Why Financial Success Demands Personal Growth

“Why Personal Development IS The Missing X-Factor In The Development Of Increased Profitability”

If you’ve been working through the lessons in The Ten Steps To Wealth, you’ll know that growth in profitability is never attained by accident… if it is, it’s not sustainable.

Sustainable profitability, either on a personal or business level, is “always” the result of personal growth. You can take the best information in the world, the best “how to” strategies, and a map clearly indicates the road ahead and give it to everyone you meet. Yet only a minority will ever achieve the riches at the end of the road. “Why Is It So“?

As I mentioned in my last post, “When you put “how to” strategies into minds that have been conditioned for the “work/stress, not enough time, not enough money treadmill”, the foundations, ie., the conditioning of those minds, do not have the necessary references or perceptions to successfully navigate the “how to” strategy through to success.

The supply of information is available everywhere, it’s ever increasing and it’s readily accessible. On top of this, it’s either free or it’s very inexpensive. Especially when you compare it to Returns Of Investment of time and energy.

For example… in the first year of my first ever business, I generated an annual turnover of $77,000. In the second year, I generated a turnover of $1,800,000 an increase of 2337%. I seldom hear of these returns in real estate or share markets. In the third year, I increased turnover to $3,400,000… an increase of 189% on the previous year.

Nothing changed except for one factor… it was the same business and I was the only person doing it. The only thing that changed was my philosophy towards developing myself. I took every single cent of profit from the first year and invested it in my personal growth and then reflected this growth through paradigm shifts in marketing.

Personal development is the single most important factor in your ability to make more money, and achieve both economic and personal freedom.

Something exciting happens when you read what philosophers such as Peter Godfrey-Smith say about the evolution of learning rules for different species.

Godfrey-Smith looked at the learning rules for vertebrates such as ourselves and for cephalopods such as octopi. Because we evolved completely independently of each other, it was thought that learning rules would have also evolved completely independently.

What Godfrey-Smith observed instead, was that similar rules of learning are seen in the two completely separate streams in the evolution of life. He notes that we can, “Both learn by reinforcement, by attending to the good and bad consequences of our actions, by having some behaviours reinforced positively and some reinforced negatively.”

“If we can both do that”, he says, “And do that in the same kinds of ways, then that’s something which evolution has done twice over. It seems to be a sort of basic design principle for minds… that you build something with trial and error learning.”

What this boils down to is that in order to learn, you MUST engage your subject matter with ‘trial and error actions’, ‘positive and negative reinforcement’, and by ‘attending to consequences’.

So, if you’re not adventuring forward, if you’re not altering your mindset, if you’re not altering your philosophy, if you are not altering your perceptions, if you’re not changing how you think and if you’re not changing how you feel… then you are not engaging true and sustainable learning. You’re not personally developing.

You can smother yourself with all the strategies and tactics you like, but if learning doesn’t penetrate to the cellular level of your existence, your personal foundations will not change.

If you fail to personally develop, you fail to financially develop… both are intractably linked.

Join me on The Ten Steps To Wealth and make sure you get the results you want.

Paul Counsel

Inattentional Blindness

“How To Avoid The Biggest Mistake People Make And Why It’s Critically Important To Stay Focused”

Over the past fifteen years, through The Ten Steps To Wealth and other programs, I’ve literally taught thousands how to enhance their financial education in a way that allows you to become financially independent.

Given this, I still see one critical mistake continually presenting itself.

No matter how enthusiastic I am about communicating the need for focus on the end goal; the majority of people who start their journey, eventually allow themselves to become distracted from financially productive activity. And of course, once you’re distracted, you cannot achieve the things that are really important to you.

Here’s why focus is so critical. Not so long ago, two psychologists, Irvin Rock and Arien Mack made a startling discovery which they termed “inattentional blindness”. It has to do with “perception” and whether or not you can see everything your eyes are looking at.

Most people believe what their eyes see and think they see everything in their field of view.

But what Rock and Mack discovered during their psychological research was evidence of a phenomena they called “preattentional perception”. Now this is a big concept so stay with me here because it’s critically important.

Mack and Rock make a radical claim that there is no such thing as conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it. This is a huge concept and it means that if you have not thought something into reality first, then you cannot attend to seeing it and if you’re not attending to something, there can be no conscious perception of it.

If you’re not clear about what’s important to you. And if you’re not attending to what’s important, your brain simply doesn’t see it and therefore you cannot create it.

You can learn more about inattentional blindness through the following links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness  and http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Inattentional_blindness

The reason why clarity is so important is that it sets up the “preattentional perception” which is the critical step prior to visual perception.

‘If you know where you’re going, not only is it easier to get there, but your brain can actually perceive the something you’re aiming for. When your brain can already see something in mental reality, it can create it in physical reality.

The reverse is also true. If it cannot see something in mental reality, it cannot manifest it in physical reality.

Most people keep making this one critical mistake. When you allow yourself to become distracted, you become “inattentionally blind” which means, as a sighted person, you become as unsighted as a blind person. When you’re inattentionally blind, there is no perception being created in your visual cortex.

When I understood this, I made a lifelong promise that I’d never let daily drama distract me from my mission. I attended to my intention with both quantity and quality of focus. I never let anything take my focus away from what was important for me.

Step one = clarity. Step two = attend to that clarity… attend to your intention.

The sad thing is that most people dissipate their energies on a series of unrelated distractions simply because they don’t really know where they’re going or what they really want.

Instead, they automatically, and unconsciously, drift along with the current of life doing the same things day after day.

Without clarity and focus, actions are half hearted, thoughts are often confusing, motivations continually crisscross, habits are unproductive, energy is scattered, harmony is absent, and frustration is present.

What you’re left with is the often contradictory guidance of conventional wisdom which always leads to ruts of sameness, settling for less and predictable outcomes.

Don’t live your life by the majority conventional wisdom, it simply cannot deliver what you may dream of.

When contrasted with purpose, clarity and individualised achievement, the wisdom of convention always has you experiencing ‘less than’.

When you lose focus, your brain loses its ability to perceive. Please, please, please never lose focus. Keep attending to The Ten Steps To Wealth and don’t forget to ask questions.

Extraordinary achievement awaits you

Paul Counsel

 

 

The Mysteries Of Money

“How To Understand The Mysteries Of Money And Their Relationship To Mind”

In Step Four of The Ten Steps To Wealth, I encourage you to answer a very important question… “Did you learn to be poor?” I hope you find the time to seriously reflect on this question because as you’ll see below, it’s of critical importance.

For the past 5000 years, dating back to ancient Mesopotamia, desires around money have occupied and fascinated the minds and lives of countless generations. Today, little has changed.

Surplus money for the “good life” still occupies the minds of current generations.

Despite today’s embarrassing abundance of “increase your profitability”, “get rich quick” and “wealth for life” information… statistical and observable evidence demonstrates that the mysteries of money still remain an enigma for most people.

It seems that only a minority ever get to authentically enjoy the “good life” while the majority retain their positions on the “work/stress, not enough time, not enough money tread mill.”

My financial experience of growing up was similar to most people in that I couldn’t help but learn from my environment.

As you may know, both my parents were born Deaf mutes and of course they knew nothing about the ways of money other than earn and spend via the exchange of labour and time.

As a child growing up in the sixties, I vividly remember the American physicist and television personality Professor Julius Sumner Miller constantly asking the question ‘Why Is It So’? I remember it being such a fertile question and it stayed with me ever since.

With thousands of generations never coming within a bull’s roar of anything that resembles financial independence, have you ever wondered whether or not the generally assessable “how to” information is incomplete?

In the burgeoning knowledge economy, why there’s so much “how to” information around is not difficult to understand. What’s more difficult is why the positive effects of this “how to” information still seems to escape most people.

When it comes to decision making, it’s natural to think that you act through filters of purposeful, rational processes. But as economist Dan Ariely notes in Predictably Irrational, being rational is far from observed truth. “Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes.”

In The Buying Brain, Dr A.K. Pradeep, CEO and founder of NeuroFocus, makes a compelling case for 95% of an individual’s buying decisions being made beyond their level of conscious awareness. Others observe that it’s 95% of all decisions.

In his recent book Subliminal, theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow observes that the unconscious mind shapes your experiences of money and the world around you far more than you might realise.

It’s something Napoleon Hill observed. In Think And Grow Rich, first published in 1937 and inspired by the richest person in the world at the time, Scottish-American businessman Andrew Carnegie, Hill clearly directs his references to “mind” rather than “how to” strategies.

He didn’t write ‘shares and grow rich’, ‘trade currencies and grow rich’, ‘buy real estate and grow rich’, ‘get into business and grow rich’ or ‘market yourself and grow rich’. It was all about thinking and using ‘mind’ to change the structure of ‘brain’ so that mind could accommodate riches.

What Hill learned from 20 years of research and over 600 interviews with many of the world’s most successful people, was that when, and not until, you get the mind operating in a specific way, riches, in any number of different contexts, stand a better than even chance of materialising for you.

As much as 99% of your potential to succeed in experiencing the “good life” depends on whether or not you change the programming of your subconscious mind. But most people opt for “how to” strategies because they think that’s where their answers lie. And even though they try to skill themselves to the best of their abilities… they rarely if ever succeed.

Think and Grow Rich is founded on Hill’s earlier work The Law of Success, in which he developed 16 “laws” of success. Hill said that when applied, anybody could achieve success. He later condensed these laws into 13 principles that formed his philosophy of personal achievement.

Recently, Mark Victor Hansen noted that the years since have proven 2 of the laws/principles to be most important: 1) The MasterMind principle/process and 2) Know very clearly where you want to go… Both critical aspects of mind.

When you put “how to” strategies into minds that have been conditioned for the “work/stress, not enough time, not enough money treadmill”, the foundations, ie., the conditioning of those minds, do not have the necessary references or perceptions to successfully navigate the “how to” strategy through to success.

It’s the central reason why surplus money for the “good life” still escapes the minds of current generations. The Ten Steps To Wealth is an online eCourse designed to help you change such programming.

Because anything to do with thoughts, behaviour and emotions around money must first well from within mind, in future issues of Ten Steps To Wealth, I’ll be exploring different facets of mind and its relationship to money.

So stay tuned because over the coming weeks I’ll be opening up a rich tapestry of ideas that in some way, shape or form, will benefit you on your journey.

Warmest of regards

Paul

Discovering The Power Of Your Natural Genius

“When you Discover The One Secret To Extraordinary Success That High Achievers Know But School Never Taught You, Achievement, Success and Freedom come easier and faster for you…”

In The Ten Steps To Wealth, I talk about the fact that savvy entrepreneurs and multi-passionate high achievers know that the right mindset must be accessed before success can materialise for you.

They know that you can work as hard as you like but success, freedom, independence and financial security are gained through the opposite of what you’ve been taught.

High achievers know that the right mindset is found within your natural inborn genius… And when you learn to tap into the power of your instinctive genius, it automatically puts you in the right mindset.

But, if you’re like most people, the broader conditioning process taught you to hide your natural genius beneath layers of old dogma, old thinking, old conditioning, old habits, old beliefs, old hurts and old learning. But the good news is that it’s just sitting there just waiting for you to give it the right instructions.

Savvy entrepreneurs know that when you uncover your natural genius, you’re automatically start attracting all the information, skills, people, opportunities, influence, control, joy, fun, appreciation, independence, connection and achievement you desire.

Learning to connect with your instinctive/intuitive genius is literally the most rapid results improvement discovery of the past 50 years. It’s a proven system for getting the exact results you want. And it’s based on the original research of Carl Jung, a true genius in his own right.

When you tap into your natural intuitive genius, you’ll:

  1. Get the biggest breakthroughs in your personal and professional development
  2. Instantly dissolve barriers to more connection, influence and lucrative results
  3. Speed past natural blind spots that promote failing by tripping you up
  4. Smash through glass ceilings and grow in confidence on a daily basis
  5. Immerse yourself in intuitive FLOW states so you experience more vitality
  6. Unshackle what’s holding you back so you can eliminate frustrating old results
  7. Destroy procrastination forever by discovering your unique intuitive genius
  8. Ignite your confidence for learning and making the right decisions.

This last point alone has the potential to influence achievement in a way that decreases stress and fires up independence so that you can add more fun, success and value to your experiences.

