My Year in the Master Key System -- Part Four

So, what have you been focusing on over the last few weeks?  I have to admit that I’ve been very caught up with the Holiday season and not very much with the mental practice I started a few months ago with the Master Key System.  But the beauty of this program of study is that the core ideas stick with you if you read them over often enough, so that they filter through even in the busiest moments.  And I notice that while very old habits tend to take over, they are slowly being shifted to incorporate the key ideas that Charles Haanel brings forward in his work.

Take, for example, the key elements of this week’s study.  I see three main ideas that pull together to give us the power and ability to draw what we want into our lives.  First, the concept of “give to get” – being of service to others and giving, in order to receive what we want.  But the model that I learned over the years of watching my mother and her mother slave in the kitchen, while everyone else sat around and ate, are not what Haanel is talking about.  Because he also stresses that we must take care of ourselves, that we “cannot be helpful unless we are strong”.  So my hours of work have been interspersed with hours of rest, play, sleep and time for me.  I’ve come to understand that it is,in fact, a cycle – take care of myself in order to have the energy to give, then give because it is the right thing to do, and then be ready to receive, which will reenergize me.  The Master Key System also says that “every transaction must benefit every person who is in any way connected with the transaction”, because we are each one of us part of the Universal whole.  So selfless, martyr-like giving is no longer part of my Holiday season tradition.

A second concept highlighted in Part Four is aligning our vision and actions with the Universe, in other words, “the higher, loftier, grander and more noble ideals which you can conceive,” the more we are able to achieve these ideas because they are aligned with the creative flow of the Universe.  Reminds me of a scene in a science-fiction movie I watched yesterday, Contact (Jodie Foster, 1997).  Foster is an astronomer who is the sole passenger on a spacecraft headed for the Vega system; after experiencing violent vibrations when strapped to her seat, she realizes that if she releases the straps, she floats effortlessly inside the craft.  She has picked up on one of Haanel’s important concepts: don’t fight the Universal flow just because you NEED to be right, open your mind to the fact that there may be an easier way to get things done.

And the final concept that pulls the Master Key System message together this week is the part that gives us the power to make what we want happen: mental and emotional strength.  This strength comes from regular practice, so that we learn how to focus better, how to seek out silence and repose to regenerate, how to channel our emotions to increase the power of our thoughts, and how to eliminate destructive thoughts. 

Practice, practice, practice.  At this time of year, we often set New Year’s resolutions to start exercising more.  Why not resolve to exercise our minds on a regular basis, just like going to the gym, to make 2012 a GREAT year?

Your Competitive Edge in 2012

You’ve updated your aging website, you blog regularly and your Facebook fan page has lots of followers.  You’ve read every success and management magazine, you have a copy of the most trendy business strategy books on your nightstand, and you spent several hours listening to webinars and attending conferences and networking events.

So, you’ve got the competitive edge, right?  Wrong, because your competitors have all done the exact same thing.  Marketing 2.0 and the global economy have evened out the playing field – the leading players in any industry essentially all look alike.  2012 doesn’t promise to bring anything new, unless you think that creating a Google+ account three days before your closest competitor does will truly make a difference.

What could you possibly do in 2012 that will make a difference?  What do you have that your competitors don’t, that you can use to create a competitive edge?  Well, to start with, you have you.  And you have your partners, employees and contractors. 

But, you’ve squeezed every ounce of productivity out of your exhausted workforce.  All your salespeople have attended the best sales training and your customer service department just underwent an overhaul due to too many customer complaints.  Your marketing department seems to have lost their creativity, your finance group is just trying to keep your corporate head above water in this endless recession, and HR is having a hard time finding enough qualified people to fill the few job openings you’ve dared to approve. 

Let me give you a few statistics that might make you think differently about things:

• Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56%;
• Happy employees take, on average, 15 less sick days per year than their unhappy colleagues;
• $360B is lost each year in the U.S. due to reduced productivity caused by poor relationships between employees and their supervisors;
• An employee’s belief in his or her ability is a stronger predictor of job performance than his or her actual level of skill or training;
• A study at KPMG reported that positive psychology training was responsible for improving life satisfaction, one of the most crucial predictors of productivity and performance in the workplace.

This will be your competitive edge in 2012 – the human edge.  Investing in developing a happy workforce (and this includes you) can provide you with a huge edge over your competitors.  While they are scratching their heads, trying to figure out how to continue doing more with less, you will become an employer of choice, reaping the many benefits of a happy, optimistic, creative, and innovative team of contributors to your bottom line. 

Want to know how?  Check in tomorrow for part two of this blog: how to incorporate the key concepts of positive psychology into your organization.

