Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (22 page)

I
N MY EXPERIENCE, AFTER
many years of studying and teaching goal-setting techniques to eager sales and marketing people, as well as practicing the three simple steps, it seems to me that there are three levels of emotion that attract success.

The first level is
desire
. Desiring something creates a powerful energy that can magnetically attract better things into our life. Desire, however, is often vague. We may desire a better life or a different job without being sure what that would look like specifically. I often hear people state that they want more money or a nicer house. Because of the lack of specifications, we might not get exactly what we deserve and are capable of, but we’ll get a better set of experiences. When those arrive, we feel a sense of relief that life is finally looking up.

Then there is
belief
. The more we understand something, the more we start to believe in it. Many goal-setting techniques recommend baby-step goals, with the thought that as we achieve each one, we build confidence in ourselves and our goals, which leads to greater belief. I often see this play out in the workplace. When people get promoted, it is not normally a surprise to
them. They believed it was coming because they became so familiar with the role and their suitability for it over time and with their proximity to it. In most cases, however, the person who was promoted was just as capable of doing that job the day they joined the company. They just did not believe it. As belief grows, we get excited and our stomach twitters with anticipation. Belief brings wonderful new experiences into our lives, and when they arrive we feel like celebrating.

Finally, there is
a sense of knowing
. This is an exponentially higher emotional energy level that comes when we are familiar with all the specifications, feelings, and senses of the object of desire. There is no excitement because there is no doubt about its attainment. The removal of doubt comes about because we have clarity in the detail of what it is we want. This level of emotion can be felt in the many things we take for granted in our lives. For instance, I am so familiar with making crème brûlée from a certain recipe that I have a complete sense of knowing it will always turn out great, so the compliments I get are expected.
Simple
. When those creations turn up in our life, we simply acknowledge them with a quiet sense of gratitude.

Step Three is about taking something we have never had or done, something we have little familiarity with but would create in our lives if there were no impediments to its attainment whatsoever, and creating a sense of knowing about its attainment. That is magic. That is the three simple steps in action.

Traditionally taught goal-setting techniques can be effective at raising our levels of emotion from desire to belief. That will definitely help you pull yourself out of the quicksand and improve your quality of life. I do not believe that it is sufficient for achieving the American dream. You need to get nearer to the state of knowing, and the process of setting intentions rather than goals achieves that.

A goal is something we do not have that we aim to get. Our understanding is that the desired object or experience is separate from us. Traditional goal-setting techniques show us how to creep toward the object in baby-step goals, each step meant to build up our confidence until desire turns into belief.

An intention is a goal but with all doubt about its attainment removed
. Baby steps are not needed because there is no doubt about getting what we desire. Instead of creeping toward it, we can simply sit back and let it come running to us. The main difference, therefore, between intentions and goals is direction of effort. With goals, we push energy toward the object. With intentions, we pull or attract the object to us.

This may seem like a subtle shift in mentality, but it is a critical one. Small changes in how we think make huge differences in outcome. Change a little, change a lot. So, as we shift our conceptual understanding from journeying toward a desired object to attracting it to us, we slip naturally into an understanding of the law of attraction.

Depending on their point of view, most family and friend observers of our move to America placed the credit (or blame) on me. They were able to see the connection between my job, company, and MBA. They may have heard the story of how I went to Minnesota and refused to fall off the winding staircase. None of them, however, have the insider knowledge to connect the dots back to Lynda’s childhood intentions.

When I met Lynda, she had been dreaming about living in America for more than ten years. Enchanted by the space program and with a girlhood crush on Bobby Kennedy, her room was a shrine to all things American. She was already an avid New England Patriots fan at a time when no one in the United Kingdom knew the NFL existed. All her favorite television shows had freely rewired her mentality such that her speech was peppered with Americanisms.

She had already visited America twice on vacation and talked excitedly to me all the time about the positive things she found in the people and the country. After we were married and finally able to afford vacations, we went to America and toured both the East and West Coasts. She absolutely loved America, and the more she experienced it, the more she believed she would live there. It had long since ceased to be a goal she aimed for and had become something she intended wholeheartedly. To Lynda, it was just a matter of time before it happened, and that is why, when the attorney dismissed her dream as impossible, she simply laughed. By that point, she was in a state of knowing.

Before I met Lynda, I knew very little about America. I know this is hard for Americans to understand because, for many Americans, their own country is so vast they don’t need or desire to learn about the world beyond their borders. Current affairs are mostly presented in local and regional contexts, which can create a perception that America is the center of the world, and everyone outside must be watching. America, however, only has 5 percent of the world’s population. Europe has 7 percent, and my attention was firmly on that continent at the time.

I would have struggled to name more than a handful of states. I had no concept of America’s size. The cultural images I had let enter my mentality were based on spaghetti Westerns I watched when I was a kid, and a few 1970s sitcoms I had seen on television. I knew nothing of American history nor had I ever heard
of Thanksgiving, the Super Bowl, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I recognize in Lynda’s story of emigration what no one else can, and that is that
I was
one of life’s details in Lynda’s intention. I was the vehicle by which she got to achieve the dream, and I was delighted and honored to be so. I turned up one day on her hospital ward, pushing one of her favorite patients in a wheelchair, and another of life’s details clicked into place for her.

I had intentions of my own that were related to business and travel for which I had created equal emotional energy and was enjoying living them. I had been practicing the three simple steps for several years and enjoyed a life of travel and adventure, with a lucrative career. The biggest source of motivation for me, however, has never been money or recognition but simply to put a smile on Lynda’s face. It is a priceless thing. I have been fortunate enough to achieve it many times, and so I set the intention of relocating to America. No occasion made me feel more grateful than when I saw her grinning from ear to ear as we stepped outside the arrivals terminal at the Minneapolis airport.

Depending on your starting place, the three simple steps can change your life for the better quickly or slowly. It depends how big your goal is and how much work life has to do to put the details together. Based on my new intention to put the brakes on my career and make a fresh start in another country and in a different job that had not yet been created, I knew life would have to start afresh to put all the synchronicity needed to work it out in place. I did not know how long it would take to make it happen, but I set out my new intentions and let life fill in the details. In three years, the intention was completed.

Like many women, throughout her life, Lynda has moments when she just
knows
something will come to fruition. She does not ask how. She will see something she wants and just decide that it will be added to her experience. When the intention is achieved
and I ask her how she feels about it, she will say, “I just knew it would happen.” When asked about why she moved to America, she answers, “I always knew I’d live here.” For many years, I incorrectly called that ability
women’s intuition
because most men have long lost touch with this capacity for
knowing
. We are in awe of it.

Psychologists suggest that women’s intuition is nothing more than a heightened ability to interpret facial expressions and body language accurately, but that hardly explains how people can know without doubt about the future of a person or thing that has not yet shown up in their lives. It is not fatalism or psychic powers because we create our experiences as we go and according to our thoughts and reactions. I think it is more because history and cultural influences have rewired male and female neural pathways differently. This has caused men to lose touch with their creative power. Deep down, some women still know they are wizards. Most men today prefer to think of themselves as warriors.

Many books compare achievement to a warrior’s journey. Being male and ex-military, I have always liked that analogy. I can easily imagine a castle with my sacks of treasure lying behind its walls. All I have to do is kill the dragon or two defending the castle, bring down the walls of resistance that hide my treasure, and claim my reward. The warrior expects those sorts of challenges along his path. Because the journey involves conquest and battle, the emotion of the warrior is often
against
something. So, for every successful warrior, dozens lie facedown along the path, having not made it.

Wizards, however, are those who can transform any object at will within nature’s laws. They rarely have to journey anywhere
in order to get what is desired. They live in a state of knowing that whatever they want can be attracted or created in response to their free will. No dragons have to die. No walls must be torn down. Wizards can simply create a new bag of treasure.

The way of the wizard is more in tune with nature’s laws. While the warrior smashes his way through a castle wall to steal a baked cake from the kitchen, the wizard simply throws some ingredients together in a bowl and bakes his own cake. The latter is far easier and, so long as you have the right recipe and skills, more likely to result in fulfillment.

Another challenge with the warrior image today is that it is wrongly considered a masculine persona, one that includes hunting and fighting as skills to be revered. The analogy ignores the equally important weapons of intuition, compassion, and healing that are associated, also incorrectly, with the feminine.

Popular psychology suggests men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Certainly, we use different methods of mental processing, but at one time there was an equal balance of male–female energy in everyone. To survive, we all needed fine-tuned hunting skills to eat and powerful instincts to sense danger.

A shallow dive into anthropology provides ample evidence that men were once more praised for their powerful intuitions than for their fighting skills. In many societies, they were the source of shamanism, working intuitively with the spirit world to impact the physical experience and heal the sick.

Proof also exists that women were not the scantily clad “pot-stirrers” we see in Hollywood movies set in historic times. Semiramis from Nineveh shaped the Assyrian Empire. Boadicea, queen of the Brittonic-Iceni tribe in England, led an uprising against the better-equipped occupying forces of the Roman Empire. She took no prisoners and had no compassion for the invaders. In one battle alone, her tribe killed eighty thousand people. Queen Myrina led an army of thirty-three thousand
female soldiers to defeat several male armies in Egypt and Syria. Rejecting marriage as oppression, they were free to mate with whomever they pleased. They were not women I would dare call pot-stirrers to their faces without risking becoming an ingredient in the pot!

Even in more recent times, there is plenty of evidence of women who have been as successful as men when it came to displays of fighting skills. It is estimated that 750 women disguised themselves as men and fought in the American Civil War. Tito’s Resistance Army in Yugoslavia included more than one hundred thousand women, of whom two thousand were promoted to officer ranks. The Israeli Army included twelve thousand women who were combatants in the 1948 War of Independence.

The farther back in time we look, the more the evidence shows that in any society, males and females shared all tasks equally. Since men took control of education and especially the written word, a split in roles occurred. Men stopped relying on their intuition as they took their guidance from philosophical and religious texts, and then feared it in the women they tried to suppress with their new education. History books are filled with graphic details of what became of all that male insecurity.

Healers were accused of witchcraft, and women were forced into a subservient lifestyle, which still exists in most societies today. Education was withheld and religious instructions given to serve a male elitist agenda.