Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: The Process of Manifestation T > F > A = R (Part 1 Summary)

This is a chapter-by-chapter summary of a book by T. Harv Eker’s Secret of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth (2005) series. One chapter, one article. Read this summary, buy the book. Enjoy!

Process of Manifestation: T > F > A = R

“Thoughts lead to Feelings. Feelings lead to Actions. Actions lead to Results.”

(Harv Eker)

That’s what Eker calls the Process of Manifestation. Thoughts are at the root of every result. He then goes one step further and states that we are programmed or conditioned in a certain way. That’s why we think how we think. The primary sources of this programming include mainly our parents and siblings, but also friends, teachers, and media, to name only a few. In short, our life is a reflection of our thoughts, which again come as a result of how we have been programmed.

This is important in many ways. Look at our culture: How could we survive without the knowledge of our ancestors? We’re born into a world of culture and structure: How could we survive without the knowledge we’re given from our parents? We depend on our parents for a very, very long time. We’re all born helpless. So, in a certain way this programming is a necessity, but in the case of money, it is often a burden… That’s where your money blueprint (see the previous post) comes in. A blueprint, in general, is a preset plan or design. Let’s take a blueprint for a house as an example. Before you build the house, you make an exact plan of what you want to build. And then, you build what you’ve planned. Now, and this is important, we all have a blueprint for money, our money blueprint – a preset plan of how much money we’ll have and how we can handle it. Every child is taught how to think about and act in relation to money.

Our financial blueprint consists primarily of the information or “programming” we received in the past, and especially as a young child. “Your past conditioning determines every thought that bubbles up in your mind. That’s why it’s often referred to as the conditioned mind.” First of all, Eker suggests, we need to understand how we are conditioned. We are conditioned in three (3) primary ways:

#1 Verbal Programming: What did you hear about money, wealth, and rich people when you were growing up? “Save your money for a rainy” “Filthy rich!” “Rich people are greedy” “Money doesn’t grow on trees” “Money doesn’t buy happiness” “We can’t afford it” and so on. Eker says, “I’m sure you heard at least one of them. The problem is that all these statements… remain in your subconscious mind as part of the blueprint that is running your financial life. Obviously, such statements do not support your financial well-being.”

#2 Modelling: What did you see when you were young? How did your parents manage money? Did money come easily in your family or was it always a struggle? Was money a source of joy in your household or the cause of bitter arguments? All these things matter a lot because as kids, we learn just about everything from modeling. It is important to recognize that your way of being related to one or both of your parents in the arena of money.

#3 Specific Incidents: What did you experience when you were young around money, wealth, and rich people? This is close to modeling but maybe you can think of a specific personal incident. Maybe a huge fight your parents had that seemingly led to the divorce? Maybe you can still hear your father swearing about a rich neighbor? Such experiences shape your beliefs you now live by.

These are three (3) major ways that have conditioned us in terms of money. Basically, that’s your money blueprint, your pre-set plan for success with money. Eker highlights: “Your money blueprint will determine your financial life – and even your personal life. And again, you can have all the knowledge and skills in the world, but if your ‘blueprint’ isn’t set for success, you’re financially doomed. If you think poor about the rich, how are you ever going to be rich? If money has always been a struggle, chances are high that it always will be a struggle. That’s in your subconscious mind. When the subconscious mind must choose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.” If you want to think like rich people, you need to change that programming… how?

You need to become aware. “AWARENESS is the first step of change,” emphasized Eker. That’s where you are right now. You thought about how you grew up around money and hopefully became aware of the fact that you’ve been conditioned in a certain way. Now, you need to UNDERSTAND what effects this conditioning had and still has on your financial life (I personally had a bad programming). It’s only through the understanding of what your conditioned mind does to you that you can become able and willing to change. Do you see that your money blueprint is not you but it is only what you’ve learned? You do have the choice in the present moment to be different (Yes I can!). That’s the third step of change: DISASSOCIATION. How you have been conditioned is not how you need to be and how you need to think. You have the choice! It is imperative you choose your thoughts and beliefs wisely.

Eker concludes: “Being aware and living consciously is probably the most important ingredient for substantial change. YOU make the choices in life. YOU are at the steering wheel. YOU know that you have been conditioned in a certain way and that this lies at the roots of your financial life. Now that YOU are aware, YOU can change!”

REMEMBER: T > F > A = R

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People #5 Seek First to Understand Then to Be Understood

An effective way to build a Win-Win situation or any type of good relationship with people is to first seek to understand them. In order to do this, you have to improve your listening skills. As Covey states, there are 4 stages of listening:

1. Ignoring

2. Pretending to Listen

3. Attentive Listening

4. Empathic Listening

To reach the 4^th level (Emphatic Listening) means that you are inside someone else’s frame of reference by ‘listening’ to their body language, tone, expression, and feelings. This is the first big step for productive communication and interaction.

