me. When I wanted to become a pilot I went and I found the best flying instructor I could find and tried to figure out the best way to learn to become a pilot. When I wanted to become a musician, I did the same thing. When I wanted to learn how to do marketing, which has been one of the reasons that Centerpointe has been so successful, I found the best marketers and I learned what they had done. Why do you think most people don’t do this? They just don’t know?

JACK CANFIELD: I think there are several things going on.

Number one, I think they do not feel like they deserve it.

Number two, they probably feel like, “Why would the best person in the world talk to me?”

And what I found is that most of the best people in the world are great teachers and they are really magnanimous. There are a few who aren’t and you are going to get rejections, no question, but if it only takes 10 questions to get one yes, why not ask and Mark and I wrote a book called The Aladdin Factor: How To Get Everything You Ask For and basically we found that there are some world-class askers out there and again, we went and interviewed over 50 of them from Mother Teresa, on down to a guy who always buys everything wholesale and never pays retail.

We said, “How do you do it?”

As a result, we began looking at why don’t people ask and one of the things we came up with is fear of rejection, a sense that you are not worthy and a feeling that you do not deserve to have it.

BILL HARRIS: So, I am assuming that in your self-esteem seminars that you do, you deal with this.

JACK CANFIELD: Yes, we deal with the idea that you deserve to have anything that the universe has to offer, as long as you don’t hurt other people in the process of getting it. I believe it is an abundant universe. I believe there is enough for everybody. I think it needs to be distributed more equally and the reason people hoard, is that they do not think there is enough.

So, it goes back to creating the illusion there is not enough, but the fact is we have plenty of everything that is really important.

The most important things, you know are not things. It is love, the ability to express your creativity, the opportunity to both give and receive love, to feel confident, to make a difference in the world and to give and receive hugs, and all that.

That does not cost any money, but there are also plenty of material things to go around as well.

BILL HARRIS: Well, you know, my view is that the reason that someone would feel undeserving is because in some way they have been traumatized. Being told those things and taught those things and being treated in a way as if you didn’t deserve the best. When people are traumatized, they develop a generalization about the world that it is a dangerous place, or at least a potentially dangerous place and that they have to watch out for that danger in order to avoid it and as you know, when you focus on what you don’t want, what you want to avoid, your brain doesn’t know that you want to avoid it. It just knows that you are focusing on it and then it figures out a way for you to get it.

JACK CANFIELD: Absolutely.

BILL HARRIS: So, what exactly do you do in the self esteem seminar to move people to a place where they do feel deserving? You can’t just tell them “you are deserving” and hope they believe you.

JACK CANFIELD: There are a number of things you can do. You can imagine having the ideal parents, we call that resourcing. You know yourself because the brain does not know the difference between a real event and an imagined event, therefore you can actually put new memories in the brain and if you will, crowd out the old negative ones.

BILL HARRIS: I have taken a few quotes out of some letters people have sent me and I am talking about kind of what I see in each of these people that is causing them to write me about how miserable their life is and in every case, it’s that they are focusing on what they do not want,
pretty much automatically on autopilot, and not focusing on what they want, and in some cases, they even claim to not know what they want.

I continually tell people that I think the key to everything is what you focus your mind on, and most people don’t understand how powerful their mind is and that they are already manifesting exactly what they are focusing on.

JACK CANFIELD: Yeah, as I always say to my students, if you want to know what you are thinking, look at what you are creating around you and what you thought in the past is creating your current reality, and if you want your future to be different, you have to create different thoughts, because what you are currently doing will only produce what you are currently getting and that’s what most people don’t realize.

They keep re-creating the same reality over and over and they think they are stuck, but the fact is they are sticking themselves by maintaining the same habits of thought and imagery, and behavior and it’s not easy to change without some kind of external support, because we are basically habit-driven people and we get so habitual we are in a trance and it takes a coach, a book, a program or a training to break people out of that, to kind of almost shake them awake and then give them the tools, take them to deeper levels of consciousness where they can think a higher level thought and expose themselves to the deeper creativity that already exists inside of them, so that they can create a better life with less effort.

Interested in hearing more about Jack Canfield's Secrets?

Read Part 2 next week!

What Chicago Tribune says...

Since its April release, "The Secret" has sold more than half a million DVDs and more than 100,000 online views. But producers estimate millions have seen the movie. Compare that to Hollywood blockbusters, and it seems paltry. But in the viral world, and in the budding genre of spiritual cinema, Rainone views it as a success -- and a phenomenon he still considers in its infancy.

That buzz is beginning to spread from niche groups and into the mainstream. CNN's Larry King devoted two episodes to the film in November, and "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" featured it last month. And while the producers have no plans for widescreen cinema release, spontaneous screenings are cropping up around the country -- from intimate dinner parties to large gatherings at churches and community centers. (The producers allow such mass screenings under two conditions: that the film is shown in its entirety and at no charge.)

So just what is this big secret stirring so much commotion?

Rhonda Byrne, as Australian filmmaker whose story begins the movie, says its principles are tucked in the words of the greatest thinkers, writers and leaders throughout time -- Plato, Albert Einstein and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., among them.

It's the law of attraction. The power of positive thinking.

Like a magnet, the film says, the thoughts and images held in one's mind determine what is attracted to them and, ultimately, the quality of life they live. Go anxiously through the day with a negative loop of thoughts in your mind, anticipating bad things will happen, and they will. Approach that same day with positive thoughts, anticipating good things, and they'll be drawn to you.

Keeping the faith

It's a philosophy the 25 teachers in the film say they have seen applied successfully to all aspects of life -- finances, career, health and relationships.

"Deep down, every single person knows this. Every person knows, deep down, life is not meant to be hard," says Byrne, who came upon "the secret" after the string of misfortune she describes in the opening. In September 2004, she began reading a century-old book called "The Science of Getting Rich" and continued her studies from there.

In fact, she says she used the secret to make "The Secret." After a string of failed projects, her accountant reported her company was weeks from going broke. But Byrne was determined to launch the film project. Not knowing how she would cobble the resources for what would be a $3 million endeavor, she says she and her crew focused daily on the end result and held an unwavering faith the film would be made.

Byrne says the resources drew to her -- the finances, the participants, even the distribution method -- and the film was completed by January 2006.

It might sound like hocus-pocus to some, says Mike Dooley, one of the film's speakers.

"But these principles, these laws of the universe -- some would call it quantum physics -- are as predictable as gravity," says Dooley, an author and international speaker who owns an inspirational Web site and retail business, Totally Unique Thoughts (www.tut.com).

"There's no society on Earth that doesn't talk about the benefits of visualization and positive thinking," he says.

It's a powerful, if controversial concept, considering we have tens of thousands of thoughts each day, says author Hale Dwoskin. Those thoughts, he says, literally create our daily existence.

"Most people are living life as victims -- victims to life, victims to their inner landscape," says Dwoskin, who has taught his Sedona Method for 30 years. (www.Sedona.com). "But you don't have to be a victim. "

Thinking negative thoughts about mounting debt or a dead-end job, these teachers say, will only ensure more debt and more years of unfulfilling work. The antidote is to visualize what it would look, feel and be like to have checks come in the mail or to have your dream job -- and to believe with absolute faith these things are headed your way.

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune