The Power of the Right Questions

As the dawn of a new year approaches, check out this great article by Noah St. John on the power of afformations. St. John tells us how achieving our goals starts with asking the right questions.

Here's the article... enjoy!

"Right now, many of us are questioning ourselves: 'Am I doing the right thing? What happened to my 401K? Will I have any money left by next year?'

Me too. And about a billion other people.

These questions are perfectly natural in times like this. The good news and bad news about questions is that they contain assumptions, and not all of our assumptions are even close to being true (especially now).

That's why the wrong questions can have a disempowering effect on us, when what we really need is to be empowered.

What if you could ask an empowering question instead?

'Why do I have so much?'

Try it. Ask yourself: 'Why do I have so much?'

Do you know what your brain is doing right now? Searching for a positive answer to that question!

You create your life in two ways: by the statements you say to yourself and others, and by the questions you ask yourself and others. That's why I named it The Afformations Method. Here are the 4 steps to create empowering Afformations that change your life:

Step 1: Ask yourself what you want.

You can use a goal you've previously written down, or start from scratch. You decide.

Let's use Brandon from Utah as an example. Brandon was an insurance salesman who'd spent more than $30,000 on every "how to succeed" program out there, but was still struggling financially. For his goal, he wrote: "I want to be all I can be in life."

Now, the breakthrough step...

Step 2: Form a question that assumes that what you want is already true.

Your life is a reflection of the subconscious assumptions you make, which are often formed by disempowering questions. That's why Step 2 of The Afformations Method is to immediately change your communication with the world inside yourself, by asking empowering (rather than disempowering) questions.

For this step, Brandon began afforming: 'Why am I allowed to be, do, and have all that I really want in life?'

Step 3: Give yourself to the question.

The point of Afformations is not to find "the answer", but to ask better questions. That's because, when you ask better questions, your mind automatically begins to focus on what you have instead of what you lack.

Once Brandon began to afform what he wanted, his mind automatically began to search for better answers. Because of this change of focus, he started thinking about his life differently. He started to see opportunity, where before he'd only seen obstacles.

Which brings us to Step 4 of The Afformations Method -- the one you must do to get optimum results...

Step 4: Take new actions based on your new assumptions about life.

Even though Brandon had spent thousands of dollars on "how to succeed" programs, he subconsciously assumed they wouldn't work for him. So they didn't.

After hearing about Afformations, he realized that this was the very thing keeping him from what he really wanted. So he began to take new actions based on his new Afformations.

He began calling more people. He followed up with more confidence. By focusing on what he had instead of what he lacked, positive results naturally followed.

Once Brandon followed the four steps of The Afformations Method, his sales tripled in 30 days. In less than nine months, his income increased 560 percent and he was named Agent of the Year.

When you use Afformations, you form empowering questions that immediately change your subconscious assumptions about life and your relationship to it, which naturally changes your results.

Omar, a car salesman, had been selling only one or two cars per month and making less than $400 a month in commissions. Then he heard about Afformations and started afforming, 'Why am I so successful at selling cars?' In the next 2 days, Omar sold four new cars, three used ones, and earned more than $1,800 in commissions in just 48 hours.

Using Afformations, you can take conscious control of your subconscious assumptions, stop asking disempowering questions and start asking empowering ones. No matter what's going on in the economy, now you can change the questions, change your results, and change your life."

* * *

Noah St. John, Ph.D. is the author of The Secret Code of Success: 7 Hidden Steps to More Wealth and Happiness (HarperCollins) and inventor of The Afformations Method.

The Great Lesson teaser video

Check out this teaser video for The Great Lesson movie. It features master teachers Bruce Lipton and Sean Brawley. More videos coming soon:

The Mexican Fisherman

Check out the inspiring story of The Mexican Fisherman:



The American investment banker was at the pier of a
small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with
just one fisherman docked.

Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna.
The American complimented the Mexican on the quality
of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, "Only a little while."

The American then asked, "Why didn't you stay out longer
and catch more fish?"

The Mexican said, "With this I have more than enough to support my family's needs."

The American then asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life."

The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing; and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat: With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the
processor; eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles and eventually New York where you will run your ever-expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But, how long will this all take?"

To which the American replied, "15 to 20 years."

"But what then?" asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said that's the best part. "When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions."

"Millions?...Then what?"

The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."

Happy Holidays from The Great Lesson movie!

Living Every Day Like Its Your Last

Enjoy these inspiring words from Paulo Coelho's novel Veronica Decides to Die

"I feel like starting to live again, Eduard. I feel like making the mistakes I always wanted to make, but never had the courage to, facing up to the feelings of panic that might well come back, but whose presence will merely weary me, since I know I am not going to die or faint because of them. I can make new friends and teach them how to be crazy too in order to be wise. I will tell them not to follow the manual of good behavior but to discover their own lives, desires, adventures, and to LIVE. I will quote from Ecclesiastes to the Catholics, from the Koran to the Muslims, from the Torah to the Jews, from Aristotle to the atheists. I can use my experience to give lectures about men and women who knew the truth about this existence of ours and whose writings can be summed up in one word: LIVE. If you live, God will live with you. If you refuse to run his risks, he will retreat to that distant heaven and be merely a subject for philosophical speculation. Everyone knows this, but no one takes the first step, perhaps for fear of being called insane. At least, we haven't got that fear, Eduard. We've already been inmates of Villete."

Mindful Adventure

Check out this inspiring article on "mindful adventure" by adventure consultant and yoga teacher Matt Walker.

Walker writes about everyday adventures and how we don't have to travel to the edge of the earth to discover new adventures. They are available to us right here, right now: "To live life to the fullest, bring a sense of adventure into every moment. It's easy to see some endeavors as adventurous: climbing a mountain, mastering an arm balance, traveling the world. But adventure is about being courageous and passionate in all aspects of your life, work, and relationships."

Enjoy the Yoga Journal article!

Yoga and Climbing | Adventure with Matt Walker | Yoga Journal

The Power of Touch

This is a picture from an article called “The Rescuing Hug”. The article details the first week of life of a set of twins. Apparently,
each were in their respective incubators, and one was not expected to live. A hospital nurse fought against the hospital rules and placed the babies in one incubator. When they were placed together, the healthier of the two threw an arm over her sister. The smaller baby’s heart rate stabilized and her temperature rose to normal.

Let us not forget to embrace those whom we love.

Happy Holidays from The Great Lesson movie

An inspiring video about doing the best you can!

Utilizing The Mind

What you think about, what you focus on - has a direct effect on the reality you live. So, if you consciously utilize your mind then you can begin to create the life you want to live in a more effective manner. You're responsible for exactly where and who you are - you're not a victim of events, but rather a victim of your own perspective. How else can anyone explain how some people are able to overcome incredible life obstacles and become phenomenal people. This next video comes from James Ray who is known for his contribution to the flim, "The Secret"

I haven't posted in a bit....so I apologize....but here are a couple of things that are fairly fascinating. These tests can be found all over youtube, but I like the idea of this father and son team working on how their energy affects the real world. This beginning topic - the power of thoughts - has been a journey for me, as I have looked to document how our thoughts can affect every day life. The reality you shape is directly related to how you view and think about the world. A person can choose to act any way they want in the world and as soon as you free yourself of societal expectations and social norms you begin to become aware that you fully choose how you act and feel. But more importantly, how you act and feel have real consequences in how the world relates to you and how you attain what you want. Check out this video that shows how rice is affected by your emotions.....

This is a great article that was found in The Guardian several weeks ago. It shows how your thoughts and frame of reference manifests in your life....Can you think yourself younger?

Thinking yourself younger?

In September 1979, the psychologist Ellen Langer took a group of frail, elderly men on a week-long retreat, during which she asked them to live as if it were 20 years earlier. The men stayed in a converted monastery, which Langer furnished in a 1950s style; they listened to 1959's music (Hank Williams, Nat King Cole) and 1959 sports games on old-fashioned radios. They weren't allowed to talk about anything that happened after September 1959.

Instead, Langer organised discussions on "recent" events and "new" books, such as Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus; she screened Some Like It Hot. Participants who'd become dependent on carers were encouraged to dress, clean and serve meals as if they were younger. By week's end, Langer's dizzyingly audacious hunch had been confirmed. The men were standing straighter, walking better, and demonstrating more joint flexibility. They had stronger grips and better hearing; they scored higher in intelligence tests. (They outperformed a control group, who'd been on a parallel retreat without the time-travel aspect.) In turning back their psychological clock, it appeared, Langer had turned back their physiological one, too.

