Moneylove And Me In Africa

A Prosperity Adventure In South Africa

This summer a lot of attention was on South Africa and the World Cup. I met a charming young woman from Brazil on a San Francisco bus, and we talked about how excited her country was about the next World Cup happening there. She was on her way to watch the finals on TV. And my good friend Barry Dunlop was there for the finals, sending back some great photos. It took me back to a month-long trip to South Africa to do a series of seminars and workshops on Moneylove in 1989.

A Juicy Time Of Change and Transformation

In September-October of 1989, a lot was happening in South Africa. Apartheid was still in place, though everyone knew it was on the way out. Nelson Mandela was still in prison, though everyone knew he was on the way out. And millions of black South Africans were in dire poverty, but there were great hopes they were on the way out.

It was election time, and the Liberal Party had signs all over the country that said, “Vote Your Hopes Not Your Fears”. It was their motto and I adopted it for my theme of Moneylove presentations for mixed audiences of aspiring entrepreneurs in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. There is a certain kind of electricity in the air in the period just before revolutionary change in a country, and you could feel it in South Africa, as I’m sure you could in Berlin just before the wall came down.

An Excerpt From One South African Talk

I discovered some tapes from that trip in a box I had stored in a friend’s basement, and went back and listened to some of them. I plan to digitalize them and probably send them as bonus audios to members of The Moneylove Club, but I wanted to share the transcript of a short segment with you right here. I have rarely had the kind of attentive focus from audiences that was there that night–they knew their lives would never be the same again, and were ready for some new ideas and new direction. Talk about robust expectations! Not of what I was about to say, but of what they were about to experience in their lives and the life of their changing nation. Here is some of what I said:

“One thing that’s very true about success is that it’s a state of mind. There are people who have millions of rand, and they have beautiful homes, and they have beautiful families–and they’re not happy. Because they don’t think they’re successful. For whatever reason, they’re telling themselves they’re not successful. And if you tell yourself that, it doesn’t matter what you have or don’t have.

“If you tell yourself that you’re on the way to great prosperity and you can just about afford your rent, if you tell yourself that life is wonderful and you’re happy, you’ll be happy. But what I’m saying is that you can be a lot happier with a lot of money. And you don’t have to change what you’re doing, and you don’t have to change your level of integrity.

“Some people believe that in order to get rich, you have to become another person. Not true. You can be just as warm and loveable as you are now and do it with a million rand in your pocket. And, in fact, more so. If you have a million rand, you can have more time to be loveable.”

Snapshots Of A Nation In Transition

Many things stood out in that month in 1989, in addition to the fantastic audiences. The economy had been devastated by the international boycott led by the U.S., but the people of all classes and colors were amazingly friendly and hospitable. In fact, on the flight from London to Johannesburg on South African Airways, so many South African passengers walked up to me and introduced themselves, and invited me to their homes, and told me how happy they were to see Americans visit to learn the truth about their much maligned country, that it felt more like an interactive workshop than an airplane flight (despite it being the longest single flight of my life). Some of those passengers even showed up at a few of my presentations.

And the flowers were magnificent, as were the views, and Cape Town was like a cleaned up version of Miami, where I had lived for ten years. And the buffets were the most elaborate and delicious I ever encountered, topping even the extravagance of Las Vegas. It was strange to go through airport type security in every government building and department store. And warnings on the walls inside many of these buildings had pictures of various types of bombs, in case of a terrorist attack.  I almost lost my camera for trying to take a picture in Broadcast House, where I was being interviewed on radio. The security guard manning the XRay conveyor belt at the entrance who didn’t notice a camera in my bag was actually fired on the spot!  There had been a lot of violence back and forth, and it wasn’t totally over yet, though greatly diminished.

But for me one of the most telling moments was near the University in Pretoria. A young couple was walking on the sidewalk, holding hands. One was black and one was white. And my host nodded his head and said, “Two years ago that would have been a felony.”

Jerry

The Moneylove Declaration of Dependence

Your Personal Dependence Assessment

So every year on the 4th of July, I focus on my personal independence, and do a spot check of the ways in which I experience and manifest freedom in my life. I count my blessings, including that of living in a free society where freedom for most people is not a major issue, but mainly a state of mind. Meaning that one can be as free as one chooses, create the life one chooses, and the work one chooses, and the environment one chooses without fear someone will come and destroy it all.

But this year I decided to do something different, and look instead at those things I was dependent on for my success and happiness. I made a list, my Personal Dependence Assessment.

I suggest you do the same, as I found it enlightening, and it produced a result that I always find exciting and very useful: It made me look at some factors in my life in a brand new way.

