There are three key aspects of your feelings that add up. They are your vision and whether you are achieving it, your inspiration and therefore what’s going on right now, and your purpose which is an overriding sense that everything that’s happening to you is in a greater context and therefore can be understood.
let’s talk about each of these one by one so that you can understand what your VIP score amounts to.
firstly your vision.
your vision, not your eyesight, is your estimation of what you would love to achieve in the future. This vision does not have to be realistic although if it is unbelievable to you then I doubt that you will have the stamina and the commitment to sustain the work to achieve it. In mountain climbing metaphor this simply means the top of the mountain. Let’s call it your Mount Ama Dablam. Which is the partner mountain to Mount Everest. So you can call your vision your Mount Everest as well. It’s up to you. Whatever it is it is very important to have it.
all human eyes are turned to the future. Nobody really worries about the present. Everybody worries about how the present will affect the future. The future is coming. When we lose hope that tomorrow will be better than today then we become self-deprecating, panic stricken, riddled with anxiety and in a state of fight flight. This fight flight state is the enemy of well-being and health, relationship and success in business and career. So we want to avoid fight flight as much as possible. It is in another language called bipolar.
so as long as we feel that the next minute in time can be better than the last minute, we have a vision. Yes, visions sometimes shrink to survival level but we are always looking to the future and until such time as we lose complete hope that the next minute can be better than the last minute we have the power of a vision. Of course, the further out we stretch our imagination with our vision the less we will be disrupted by the local present goings-on which can be quite manipulative and traumatic. Suffice to say a big vision leads to a big life. Defending that vision in the face of plenty of challenge becomes a serious piece of self awareness.
The investment it takes to hold onto and build a vision, is exactly the same investment it takes to build your energy. And so your vision becomes a powerful source of energy in your life. The loss of vision becomes a powerful source of exhaustion as well. So it would seem at a primary level of your personal development, building, sustaining and nourishing your vision must have an incredible impact on your health. You will notice in the world that people who lose their vision, run out of things to do in life that excite them, decay quickly mentally as well as physically.
one of the many errors people make in building a vision is to allow it to be randomly generated. Most of the time under the circumstances vision becomes an escape from a discomfort or pain in the current moment, or even the past. I remember my ex-wife saying I want to get as far away from you as I possibly can! Well that became her vision. It’s quite unwise to build a vision on the process of escaping from discomfort primarily because we always run into the same discomfort wherever we are going. Greenfields are very rarely green because they are better, usually they are green because of the manure underneath the grass. We usually don’t see that till we arrive.
so creating a vision statement does not have to be rational. A vision statement, or vision quest as we prefer to call it, is a process of deliberately agitating our comfort with the status quo, bypassing all the problems we are currently facing, and reaching into the future and bringing some image of the future so present in our mind that we feel like we are already there. At this stage in the 30 day program you will not have a vision statement formally created but you will have ideas about what the difference is between where you are and where you want to be in life. That gap, is the difference that the VIP score wants to measure.
if a big fat zero is how you feel about one of the seven areas of life right now which would mean you have lost all hope for it to be any better, then, you’ll need more than the 30 day challenge to fix your challenge. On the other hand if you have achieved 10 out of 10 in any of the seven areas of life I would totally recommend you look up the births and deaths column tomorrow in the paper and make sure you are not there. Achieving 10 out of 10 for a few seconds in life gives birth to a new opportunity which will make 10 out of 10, less then.
using the VIP diagram simply create the centrepoint as the big fat zero, and the outer spoke of the wheel where it touches the rim, 10 out of 10, and go around to each area and school yourself where you feel you are at right now. Put across on the spoke and Mark it with the number you perceive to be your current VIP score. Then add up the scores divide them by the total possib with seven or eight spokes, and you will have the percentage you can call your VIP score.
our mission in the 30 day challenge is to improve that score. But we must be careful. When somebody has a very low VIP score in any one of the seven areas of life they will typically turn their attention to fix that pain or suffering. While staring at the problem what they don’t realise is that they are not focusing on one of the current areas of life which is doing quite well. For example if we had some family challenges we might just turn our back on our financial investments while we sort it out. The discovery can be that while we fix one problem we create another. I’m sure you’ve seen this before in your own life and in the lives of others. They are stressed at work so they leave their job and start working less and next thing you know they have weight management problems or mental health problems. The secret to improving your VIP score is to improve all seven areas of life at once. Cherry picking is forbidden in the Innerwealth process. We don’t want to make more problems by fixing others.