Langer's study hasn't yet revolutionised healthcare, but the film rights to Counterclockwise, her new book looking back at the research, have been bought by Jennifer Aniston, so maybe that's almost as good. (Details are scant, but I'm imagining Aaron Eckhart as the love interest, working down the hall from Prof Aniston; could Jack Nicholson refuse a cameo as a spritely senior?) Meanwhile, though the original work had its limitations, subsequent research has bolstered the notion of "social clocks", whereby our bodies conform to what we think is appropriate to our age. Women who marry much younger men live, on average, longer than those who don't, perhaps because their clock gets recalibrated. Women who give birth later in life live longer than younger mothers, too: is it because they're surrounded by younger environmental cues - their children - relative to their own age? And men who go bald young, I'm personally distressed to learn, seem more susceptible to certain diseases that can't be explained by the hormones that cause hair loss. Could it be that we early-onset baldsters come to think of ourselves as older, thereby winding our clocks forward?

This is speculative stuff, and speculation on the mind-body connection demands caution: one false move, and you're in "think happy thoughts to cure cancer!" territory. But Langer, a Harvard professor, is no kook. And the broader point - that we're depressingly susceptible to subtle environmental cues, in ways we never notice - is beyond much doubt. Researchers call it "priming": the way people tidy up more thoroughly when they can smell cleaning liquid; or the way students asked to play an investment game behave more competitively when there's a briefcase visible on a table, symbolising business, than a rucksack.

If such cues do affect our bodies as well as our behaviour, Langer warns, we must stop abdicating responsibility for our health to doctors, and stay mindful of how we're letting ourselves be defined. Who says your current energy levels are "just the way you are", or that your aches are inevitable at your age? "Asking why we can't become better even when we feel we are at our best and our healthiest," Langer writes, "is the only way we will ever know how good we can be."

oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk

The Power of Thoughts - Continued

As we delve into this topic, I am finding more and more information on how your thoughts can affect your reality. In fact, the more I learn the more conclusive I feel that what you're thinking about, what you're focusing your energy on, manifests itself in the real world. These two videos are very different. One video is about how thoughts affect the molecular structure of water. This is from an actual study by Dr. Masaru Emoto. This is a clip from the movie, "What the Bleep Do We Know!?".

This second video is from John Assaraf who is the author of the book, The Answer and he discusses on television how to begin making the changes in your life to become the person you want to be. The clue is to realize that you are in complete control of your life and your destiny - you must believe it as a core belief.

More to come...

Power of Thoughts (2)

Jerry Lynch and Chungliang Al Huang's book, Thinking Body Dancing Mind

"Perhaps one of the most convincing pieces of research to verify the power of imagery in sport was an experiment performed with two groups of basketball players who were trying to improve their free-throw percentage. One group shot one hundred free throws every day for three weeks; the other group simply visualized doing the same. The study found that the visualizing group showed significant improvement over those who actually shot the ball."

The power of our thoughts is significant. While Oprah is rich, famous and her life has been actualized - this clip with Larry King depicts how Oprah utilized the power of her thoughts to be in the film, The Color Purple. Her obsession to be in the film, her dreaming, thinking, and praying for a part and her getting a call to audition without knowing anyone producing the film portrays the power of thoughts.

The Power of Thoughts - Focus of the Week

Thoughts are very powerful - perhaps more powerful than you realize. These two videos layout the case for the power of your thoughts and how you begin with yourself if you want to change your life. The first video lays out the scientific explaination for the power of human thoughts and the studys that have been done. It is very compelling for people who don't realize just how powerful their words and thoughts are. Our thoughts can affect matter.

The second video is comprised of various interviews of the actor, Will Smith. In these videos you can see Will's passion for living out his thoughts and ideals. He has a deep desire to be a better person and to change the lives of others. It is the passion he has and his resistance to negative thinking that is so powerful.

Welcome

If you ever knew how powerful you are….your life would change in a moment. It is time to claim your power with the voices and stories we’ve brought you in the film, “The Great Lesson”. We’ve assembled cutting edge interviews with leaders across disciplines who utilize ancient wisdom from the East in business, sports, self-healing, science, psychology and beyond. Our documentary lays the foundation to take your life in a new direction, by unifying your mind and body to maximize your potential.

We all know people who’ve actualized their lives. Success appears to come easy to them. However, they are operating on a different plane than the rest of us. How do you develop your full potential while dealing with the daily grind? The car breaks down, the kids are acting out, bills are due and you hate your job. How do you turn your life around when you’re constantly facing the day to day barrage of life? There are basic principles that go back centuries that are the keys to unlocking your full potential. By understanding these keys you can begin to transform your life in a meaningful way. “The Great Lesson” film along with our workbook will give you the tools to transform your life.

Drew Scott Pearlman and Jamison Jacobs are currently developing the film, “The Great Lesson” which will be completed by the end of the year. Please sign up for updates on our film.