Nowadays, in this “land of the free” dependence has become sort of a dirty word. And often is used to describe someone who is weak and dependent on others for financial survival–or enslaved by dependence on drugs or alcohol, and “depend” has sadly become synonymous with the brand of adult diapers not only using that name but actually trademarking it. So we intend to avoid or ignore the concept of depending on others as a positive aspect of life.

My favorite definition of “depend”, however, speaks to a necessary aspect of all our lives:  ”To place reliance or trust on.” While it is very important to depend mostly on ourselves in this life, we are not alone and we do need others. It is a uniquely human attribute to be able to choose to rely on or trust others. In fact, the better we are at choosing who and what to place reliance or trust on, who or what to depend on, the more successful our lives, the most satisfying our results, the more fulfilling our efforts.

A Healthy Sense of Dependence

No matter how self sufficient you may be, you do need certain things in your life to make it easier and happier and more fulfilling. What are they? That’s for you to explore in making your Personal Dependence Assessment. I decided in this first exploration of this new idea for myself to limit it to three things that are essential for the current path I have chosen, three things I depend on right now to help me get to where I want to go.

1. This Blog–that’s right, I consider my blog my personal window out into the world. It’s how I expect people, including the many thousands of Moneylove fans who may not even know I’m still alive and kicking, to find me and find out what I am doing and thinking and offering right now. That’s why I put the best of my thoughts and ideas right here, concepts and strategies I would have charged a solid fee for in the past. And it’s why I spend a certain portion of my time learning all I can about how to produce a better, more effective, more interesting, and more widely distributed blog.

2. The Moneylove Club–You probably already know about my most significant vehicle for teaching the new Moneylove principles of prosperity consciousness. In addition to this blog, I am putting most of my creative energy into producing what I intend to be the most powerful audio programs for prosperity and personal growth ever created. An ambitious aspiration, I admit, but from the feedback I’ve been getting from the subscribing members, it’s happening. And the mini-coaching session each member gets by asking me a question every month and getting a personal answer, has produced some pretty amazing results for those who have taken advantage of this. Way beyond what I anticipated when I first offered this bonus feature.

And as part of the Personal Dependence Assessment, I suggest you also list what you are doing to improve this particular relationship in your life, whether it’s a person (perhaps a teacher or mentor), an object (this could be technical, like your smart phone, or laptop, or even a particular software that is important in what you are doing in the world), or a service (one that you are using or one that you are offering). For my audio club, I am going to The Apple Store in San Francisco every week for a one-to-one consultation on using and learning my Garageband audio software. I also tap into the superior knowledge of such friends as voiceover superstar Kevin Delaney to provide knowledge in areas I haven’t mastered yet.

3. My Past Success–That’s right, I am dependent on all the success and visibility I achieved from having Moneylove sell two million copies, and doing hundreds of talks, seminars, workshops, and media interviews about prosperity and abundance all over the world over more than thirty years. Some of you reading this now came to this blog because of some positive experience you had with me and Moneylove in the past. And when someone who is curious about where I might be now and Googles me, hundreds of items come up, including ones that lead to this blog or my other, more personal blog at

www.JerryGillies.net

I could have just as easily listed the Internet as something I’m dependent on, as I wouldn’t have this immediate and extensive access to former readers, fans, and students without it. And what I’m doing to improve this area of my life is working on getting a larger audience for this blog, by writing articles, getting friends and colleagues to let people know about it, and collaborating with several other entrepreneurs who are also Moneylove fans to get me wider and more effective exposure.

So I invite you to make your own list. You can make it as large as you like, but I found three items a good start for me. And I would love to have your comments on how this strategy worked for you.

Jerry

Moneylove, Worklove, and Vocational Arousal

The Richest Man In All The World…….

It’s pretty hard to ignore a sentence that starts out with the above words, which is exactly why I used them thirty-some years ago to open my Worklove chapter in Moneylove. The whole quote goes like this:

The richest man in all the world is the one who has a good time earning his daily bread. WORKLOVE means just that, loving the work you do, doing the work you love.

In recent days I’ve been reminded of the profound importance of this concept, which back then was, believe it or not, a rather strange and foreign idea to most people. Even stranger is the fact that many still have not gotten the message. On CBS Sunday Morning, one of my favorite shows for a lot of years, actor/philosopher/commentator Ben Stein had a great segment on just this subject, called Decide To Live.

Decide To Live!

Stein aimed his comments at today’s college graduates, but they apply to all of us. He says he asked his shrink, “a very smart man,” what he thought the differences were between unhappy people and happy people. Stein says his shrink answered (I admit I do wonder if these aren’t really Stein’s thoughts, and if this shrink even exists) that unhappy people are the ones who “let their parents or their family talk them into a career that really wasn’t them. What they do is not them–it is not who they are or who they wanted to be.”

So what about the happy people? Again, crediting his shrink, Stein said,

They made a Decision to Live. They decided to do what their heart told them to do.

Food for thought? I’ll say! Is there any simpler way to explore how on purpose your life now is than by asking yourself when and if you made a Decision to Live? And how powerful is that phrase, “They decided to do what their heart told them to do?” We can all ask ourselves whether we are now living lives that evolved from making a decision to do what our hearts told us to do.

Vocational Arousal

And then, on Sunday, at Unity San Francisco, Rev. Sonya Milton mentioned that she attended a major Unity conference in San Diego the preceding week, and one of the keynote speakers was Barbara Marx Hubbard, who is celebrating her 80th birthday and going stronger than ever. I knew Barbara back in the 1970s, when she was President of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, an organization I was very involved in–for several years I headed up the Florida chapter of AHP. This was before Barbara became the first woman to seriously run for President of the U.S., and launched her award-winning TV series in which she interviewed the finest minds of our time, and more recently produced two movies called Visions, solidifying her role as one of the most significant visionaries and futurists of the past fifty years. Just Google her name and prepare to have your mind boggled.

Anyway, Rev. Sonya repeated a term Barbara Marx Hubbard has coined that describes with passion and vitality exactly what I mean by Worklove.  “Vocational Arousal.” I love the sound of that. It’s a question we can all ask ourselves over and over again–Am I Aroused by my Vocation? By the work I choose to do in the world? Or is my work something I just do to get through so that eventually I can afford to follow my heart and live my passion?

Barbara Marx Hubbard actually came up with Vocational Arousal to describe that powerful spark that gets ignited when someone you meet moves you forward in your own purpose in a powerful way. For her that was meeting Jonas Salk, who wanted to discuss with her the concept of co-creation. But I like using it more generally to describe the excitement and thrill of doing work you love, are passionately involved in, and feel is making a valuable contribution to the world in some direct or indirect way.

But as with any profound concept, this one did get me to thinking about what got me going on my life’s path, what moved me forward in my purpose. And I remembered that I decided to be a writer at very young age. I could see the limitations and frustrations of the work-a-day world of my father and his job as a foreman on an assembly line at RCA in Camden, New Jersey. And my mother had written short stories before she married, and was an avid reader–a life that seemed much more free and satisfying. The two of them definitely fueled my purpose, aroused my vocation.

And for me, the most powerful part of vocational arousal is the energy it creates around you, so that you not only are aroused yourself, but other people become aroused by both what you are doing and what they are doing. And when this happens, let’s face it–you don’t even have to think about money or prosperity or abundance or the Law of Attraction. It all happens effortlessly and naturally.
Jerry

The Power And Potential of The Company You Teach

What A Great Bunch Of Students, Readers and Listeners

Are Now Showing Up

The title of this piece is a play on the subtitle of my book, Friends, “The Power And Potential of The Company You Keep.”  I like the rhythm of that phrase and have mentioned before that I eventually would like to revise that book to focus it on social media, where a lot of people seem confused about what it means to be someone’s friend. But here and now, I apply it to those people who have contacted me since my emergence back into the world after twelve years of incarceration. Those people, and you may well be one of them, who have been positively affected by my books, tapes, seminars, etc. And those adventurous souls who have joined The Moneylove Club or signed up for coaching sessions. I’m really immensely impressed.

No, I’m Not Talking About Being Impressed With Myself

Well, I am of course impressed with myself–anyone who puts themselves out there in the public eye had better be a bit impressed with their own knowledge, skills, and talents–or they have no business going public. But what I’m talking about here is how impressed I am with the quality, intention, and caliber of the people I’m attracting. Impressed with a capital I. Now, I’m fortunate in being able to start out slowly, and haven’t begun to create the major exposure for my ideas that will start happening later this year. It’s a luxury, because it gives me the opportunity to pay personal attention to emails I get, and responses from subscribers and coaching clients.

And I really don’t know if it’s this new information abundant world we live in, or that I’ve somehow raised the standards of the people interested in working with me, but these are not neophytes in the world of personal development or accomplishment. For the most part, they are people who are already more successful than most, living a life and lifestyle they enjoy–but always looking to expand this and explore new horizons and new perspectives and new behaviors.

Choosing Your Audience

Few of us are blessed enough to be able to pick and choose the people we reach with whatever message or information or service or product we are offering. And I honestly feel that if I were able to list the criteria of those kinds of people I most want to reach and teach, those criteria would exactly match the people showing up right now. The entrepreneurs, musicians, therapists, coaches, authors, bodyworkers, dancers, photographers, consultants in every field from physical fitness to education to sexuality–what an amazing and talent array of folks, and what interesting issues they present to me for new ideas, strategies, and suggestions.

And I just had the thought that the people showing up today to partake of the Moneylove material and new prosperity ideas have one quality in common with most of the relationship partners and dear friends who have come into my life in the past. They almost all possess certain skills or knowledge that I don’t. Whether it’s being a whirling dervish, playing classical cello concerts, being a successful blogger or online entrepreneur, they all have stuff they could teach me in addition to learning what I have to offer. That has always seemed to me to be the healthiest kind of cooperative connection.

I’m dwelling on this not just to acknowledge all of my people (or should I say “peeps?” No, I think not.). But to suggest that this be a new aspiration for all of us–to attract a select group who will love what we do, and use it for their highest good and that of others. I’m wary of using the term “friends” too loosely, but I do feel a strong kinship with many of these new respondents and correspondents. So here’s a closing question for you to consider:

“If I could pick and choose my audience, my customer base, my clients–what are the top three things I would like them each to be?”

Jerry

This Busyness Business

The Different Forms of Busy

It was one of my most aware coaching clients who mentioned that she thought I might be advocating hard work as the only path to success after listening to the current audio of The Moneylove Club. On that recording, I said that The Law of Attraction was a lot more than just positive thinking, something I don’t think is stressed enough. Then I went on to say that, and this is from my personal observation, just about everyone featured in The Secret, all those teachers of prosperity and The Law of Attraction, worked their butts off. Many of them are constantly on the go, and it is not unusual for them to do 200-300 talks in a year, practically living in airports. But I wasn’t advocating this behavior, merely illustrating that only part of the story is told in the hugely successful 2006 film.

In fact, one of the phenomenons that uniquely occurs in this group is the “trapped by your staff” syndrome. In order to get that many speaking engagements, a staff is necessary, quite often four or five people whose job it is to book the person, plan the travel arrangements, and take care of all the logistics of a busy speaking career. So if the speaker should want to take, say, a one month vacation in Tahiti, to enjoy some of the fruits of his or her labor, the staff would still have to be paid.

I remember one famous speaker telling me that he missed the days when he and his wife did all his booking and he made $150,000 a year. Now his company was doing about $2 million, but he only got to keep a little over that original $150,000, the rest going for expenses and a staff of six fulltime people. So he was forced to keep a lot busier than he would have liked by virtue of the fact that six people were dependent on him for their income.

For some people, busyness is natural and comfortable, and even relaxing. I think Ray Bradbury, whom I also quote on my audio, is one of these.  I repeated a comment he gave me for my book, Psychological Immortality:

I think busyness is everything–I don’t care what you do as long as you’re busy and as long as you love doing it.

Full Busyness versus Empty Busyness

The dictionary definition of “busyness” is:  active or sustained effort to accomplish something.  It doesn’t say anything about frenetic hyper-scheduling. I think we need to put the whole concept of busyness into two categories, which I’ll label “Full Busyness” and “Empty Busyness”.

Full busyness is the kind of full and satisfying life someone like Ray Bradbury or Richard Branson or The Dalai Lama experience. Lots of creative energy, lots accomplished, but lots of play and the ability to kick back and relax, reflect, meditate when that’s appropriate. This is not the same as someone who fills his or her life with activity for activity’s sake, “busy work” if you will, always operating at a frenetic pace. I think the most important aspect of full as opposed to empty busyness is that the full version always leaves room for unexpected opportunities, wonderful surprises, new adventures and new creative projects and new people.

In Moneylove I talked extensively about Creative Laziness, and in a paragraph entitled, Idleness Is A Myth, I wrote:

Of course, idleness really doesn’t exist. You may be loafing, but you’re not idle. Your brain is still performing its millions of chores, your creative imagination is still going ahead full blast, and your body is still going through all of its changes, Laziness is truly the mother of creativity. If your body and conscious mind are idle, your subconscious mind, your creative mind, can plunge full steam ahead, and your conscious mind will have room for those new ideas to pop up. A busy life will keep you from tapping into a lot of your potential creativity.

For more on achieving Full Busyness rather than the empty version, check out the segment on The Law of Subtraction in my new online book, The Moneylove Manifesto. Just click on its cover at the top of the right margin of this page, or the title under BlogRoll, also in the right margin.

And, finally, here are three questions to ask yourself to see whether you might have too busy a life right now.

1. Have you recently had to turn down a friend inviting you to do something you would really enjoy doing, saying you just don’t have the time.

2. Is there some project that could produce major income or major personal growth that you have put off until some unspecified period, “when I have the time.”

3. Is there something you could learn that would produce a major positive impact on your life, but you haven’t been able to find the time to learn it?

If you said “No.” to all three questions, you probably are not too busy or overscheduled or living a life filled with empty busyness.

And thanks for finding the time to fit my blog in.

Jerry

Moneylove As Philosophy

Some People “Get It”, Some People Don’t

A lot of folks think I’m just another one of those prosperity gurus talking and writing about how to get rich, how to get rich quick, how to get rich and hold onto it. They miss the point, and even Warner Books in the paperback of Moneylove, by putting Think, Get Rich on the cover, missed the point.

Believing and Feeling Are More Important Than Thinking

Okay, here’s the deal. Of course, all positive action leading to positive results starts with thought. But that is just the first spark, the real power comes from believing you will achieve your goals, which of course influences your actions–and feeling your own power and your own possibilities. Without these, you can think until your brain explodes, and you won’t be attracting anything worthwhile.

One of the reasons I am planning to revise, expand, and annotate the original book is because this is something I would love to see other authors do with classic works. I’ve mentioned before that I would love to know what Napoleon Hill would say that’s new–he certainly would have had a lot more ideas since writing Think And Grow Rich (and by the way, his book also was about a lot more than thinking–go back and read it). This project also gives me the opportunity to revisit Moneylove all these years later, and think anew about some of what it contains.

I am also looking at it for the next audio program for The Moneylove Club, which will feature ten statements or ideas from the book, and what I think and feel and believe about them now. One of these is the following quote from Frank Goble’s The Third Force, about the work of pioneering psychologist Abraham Maslow, and his studies of self-actualized people. Maslow was important because he was one of the first to say: let’s study healthy, successful people rather than focus on the sick and disturbed.

Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they are willing to make silly mistakes. The truly creative person is one who can think ‘crazy’; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible–he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are.

A Quote That Can Change Your Life

Oh, I believe this to be absolutely true. If you studied the above paragraph and adopted and adapted it to your life, I have no doubt that your results would be very rewarding indeed.  For me, facing indecision without undue stress is a big one, and I admit I still need to work on it. I think I have flexible down pat, and certainly maintaining my optimism and robust expectations while serving a 12 year prison sentence indicates I am not threatened by unexpected changes in conditions. Self-actualization is an ideal–very few of us will achieve it to perfection, but perfection is not the goal.

What actually constitutes a successful life, I believe, is a constant forward movement toward our highest goals, so you can look back at the end of a day and say, “I’m a little bit closer today than I was yesterday.”

Jerry

Moneylove Mind Mix

Multiple Forms Of Input Increase Brain Power

You may notice that at the top of this blogsite, there is a new item, which you can click on to get information on my new monthly audio and learn about membership in The Moneylove Club. Or you can just click on this link:

http://moneyloveblog.com/moneylove-club-join-now/

What led me to creating this monthly audio was all the response I got in the past year from people whose lives and finances were dramatically and positively influenced by my 1987 Moneylove tape series from Nightingale-Conant. I’ve mentioned before what an amazing and gratifying surprise it was to come out of 12 years in prison and discover that my ideas and concepts were alive and well, even though few people knew that I was. Googling my name and getting thousands of hits, quotes, recommendations, testimonials, was an amazing experience. It led me to the decision to revise and annotate the original Moneylove book, and to start offering personal coaching, and now this audio club.

I strongly believe that one of the reasons my material has had such an impact over so many years is because I discovered early on in my teaching seminars that giving people different kinds of information in different modalities activated more of the subconscious mind and made a more powerful impact in effecting change.

For example, when I did a workshop, I would intentionally break it up, so that my agenda might look like this:

1. Lecture.

2. Visualization led by me.

3. Breaking into small discussion groups.

4. Pairing into twosomes for a prosperity exercise.

5. More lecture.

6. Large group experience or game.

7. Individual sharing in whole group.

I would bounce back and forth, so that we never spent more than fifteen minutes in any one format, and thus it would never be boring and the mind would have to stay alert and keep paying attention. Scientists have since found that this is a way to activate more parts of the brain.  And I have no doubt that some of the people who subscribe to my monthly audio will expand their prosperity significantly even if they are already reading my blogs, or my books, or taking one-to-one coaching. Each of these reaches different parts of the brain, and the more forms you can use to take in information and inspiration, the more potent the internal mix will be.

As an aside, I have a dear friend who talks about all the books she reads, but she actually doesn’t read any books, she listens to them as audiobooks. For some people, including her, this is a great way to experience novels and nonfiction, especially as you can listen to a book on an iPod while doing other physical chores or driving.

But I assert that there is a part of the brain that isn’t getting exercised if you aren’t reading words on a page in a real book. People who choose one or the other form as the only way to experience books are missing out and depriving themselves and their brains.

So I caution and advise you that no matter how much value and pleasure and inspiration you may get from my monthly audios, don’t let them replace all the other ways of taking in information.

And as part of my commitment to create this mind mix, I am now learning some skills in producing videos, which I will add to my repertoire later this year. For it is also true that in addition to taking in stuff at a more potent level if you receive it in several different ways, delivering information in different ways also expands our horizons and mental skills.

Jerry

Moneylove “More Than” List For 2010

10 Reasons 2010 May Not Suck

These are not necessarily in order of importance or significance. In fact, #10 is one of my favorites.

1. You are committed to stop complaining this year.

www.acomplaintfreeworld.org

2. You are never too busy to stop and enjoy some fun, if only for a few minutes.

www.eatpes.com

3. No matter how good or bad your life was at the end of 2009, you are absolutely certain it will be better at the end of 2010.

4. You are sharing your abundance with others through your church, synagogue, mosque, fraternal organization, trade association, some private entity, or just on your own.

5. You are giving some of your valuable time to a worthy and/or passionate cause–whether reading to a blind person, attending a city council meeting, delivering food packages to the needy, writing a letter to the editor of your local paper, or commenting online on some blog post you particularly like.

6. You are doing something new, nurturing, and fun with your body. Whether it’s learning folk dances or the tango, getting involved with a new form of body work like The Alexander Technique or Rubenfeld Synergy Method or Rolfing, rock climbing, or jumping into a vat of warm chocolate pudding.

7. You are constantly discovering and exploring new adventures, new toys, and new learning experiences online.

8. You are mentoring someone, guiding them to greater success by sharing your experience and knowledge.

9. You are really feeling the newness of this new decade, and always have room in your life and consciousness for someone new or some new idea that will shake up your entire perspective on life.

10. You are regularly reading this blog. And are also constantly checking out  sources of new and positive thoughts and techniques for living life well and prosperously.

Some of these you may already be doing, some you may need to add as the year continues to unfold. Your own formula and pacing should prevail. But make no mistake about it, if you are living and feeling these ten suggestions, there is absolutely no way your life can suck in 2010.

Jerry

MoneyLove “Less Than” List For 2010

10 Reasons Your Life May Suck In This New Year

This list may provoke or anger or motivate you, but do remember it is just my opinion, not a proclamation handed down from Mount Olympus.

1.  You’ve had no intention of using this beginning of a new year and new decade to motivate and inspire yourself to new action.

2. You are complaining about the same stuff you complained about in 2009.

3. You haven’t reached out to a single new person in 2010.

4. You have no idea what you would ask for if a genie granted you 3 wishes.

5. You haven’t read a single book in the first month of the new year, fiction or nonfiction.

6. You couldn’t care less about Haiti.

7. You are cynical and pessimistic about politics and anything in Washington ever changing for the better.

8. You spend lots of time text messaging people you don’t care about that much about things you care about even less.

9. You use a lot of time joining silly games and communities on Social Media sites. (Yes, I mean Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc.)

10. You distribute dozens of things other people have said, quotes and aphorisms, rather than tapping into your own wisdom and coming up with your own philosophy.

None of these items are necessarily that destructive by themselves, but having several of them as current factors in your life is indicative of major stultification and stagnation.

And if you don’t see a call to action in this list, then good luck to you for the rest of the year.

Jerry

Prosperity Coaching – Restarting The New Millennium

New Millennium Prosperity Coaching With A Brand New Tool

I’ve been thinking a lot about the 2010 milestone–the beginning of the second decade of this new millennium. And how so many of us had major dreams and aspirations for the turning of the new century and new millennium in 2000 that just haven’t materialized. Of course, the tragedy of 9/11 changed a lot about our perceptions of the world and perhaps it had a major impact on you. But here’s a new opportunity to make this a new time with new results in your life. To help accomplish this, as part of the preparation for doing a personal coaching session with me, I am creating a new version of a tool that has helped tens of thousands of people focus on their accomplishments, desires, and aspirations.

The Jerry Gillies New Year’s Questionnaire

It originally started as my contribution to a New Year’s evening at my apartment in Miami in 1976, the Bicentennial Year. I designed 76 questions each of us could answer for ourselves, and then discuss if we wished, about the year just gone by and our hopes and dreams for the one just beginning. This expanded in later years, and the questions kept evolving. Now I have come up with 110 Questions For 2010. And part of the emotional preparation for all of this is to look at 2010 as a restart of the New Millennium, a do over if you will.