why don’t you take a piece of paper right now draw a circle divided into eight spokes which makes the mathematics of drawing it simpler, label each of the eight spokes as spiritual, mental, social, career, financial, health, relationship, family. Then use the process I’ve described above to school yourself as zero in the centre or 10 out of 10 on the outer spoke and see what your total VIP score is divided by the total possible. This will give you some sort of a percentage.
inspiration
the danger of focusing on the future which is where all human eyes are directed is that we lose the opportunity to nourish ourselves by celebrating the present. Where in the west we are focused on the future and being motivated to drive towards improving it, the east is the complete opposite and drives people toward the present in order to celebrate it. You can do both. And that’s the magic of Innerwealth technology that are teachers both East West science in managing the self and therefore introduces the best of both. They are absolutely supportive of each other. Inspiration is the inner voice where as vision is the outer voice. The invoice must speak louder than the outer voice in order for us to be inspired by life. When the outer voice is louder than the inner voice we are motivated by life and therefore driven to the future hoping to find what we’ve already got if we could listen to the inner voice.
so in combination with your vision quest you will also learn the process of valuing everything you’ve currently got as it is. It is very important to understand this. Because if you start chasing your tail hoping the future will be better than the present when you arrive at the future it will be extremely disappointing. You take your problems with you. And so we spent a significant amount of energy to make sure that we clean the table before we go to bed so that we don’t get ants. We also make sure we clean our mind every day so we don’t accumulate baggage that we carry forward into the future and make building the future like pushing the proverbial uphill.
overcoming the rhetoric on this topic of being inspired by the present moment is really challenging because it is very easy to do. So many people teach gratitude. But they teach gratitude all wrong. Gratitude is not just gratitude for what is going good it is gratitude for what is not going as we expected. The reason that we must be grateful for what is going on that we didn’t expect is because it’s our expectation that is a mess not what’s going on. We are never being taught what not to do. And so whatever is transpiring in our life is important for us to experience and learn from. There are many people stuck in therapy and all sorts of psychological process that believe there is something broken in the past or the present of their life that they must get over. But this is a complete error. There is nothing ever that’s transpired in our life it’s not worthy of love, and while we run away from it and try to fix it with therapy and what have you, we carry the garbage forward. The secret to loving the moment and living in the moment is to be able to evolve through
you are going to learn process which help you retail stories that you’ve been telling for years. I remember saying to people that my stepmother was a vicious alcoholic person and therefore I am justified in going to some form of counselling to get my head screwed back on straight. This story went on for a long time as I blamed my childhood for some of my adult behaviour. What a ridiculous paradigm that is. The first question I had to ask myself was, was my alcoholic stepmother always drunk? And I’ll dam the answer was no. So she wasn’t always an alcoholic. The second question I had to ask myself was was she always vicious? And the answer was absolutely not sometimes she was absolutely the opposite. And then I had to answer the question were you always miserable or did she make you laugh and did she cook you dinner and did she wash your clothes and did she patch up your wounded knee when you slept over in football? And the answer was dam, yes. So I’ve been running a script that said my stepmother was a one-sided, bitch. But in fact, after all that counselling and therapy, I never focused my mind on the other side of her.
what do you judge in others you judge in yourself. What you judge in others you breed, attract or become in yourself. Now I didn’t become a vicious alcoholic person. But every time in business or family life I had to be cruel, strict or disciplinarian I hated myself for it. Every time I had to be tough with a supplier or mean with an end user that was being belligerent I hated them and I hated myself for doing it. And this lack of self acceptance meant that I avoided conflict at all cost. I ran away from conflict and therefore lost a lot of business, lost a lot of credibility in my home, and ended up being very two-faced in the way I lived. Angry sometimes on the inside, peaceful and nice on the outside. I just didn’t like my stepmother so much that I didn’t want to create the similar circumstances to the ones I felt as a child in my adult life. And so, eventually I had to admit that she was not all bad first and foremost. Second thing I had to admit that her cruel men alcoholic times gave me an incredible gift. They taught me not to take myself seriously, they gave me an incredible intuition as to when there was trouble around, they gave me an unmistakable resilience to love somebody no matter what they did. Everything that I treasure now in my life as a teacher I learnt stepmother. The person I had been diminishing and running away from actually became the Guru of my life. And this is what I mean when I come to the topic of gratitude. If you don’t appreciate it the way that you’ve got it you will never get it the way that you wanted. And this is Zen mastery retold in the language of real life every day interactions with human beings. This is the great power of Innerwealth technology to bring you into this present moment absolutely bullet-proof. There is nothing you’ve done or not done it’s not worthy of love and it’s the same for others. I know this is a big stretch for those of you out there listening to this who have been, enabled to re-tell the stories of their childhood over and over again and how much a victim and how bad things were but I promise you I have done this work for 35 years with thousands of people and everybody comes to the same outcome if they really put their mind to it everybody is worthy of love and there is nothing at all ever that happens to us that can’t be turned into something we are grateful for. Ultimately the realisation is that we wouldn’t change a single thing. That’s a stretch for some of you, for those of you who have worked with me and I listening to this, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
it is wise to take a pen and paper right now while listening to this audio and write down anything that you are not grateful for in the past. If you can’t write down what it is you’re not grateful for write down the name of the person who did this thing that made you not grateful. The lack of gratitude kills us sends us to an early grave and we are underground for a very long time compared to how much time we spend above it. And there’s no use taking this crap of ingratitude into the grave and missing out on a whole bunch of fun and joy in life.