My Year in the Master Key System -- Part Three

There’s a reason why it takes time to absorb the Master Key System – we’re not always ready to fully understand a particular message the first time it is presented to us.  I’m reminded of the quote by Rainer Maria Rilke: “Do not now look for the answers.  They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.”  (As an aside, I truly recommend that you read Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” if you haven’t yet!)

Part Three of the Master Key System talks further about how the conscious and subconscious systems relate.  The subconscious mind receives direction from the conscious mind and simply does what it is told.  It links to the Universal Mind when it needs something, which is the mechanism by which we are able to create what we truly want.  The power of the subconscious comes from the energy it radiates – the more energy, the more effectively it reaches out to the Universal mind and the more rapidly we can create what we want.  So you want to radiate as much positive energy as possible – that means amplifying every request with strong positive emotion and passion.  It also means that we can’t let anything get in the way of this radiation.

This brings me to the main point of this blog – letting things get in the way.  This is probably the hardest part of the journey for me.  I believe what I read from an intellectual standpoint, but every time I re-read the material, I realize that I really don't get it yet.  I guess that up until now, I haven’t been able to “live the answers”.  Part Three tells us that fear is the biggest resistance against the positive requests made by our subconscious.  And fear is something I live every day, and I suspect that many of you reading this might dare to agree.  We want greatness, but fear living up to it.  We want success, but fear making a fool of ourselves.  We want to be a model for others, but fear other people’s reactions and treatment.  We want abundance, but fear the lack of abundance that we see around us.

In parallel to studying The Master Key System, I’m also reading other success classics, such as The Science of Getting Rich, by Wallace D. Wattles.  Wattles says: “To think according to appearance is easy; to think truth regardless of appearances is laborious, and requires the expenditure of more power than any other work man is called upon to perform.”  Wattles is saying that it is easy to think that things will always be what we see around us – we will always have what we have, we will always be what we are, we will always do what we do.  But the Master Key System says that we don't have to.  With focused study and concentration, we can create so much more and transform our lives and ourselves into exactly what we want!

A fun way to convince ourselves that we can actually do this is to try it out.  Think of one thing that you want to create, something immediate, not too complicated, but different enough from what you are living to convince you that you actually created it.  Sometimes I do this by finding a parking spot or getting someone to call me.  What small wins do you want to create this week to convince yourself that you can create anything you truly want? 

My Year in the Master Key System – Part Two

As I move further into my study of the Master Key System by Charles Haanel, I begin to understand how I could actually start controlling the process of creating in the outside world. 

Part Two of the Master Key System starts by explaining that we have a conscious and subconscious mind.  The conscious mind deals with and reacts to the outside world.  It sends messages to the subconscious mind, which quickly and effectively finds a way to provide what the conscious mind wants. 

What we often don’t realize is that we can choose what we react to and how we react.  Have you ever noticed that some days things come at you so quickly that you seem to respond as if you were a machine, processing each thing as it comes and reacting automatically.  This saves energy and allows our conscious mind to focus on the most important things.  I actually feel good on days like this, because I think I’m being efficient and dealing with everything effectively.  Except that my automatic reactions are not always conducive to giving me what I truly want.  I say yes when I should really be saying no to a project that I know won’t bring me any benefit.  I respond emotionally when I should realize that I am too tired to respond rationally to my spouse’s three teenagers.  I create a crisis when a few deep breaths might give me the chance to remember a solution I have already applied to a recurring problem. 

The conscious mind has the ability to discriminate, choose and reason.  This means that we can choose what we send to the subconscious mind, the instructions on which it will operate.  If we send “panic, this is a disaster!”, the subconscious very efficiently ensures that a disaster occurs so that it can panic according to our wishes.  If we send “find a solution to this before it becomes a disaster”, the subconscious will do just that: find a way for a solution to present itself to us so that we avert the disaster. 

Ok, so all I have to do is send positive messages to my subconscious and I’ll get everything I want, right?  Well, it’s not quite that simple.  First of all, we have to learn to discipline our conscious mind to send only positive messages.  In the Master Key System, Charles Haanel takes us through a series of exercises to start this discipline process.  In Part One, he tells us to practice being physically still.  And in Part Two, we start practicing being mentally still.  A form of meditation, we are asked to learn how to inhibit all thought and become quiet inside.  Quite a challenge!

But there is a second challenge to sending positive messages to the subconscious.  There is a filter between the conscious and subconscious minds.  This filter is made up of all the programming we have accumulated through years of being told what to do and all the internal messages we tell ourselves.  We can send positive messages about becoming financially secure, but if we have internal programming that says “rich people are snobs and I don’t want to be a snob”, our programming will sabotage the positive message before it reaches the subconscious. 

So I have two challenges: discipline my mind and dissolve all the negative programming that sits within the filter between my conscious and subconscious minds.  It’s certainly plenty of work for the next two weeks!