Now here, I have to toot my own horn a bit. I am known for the power and potency of my questions. In fact, Dr. Wayne Dyer told me a list of questions I created for couples to ask and answer for each other in my first book was the single most valuable tool he had discovered when teaching a course in marriage counseling at St. Johns University.

What is different this time is that I am going to ask everyone who signs up for a one hour coaching session to answer these 110 questions, then send as many of the the answers as they are willing to share directly to me. I am asking that they send at least ten of their answers. I will read through them as my preparation for a very individual coaching session.

If you register, you will immediately receive the fourteen page questionnaire you can download or print. You can then highlight the answers that are most significant for you, or I will pick out several that we can discuss specifically during the actual coaching. So far as I know or have been able to discover, no other coach in the world offers this kind of advance preparation, this kind of honing in on the client’s specific needs. And quite honestly, in some early sampling of coaching clients, I have seen that this list of simple questions may be a powerful source of transformative inspiration worth far more than the coaching fee itself. Especially as it becomes a back-and-forth shared experience between the two of us.

One reason for this unique component of my coaching is that I want to start off with each client at a higher level of awareness. And that’s for each of us. Most coaches expect their clients to keep coming back, so that their wants and desires and needs will slowly but surely unfold over time. I am designing this offer so that one session will do it for you, move you into your next level of peak performance. Sure, I would love to have you continue to work with me. But not because you haven’t gotten full value in the first session and feel unfinished, rather because it has proved so valuable that you want more to add-on to your successful results.

For thirty years now, I have been teaching, writing, mentoring, coaching, and speaking about prosperity consciousness. And because of that wealth of experience, I know you can be richer than you are now. Despite the economy, despite your own doubts, despite having some negative beliefs that have held you down until now. In other words, in spite of everything you perceive as the reality of today, you can dramatically change your results by listening to someone who knows what they’re talking about. Someone who won’t let you get away with dawdling or dithering or delaying.

So here are five ways in which my coaching sessions are different and much more empowering.

1. Investment.

Having done one-to-one sessions in the past at $1000 per hour, I am now doing a test of a new approach, and want to make it accessible to people who have a burning desire to change their current situation, and will make good case histories for future books and seminars. $197 is the one-time, one session fee.

A personal note:

I know this is not the accepted practice–mentioning the price so soon up front goes against most conventional marketing wisdom. But I’ll confess I am letting my personal bias dictate my decision. I hate having to read my way through pages and pages of marketing ploys before I find out how much it’s going to cost me. I just received a sales letter email from a very famous and successful entrepreneur selling a course. I wanted to know how much he was charging, but had to scroll down past sixteen pages to finally find out this “$1597” value would cost me $277. The truth? My time wasted with reading sixteen pages should be compensated with at least $277 just to read all this hype.

(I have lots more to share with you–I want to provide as much information about what you’ll be getting as possible. But I also realize you may not want to read further, or you may already know this is the gift you are ready to give yourself right now. If this is true, you can leave this letter and go to the link below and sign up.)

2. Action-Oriented with Unique Follow-Up.

My purpose in creating this special series is to get you moving in your life, and I will design at least three specific strategies for you to implement, with a follow-up to check on how you are doing and to see whether your program needs tweaking or modifying in any specific way. You will be given three specific tasks to perform in a set amount of time. These will be based on your individual needs and desires, based on information from your answers to the 110 questions and what you discuss during the coaching session itself. You also will be given three additional, very individual questions to ponder on your own at the end of the coaching session. A week or two after your session, I will, by phone or email, personally contact you to see how you have been doing with your three tasks, and what you’ve learned from your three personal questions.

It’s not enough that I give you ideas and concepts that you find interesting or entertaining. My intention is not only to inspire and encourage, but to motivate and activate. If you aren’t putting this stuff into immediate practice in your life, it isn’t working. My whole motivating goal in putting out this unprecedented program is to move toward my long-range goal of producing a book incorporating many success stories of people who have used my techniques to make dramatic changes in their quality of life and standard of living. If you aren’t going to contribute to that result, I really would rather you didn’t participate.

3. Continuing coaching.

If you are excited about the process and your results and want to do some more sessions, I will personally design a continuing coaching program for you, taking into account your goals and desires, your available time, and your budget. But your initial commitment is just a one-time $97 investment–there will be no automatic debiting or billing thereafter–you will have the option to continue, but you will have to tell me directly you want to do so.

Here’s an area where many information marketers are condescending and deceptive. They don’t mention in the initial marketing material that they want you to keep on buying more and more of their products. Sometimes they go so far as to build in a continuing monthly debit that will be charged to your credit card or bank account if you don’t read the small print and figure out how to cancel it.
I abhore and deplore these tactics–they make my skin crawl. On the other hand, if you decide you want more, and only because the initial coaching session works for you and helps you make immediate progress in your life, I would love to keep working with you, and will make you a very special offer at a very special rate.