the final letter in the acronym of VIP is purpose. Everything that we’ve spoken about above your vision and your inspiration are worthless to you unless there’s a good reason. Vision is hard work and people will try to pull that vision away from your feet, even those you love may even feel intimidated by your vision and want to suck you down. Inspiration is constant discovery. There is never anybody on this planet who is 100% finished in trying to process the garbage of the judgements about others and therefore self. So to hold a vision and to keep inspired you need a bloody good reason better than feel good. And that’s where purpose comes in.
we often use the metaphor of change the world by changing yourself. Innerwealth technologies motto is changing the world one heart at a time. Our podcast with Troy Jones is change one change all. We believe that when you want to help the world change, then everything you do to yourself and to those around you that is focused on that outcome, build your energy, builds your life, impacts the lives of those around you including your children more than any other Single thing that you can do or say. The concept of service has been delivered in every great book ever written on the best of the human condition. When we work for money we sacrifice some of the most important parts of our human potential. Yes we do want to be paid, yes being paid more is a measure of our Innerwealth through our wealth, yes with more money we can do more for others, but Service with gratitude that stands independent of wealth creation, is a power that awakens the spirit in every single human being on earth. All the great people who have lived whether they are musicians or parents or movie stars or a race car drivers have finally ended up being in a state of service to the world greater than themselves in order to sustain their performance. And this step relies on you feeling like you have a purpose greater than you and therefore having a motive greater than you for sustaining your vision and your inspiration in life.
When you link everything you do to a purpose greater than you suddenly you become a superstar. When you become committed to making the world different through some special things that you want to contribute to the world which is different for every single human being, this active grateful service to the world builds you into an inspired leader. No matter where you are right now listening to this blog or podcast you can, with a purpose greater than yourself solve every single problem that faces you right now in your daily life. When one boat rises with the tides all boats rise with the tides and so when you lift yourself up into this sign of thinking purpose rather than thinking self gratification or success or being a champion in your own right then you rise into a place where you can win and that will take all people around you with you.
as a parent instead of thinking about yourself as a role model which is a doomed failed experiment in life think of yourself as a real model. Authenticity cannot be substituted with fake disguises and rules and regulations that you put forward to your children to pretend that you are something you are not in front of them. This is also important to recognise at work. We all have radars and those radars are tuned to recognise fraudulent behaviour. The secret to loving yourself is to make your private public. Doesn’t mean running around naked of course. What it means is to move beyond shame and guilt about who you are and own it. Instead of trying to live to be somebody else celebrate the you that is you. Every human has every human trait and if you can understand this one single piece of universal knowledge, that we all look different or active front but we have every single human trait built into us then it is only our judgements of ourselves and others that makes us think that our privates must be hidden and our publics are worthy of being on display. As a great leader at work or at home being a real model is the solution, and being a role model becomes a joke.
right now take a piece of paper. Ask yourself this question. With all the work and all the achievement and all the effort you’ve put into the world that you’ve lived in so far today, what is the one thing you most wanted for yourself. What did you want from the world? Was it love, was it approval, was it freedom, was it strength? Ask yourself what you’ve most wanted as a result of all the work and effort you’ve put in to life, and you will have a very clear insight as to your purpose in life which is to give what you’ve most wanted, to others. We know that you can’t give what you haven’t got and therefore you know the work that is ahead of you in the next 30 days. To make sure you are abundant in the thing you’ve been wanting through self mastery so that you are free to give the access that you have unconditionally.
that’s the end of the audio for day three of the 30 day challenge and we have started to build a little momentum here I hope this is been thought-provoking and for those of you who have already done the 30 day challenge it might be a good opportunity to do some revision because this stuff is always evolving, as are you.
with spirit
Chris
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