Jung discovered that each individual has a part of their mind that literally opens the doors to genius and that you could learn to stimulate your genius on a daily basis. And it’s through your natural genius that you discover the mindset, or mastermind, necessary to achieve rapid progress.

Your natural genius advantage accelerates 3 areas of performance…

Firstly, you grow in inner strength because of the confidence and certainty you develop. This gives you more personal power and a heightened ability to influence and control situations, people and outcomes. Not in a manipulative way, but in a way that comes with finding more confidence and certainty from within yourself.

Secondly, it gives you the drive to achieve more of what’s important for you. And your achievements come faster and easier than ever before because your innate natural genius knows exactly what to do. The decisions you make are more productive because what to do next is always clearer and more logical for you.

Thirdly, the appreciation you feel from others rockets to new levels. You’ll connect to customers, co-workers and bosses in a way that has them offering you more praise, appreciation, and loyalty. People feel more magnetically attracted to you, they want to be around you and they want to know who you are.

This is exactly what happened to me. I struggled with the lack of achievement for 40 years. But when I seriously started searching for a better way, two things happened. I discovered where I was stuck and because of this, I discovered the instinctive genius that Jung said we all have inside us.

As a result of applying what I learned I became a multimillionaire living with more passion, fun, independence and freedom than ever before… Now it’s your turn. {Read more here}

To your continued success

Paul Counsel

The Destructive Effects Of Down-Streaming

“Are You Allowing The Destructive Processes Of Down-Streaming To Steal Your Financial Future?”

“Down-streaming”  which is defined as allowing seductive marketing, instant gratification and increased living costs to steal your savings and hard worked for wages right from under your nose every single time you get paid. Just like most people, every time you get paid, you’ve been taught to send your money down-stream into the pockets of every Tom, Dick and Harry instead of keeping and multiplying it.

According to The Ten Steps To Wealth, it’s the most destructive financial process I know about and I’ll bet it’s the #1 cause of ongoing money distress for you.

It’s not your earning capacity that’s the problem… the real problem is the way you’ve been taught to handle money.

The real elephant in the room that nobody is talking about is that we’re all taught to “suck at money making“. All your life, you’ve been taught to earn money by exchanging your time and labour for it. Then you’ve taught to spend that money as soon as you get it.

And if you don’t have enough money, you’re taught to spend on credit and pay huge amounts of interest for the convenience of destructive debt. And unless things change, you’re always going to come off second best. No if, or buts about it.

This happens because of 3 conditioned mindsets based on earn, spend and borrow. They demand down-streaming from you. That’s why most people keep struggling with money all their lives. You probably don’t realise that you’re down-streaming because you’ve never been taught any other way.

And you probably don’t know that if you reversed this process, you’d have the equivalent of a goldmine which means independence and freedom for the rest of your life.

Your life’s time is too precious to keep losing time, security, independence, joy, and freedom. Sadly, some people lose their health, their relationships, their families, their businesses and their savings because they’re following the destructive practices of down-streaming.

Here’s why it’s important to you to avoid down-streaming… When you work too hard for too little money, you miss out on gaining your goals, and achieving important things like financial freedom security and independence. Because you can’t afford it, you also miss out on time for fun, adventure and doing exciting stuff that really restores you.

Missing out on financial independence means you’re forced to endure the uncertainty of world economic events and the further erosion of value and savings. And the older you get, the more you miss out on. Then it becomes harder to make up for lost time and you end up making more mistakes and falling further behind. Because time is running out, you can’t afford bad decisions or future mistakes.

Eventually, you’re pushed away from decision makers, opportunities and friends because you don’t have time for them. You end up failing more and less approval and validation come your way. You lose control and your social influence shrinks.

Your ideas stop carrying weight and you’re more often taken for granted than taken seriously. The reality is that you steadily lose confidence, power, control and independence.

But when you learn what I’m about to share with you, and you take the action steps I’m going to recommend, you’ll reach your goals with more confidence and certainty. And you’ll get the outcomes you want faster and easier.

Enjoy more of The Ten Steps To Wealth by registering for your results changing eCourse. It’s complimentary and you get to experience a whole bunch of other advantages.

