Exploration

Quote
"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens."
-Carl Jung

My Thoughts
This week I would like to share something from one of my mentors, Christian Simpson.
I know you may think this is long, but I assure you it is well worth the read.
Feel free to check out his website:
http://www.christian-simpson.com

It all comes down to results. The name of the game in life is results. Success may be a relative term that means different things to different people, however, the most accurate description of success has to be improving the results we get in every aspect of our lives.

Here’s the problem: many of us have become so fixated on our results, we’ve lost the ability to influence and improve them. Let me explain what I mean. The results we get in our lives are effects, they are outcomes of a very orderly and specific creative process. Results have ancestry, and the common error made my many individuals and enterprises is the seductive nature of focusing on the effects of performance not the cause of them.

If you are to sustainably improve the results in your personal and professional life, you need to be influencing the cause of those results, not focusing your attention on the results themselves. So let’s “unpeel the onion” and define that ancestry.

Results are a direct consequence of our actions and behaviors. They, in turn, are the physical expression, through the body, of our feelings, we’re all emotive beings. So what creates our feelings? The answer is thought, the first level of creation. Our thoughts create our feelings, which are then expressed as actions and behaviors, which, of course, create our results.

The quality of a person’s results will always correspond to the quality of their thoughts, and yet most people give little thought to what they are thinking about. Nothing undermines success more than this fact, and I’ll be sharing more about why that is in the 3rd step to success.

Even though thought is the first level of creation, it doesn’t end there. Remember, I outlined it was the quality of our thoughts that correspond with the quality of our results, so it’s about understanding what is influencing our thought process.

Tragically, for many people, they allow their thoughts to be shaped entirely by the existing conditions and circumstances in their lives, or they're influenced by the opinions of others, or, worse still, the media engine. They think in reverse, outside in not inside out, and their results cannot fail to reflect it. There are other influences too, some of them far more potent.

If we unpeel the onion another layer back from our thought processes, we’ll find our belief systems, our programming, most of which we inherited from authority figures in our lives (parents, teachers, friends, leaders). Without question, most of us are products of somebody else’s habitual way of thinking. I don’t think I need to explain the influencing power of beliefs on behavior, you can observe them in many of the problems we face in our immediate and global society today.

The key to overcoming all of this and taking control of your personal and professional success is self-awareness. You cannot influence that which you are not aware of. That is why investing in your own personal development, your self-leadership, is so essential. Knowing yourself is the prerequisite for greater success in life, think about it for a moment, if you can accept that you are the common denominator and primary influence on every result you get in life, the true architect of your success, can there be a more important pursuit for you in relation to greater success?

So does it end with our beliefs? No, because if we unpeel the next layer we find our values, without question the most important information a person can possibly know about themselves. Your values are who you are, they make you tick, they’re your compass, your spiritual DNA, your blueprint that defines what has meaning and heart for you in life. A person living their values is a truly successful person in every sense of the word because they shape their lives to who they are, from business to personal relationships, finance to health, living a life on purpose aligned with their primary values.

There’s a reason why all of the ancient scriptures referred to the axiom of “know thyself”. We create our outcomes in life, knowing who you are is far more important than knowing what you want, because if you don’t know who you truly are, what truly has meaning to you, then how can you really know that what you want is truly that which you want? Life doesn’t give you what you want, it gives you who you are. Know thyself is essential for success, the consequences of not doing so are, to an advancing person, significantly disturbing.

Until next time....