We often get up to the 3^rd stage (Attentive Listening) of listening and we are under the impression that this is always more than enough. Consequently, we have these autobiographical responses:

a) Evaluate    (agree or disagree)

b) Probe        (ask questions from our own frame of reference)

c) Advice       (give counsel based on our own experience)

d) Interpret   (explain people’s actions based on our own motivations)

These responses don’t always reach and satisfy other people’s needs. On the other hand, by listening empathically (4^th level), we can get beyond a surface-level, transactional exchange and have a real impact. By deeply understanding other people’s issues and satisfying their needs, then we can move onto being productive and be understood by them too. When we rush in response without understanding first, it’s similar to this:

Suppose you’ve been having trouble with your eyes and you decide to go to an optometrist for help. After briefly listening to your complaint, he takes off his glasses and hands them to you. “Put these on,” he says, “I’ve worn this pair of glasses for 10 years now and they’ve really helped me. I have an extra pair at home; you can wear these.” So, you put them on, but it only makes the problem worse. “This is terrible!” you exclaim. “I can’t see a thing!” “Well, what’s wrong?” he asks. “They work great for me. Try harder.” “I’m trying,” you insist, “Everything is a blur.” “Well, what’s the matter with you? Think positively.” “Okay, I positively can’t see a thing.” “Boy, you are ungrateful!” he chides, “And after all, I’ve done to help you!”

What are the chances you’d go back to that optometrist the next time you need help? Not very good, I would imagine. You don’t have much confidence in someone who doesn’t diagnose before he or she prescribes. This is, of course, a symbolic example, nothing that would happen when visiting a doctor, but you get the picture.

Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

Essential Thinkers #23 John Locke, the Empiricist, on the Nature of Human Understanding

In his day, John Locke (1632-1704) was an important political figure and author of the liberal exposition Two Treatises of Government. An associate of the Earl of Shaftesbury, Locke spent time in exile in Holland, returning to England after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. It is for his views on the nature of human knowledge, however, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding that he is remembered in modern philosophy. 20 years in the writing, the book was to exert such an influence on the next 100 years of Western though that its author is considered by many to be the greatest British philosopher of all time. The works of George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume are all direct successors of Locke’s Essay.

The subject of Locke’s Essay, as given in the title, is the nature of human understanding, that is, the very way in which the human mind collects, organises, classifies and ultimately makes judgements based on data received through the senses. Greatly influenced by the scientific turn of his day, and a personal friend of two renowned contemporary scientists, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, Locke’s intent was to set the foundations of human knowledge on a sound scientific footing. He had read with great interest Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, but rejected the rationalist philosophy that underpinned its conclusions.

For Locke, there could be no innate knowledge: rather, everything we know must be derived from experience, through the actions of the physical world on our sense organs. This is the view now known as empiricism, a view still central, in essence if not detail, to the philosophies of W.V.O. Quine and other modern thinkers. Locke’s detractors, the Rationalists (Rene Descartes, George Berkeley, Gottfried von Leibniz) with whom the Empiricists battled for ideological supremacy throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries, have their modern counterparts in the supporters of Noam Chomsky and his philosophy of innate, or generative, grammar.

Locke states that the mind at birth is like a blank slate, or tabula rasa, waiting to be written on by the world of experience. All human knowledge is derived from ideas presented to the mind by the world of experience. However, these ideas can be classified into two general sorts. There are complex ideas and simple ideas. Simple ideas are the immediate products of sensory stimulation, examples would be ‘yellow,’ ‘bitter,’ ‘round,’ ‘hard,’ and so on. Complex ideas are constrictions out of simple ideas, and are the product of internal mental operations. These include all our ideas of familiar material objects, such as tables, chairs, cats, dogs and horses. But complex ideas need not represent anything real in the world. This accounts for ideas like that of a unicorn, a complex idea itself made up of other complex ideas, such as ‘horse’ and ‘horn.’

Among Locke’s simple ideas is a distinction between those that are primary qualities of objects and others that are secondary qualities. The distinction divides those qualities thought to be essential and inherent to all objects and those that are apparent only on account of the effect objects have on our sense. Primary qualities are those such as solidity, extension, shape, motion or rest, and number. Secondary qualities are those such as colour, scent and taste. These are secondary because, according to Locke, they do not inhere in objects themselves, but are causally produced only in our minds by the effect of an object’s primary qualities upon our senses. Another way of conceiving them is to say primary qualities are objective (really exist) and secondary ones subjective (only exist in the minds of observers).