After the first session, or even before if you know you will want more than one such experience, you may sign up for five coaching sessions that can be spread out over a six month period at the price of less than four sessions. 5 for $750.

4. Additional free material.

You will immediately be put on a special list and receive weekly email prosperity messages and ideas before they appear in future books, on my blogs, or in any other form. This is a two-way street and win-win proposition, as I will ask for your feedback and reports on any positive results you have putting these ideas and suggestions to use. And as I come upon audios, videos, reports and trainings that pertain to your particular issues, I will forward these to you regularly. Just as you may email friends those things you think they will be most interested in of find most useful, I will do the same for my coaching clients.

5. Free recording.

You will receive an MP3 recording of your coaching session so that you won’t have to be distracted taking notes during your session. And instructions on making the most of this recording for your own success.
Another two-way street and win-win situation. I will also have a copy of the session and may want to use parts of it in seminars, or on my blogs, and by signing up for a coaching/consultation, you agree to have it recorded, though your name won’t ever be used, unless you give specific permission to do so.

Buying Your Ticket For Transportation To Your Future Success

I know you are probably used to a lot of hyperbole about the value of various programs–everyone does it–telling you this is $5000 worth of materials you are getting for $39.95, etc. Where I choose to be different is that I have actually been paid $1000 for personal coaching sessions. And the people who paid me this, fans of the original Moneylove bestselling book, or of my Nightingale-Conant cassette program, were excited to have my personal attention and more than willing to pay that amount, and no one ever took advantage of my money-back satisfaction guarantee. I keep the names of all such clients confidential, but you would be surprised at some of the major figures in the world of motivation and success who saw their careers take off after one or more sessions with me.
Actually, though I could be a bit deceptive and use this in a bold print headline, I have been paid as much as $5000 for a one hour coaching session. However, this amount was paid at a charity auction, and the money went to the charity rather than into my pocket. But the client said it was worth every penny and continued with several more sessions (at a considerably lower price, I’ll admit).
And I’ve a lot more experience and knowledge now, so my coaching sessions are even more valuable.

Your Decision To Take The Next Step
And unlike anyone else selling this kind of program, I am not going to tell you that it’s time for you to take the next step in your life. That’s your decision, and I don’t want you as a coaching client if you are not yet ready to take the plunge, to start doing things differently and thinking new thoughts in order to get new and different results. If you know in your heart you are ready for this, then welcome. If not, I wish you well, and perhaps another time. Yes, it may be a lot more expensive then, but the truth is if you are ready then but not now, it will be money well spent, and a wait wisely worth it.

I hate false ultimatums. So I’m not going to tell you I’m only taking on so many clients and that’s it, or claim that this offer is only good for the next week or month or 24 hours. But obviously, as I am highly focused on creating my blogs and my revised and annotated new edition of Moneylove for early release next year, there is a limited amount of time I am willing to devote to this. When I’ve filled up what I consider to be a reasonable coaching schedule, I will withdraw the offer. Some of my superstar friends in the motivational world already are telling me I should charge $1000 for these sessions. One recently said to me, “Your work changed my life and made me a millionaire several times over. If anyone is charging a thousand dollars for an hour of coaching, it should certainly be the author of Moneylove.”

Your Coach’s Commitment

So here’s my commitment. I will deliver to you a coaching session with the intention of making it worth $1000 an hour. It may be a subtle difference, but when we start our session, I want the kind of attention from you as if you were paying $1000, and I will give you the same elegant, high-end attention. This is only worth it for me and you if it produces results. I’m not going to be satisfied to accept your money and then send you on your merry way. I want to know what is happening in your life, and how effectively you are using my ideas, and how you may be tailoring them to your own situation. We are entering into much more of a partnership than most coach-client relationships.

Are You Ready?

And I am not going to talk you into this, or keep sending you marketing letters with more enticing offers. This is my best offer, and you know right now whether now is the time and place in your life to move forward in this way. If you can’t make a decision, then you are not ready and I am not interested in having you as a client. I do not want to spend my limited time trying to train wishy-washy, uncertain, uncommitted clients. It’s too much work with no payoff in terms of satisfaction for me. When you’ve been doing this for thirty years, you know immediately who is going to get positive results because they are willing, ready, and able to make immediately changes in their current patterns, and who isn’t going to succeed because they are stuck in old habits of indecision, doubt, and fear. Are you one of the ready ones? You tell me–you’re the only one who can.