In the popular conundrum of whether a falling tree makes a sound when there is no one to hear it, Locke’s view would be that the falling tree creates vibrations in the air, but that there is no ‘sound’ strictly speaking, since sound is not a ‘real’ or primary quality. This view, sometimes called ‘scientific essentialism,’ leads to the metaphysical conclusion, plausible to many modern thinkers, that without a perceiving mind, there is no such thing in the world as colour or sound, sweet or sour and so on; but there are really such things as shape, extension and solidity, independently of whether anyone perceives them or not.

[Summarized from Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes, 2012.]

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Leonardo da Vinci's Unquenchable Curiosity and Acute Observations

Helen Gardner, in her book Art through the Ages (1970) writes of Leonardo da Vinci’s “unquenchable curiosity,” and we see this reflected in the 13,000 pages of his famous journals, in which he made a daily record – in notes, drawings, and scientific diagrams – of his observations and studies. These notebooks cover a wide range of interests and phenomena, from human anatomy and facial expressions to animals, birds, plants, rocks, water, chemistry, optics, painting, astronomy, architecture and engineering.

Biographer Daniel Arassa recounts just how far da Vinci would go to try to understand everything around him. On one occasion, the great man coated the wings of the fly with honey to find out if this would change the sound of its buzzing noise in flight. Observing that the note produced by the fly was lower than usual, he attributed this to the fact that the ballasted wings were beating the air less rapidly than before. Thus, da Vinci concluded that the pitch of a musical note is connected with the speed of the percussive movement of the air.

Da Vinci’s acute observations led him to think about and try to solve problems that hadn’t been seriously considered before. Nobody, for example, was asking for a parachute, a car, a submarine, a hang glider, a diving suit, a helicopter, a calculator, or floating shoes and stocks for walking on water, but Leonardo da Vinci invented, or at least conceptualized, these things.

He also came up with military innovations like the machine gun, the armoured tank, the finned mortar shell, a giant crossbow, a triple-barrel cannon, and a mobile bridge. He sketched mechanical breakthroughs such as a steam engine, a hydraulic pump, a reversible crank mechanism, a flywheel system, ball bearings, a hoisting machine, a more accurate clock, an automated bobbin winder, a lens-grinding machine, and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire. He designed the world’s first canal lock system, a method for excavating tunnels through mountains, a 720-foot (220 m) single-span bridge, a new kind of musical instrument, a double hull for ships, an industrial use for solar power, and a fully functional robot (which he built and displayed for his patron, Ludovico Sforza, at a celebration in Milan in 1495).

“Da Vinci,” writes Rowan Gibson, “was able to spot unmet needs and innovation opportunities because he was vastly more observant and more engaged with his environment than others. He was focusing his attention on issues and frustrations that most people simply ignored.”

[Quoted from The 4 Lenses of Innovation (2015) by Rowan Gibson. Title mine]

                                                                                                                    

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Change Your Life: Listen with Empathy and Openness (Don't Rush to Give Advice)

“It is the province of knowledge to speak,

And it is the privilege of wisdom to listen”
(Oliver Wendell Holmes)

I’m still learning this: the key to providing emotional and moral support to people in need, is the ability to listen to what they are saying. When others need our help, my instincts, our instinct is to rush in and provide comfort and practical advice. But no matter how valuable the knowledge that we wish to share, no matter how well intentioned our desire to help, our first obligation is to provide the space and the opportunity for others to share experiences, feelings and thoughts. We need to beware of our inclination to think about our response while others are speaking, jump to complete their sentences, or interject with our advice – even if it is the best advice possible.

Learning from the experience and advice of others is extremely important – it is one of principal ways in which we grow as individuals and humankind. But it usually works only if those receiving the advice feel that they have been heard. Once a student told earnestly to me, “Thank you for listening to me.” I didn’t give any advice, I just listened and I asked questions. Well, if advice is needed and necessary, then give advice. But first – listen.

In the early 1970s, Robert Greenleaf coined the term Servant Leadership after noticing that the great leaders throughout history spoke and acted as servants. According to Greenleaf and other leadership scholars, one of the core characteristics of servant leaders is that they listen first and talk later. In fact, in become a servant leader, Greenleaf argued, a person has to go through “a long arduous discipline of learning to listen, a discipline sufficiently sustained that the automatic response to any problem is to listen first.” First we need to learn how to listen.

Don’t rush to give advice,

Listen with empathy and openness

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

 References:

1. Choose the Life You Want: 101 Ways to Create You Own Road to Happiness by Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD (New York: The Experiment, 2012) Buy this book!

2. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy by C.R. Rogers (Boston: Mariner Books, 1995)