To your success

Paul C ounsel

How To Have Laser Beam Focus

“How to Experience Deeper Self-Awareness, Greater Achievement and Laser Beam Focus in 2012 & Beyond”

The Ten Steps To Wealth is a practical eCourse that’s personalized to you, if you want more freedom, more connectedness, more time better results and more money than you’ve been getting in past years.

Did you know that, on average, you have approximately 80,000 thoughts per day? The disheartening fact is that about 79,900 of those thoughts were the same as yesterday and will be the same again tomorrow. Such is the power of your mind’s reflexive processing!

In the past decade, much has been discovered about the thinking systems that govern our daily lives and the results we get. American Psychologist Daniel Kahneman is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for work which radically altered the way we understand models of judgment and decision making.

In his groundbreaking work, Kahneman reveals the brain’s two systems, System 1 and System 2, that drive our capabilities and confidence, but also our faults and biases that play out in everything from business and stock markets, through making more money and investing, to planning a home or vacation.

The Ten Steps To Wealth eCourse is designed to teach you how to access the best money thinking and actions from yourself. And this is extremely important because if you use the wrong thinking system at the wrong time, your results are likely to end as disasters.

System 1 thinking is the ‘default’ system. It’s a rapid response reflexive system that’s intuitive, automatic, unconscious, protective and emotional. It’s geared for survival. System 2 is slower, more reflective,  conscious, deliberative, and more sequential in its processes. It’s geared for growth, evolution and expansion. It’s the system you need to access if you want to transform your money results.

Most underachievement is driven by using the wrong system at the wrong time. Fast thinking is full of fear, loss aversion, faults and biases which have a pervasive influence on our thoughts, behaviours and results.

Achievement is driven by the reflectiveness of slow thinking and knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.

Success comes from knowing when you should and shouldn’t trust your intuition or the reflexive thinking of System 1.

You simply cannot rely on mindset alone if your ambition is to create personal change, or achieve a goal of any significance in the years ahead. If you are aware of the two thinking systems, and their respective “internal commentaries”; you’ll notice that a choice toward growth automatically invokes an “internal dialogue” which throws up a multitude of barriers that sabotage your real abilities.

Success means discovering how you can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that stifle your achievement and often get you into trouble.

The Ten Stpes To Wealth offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both your professional and personal lives. Step by step, I help you design a more effective guidance mechanism that allows you to live an empowered and focused life.

I’ll provide the know how, two decades of experience with thousands of people, glimpses of the possible, years of personal achievement and the space for growth. All you need to bring is your willingness to engage, openness to possibility and a genuine ambition for growth in the coming years.

Click here and join me on an exciting journey of discovery.

Connect with you soon

Paul Counsel

From Dead Flat Broke To Financial Freedom

“How To Go From Dead Flat Broke To Financial Freedom”

Welcome to the Ten Steps To Wealth. With economic news from all around the world becoming more negative by the day, it’s time to invest in a journey of change in order to bring about a new and profitable future for yourself.

I know this journey has the potential to be most profitable journey because what you are about to read describes a shortened version of the journey I’ve travelled over the past few years.

It’s been a journey from dead flat broke and living in the back of cars, to the ability to make more money than I’d ever dreamed was possible.

It’s my intention that this blog, and its subsequent posts, really forms the basis of the journey that begged me to move away from financial distress so that I could tap into the potential for financial freedom that existed in me for 40 years without me ever having realised it.

I’m documenting this journey as a series of clearly defined steps so that you might travel a similar pathway. If you want to move faster along this pathway than my blogging will reveal, you can access a full description of your journey towards financial freedom by immersing yourself in the free eCourse. You can get it here.

If you want to ignite your ability to achieve more success with money  and finally get yourself into a place of financial independence so you never have to worry about the damage that economic turmoil is doing to your savings and your future, the most important thing about this journey is that it will have you moving from a lifestyle of necessity to a lifestyle of choice.

No more sleepless nights, no more tossing and turning late at night because your worried mind won’t shut down, AND no more feelings of shame because you often have to turn to your children and say, “we can’t afford it”.

The Ten Steps To Wealth describes a journey away from sameness and always having to settle for less; to the joy and relief of financial freedom.

It really has been an adventure where each day brings new and pleasant surprises. And it’s an adventure that I’d highly encourage you to take. If you care to register for the eCourse, I’ll be there every step of the way with you. Through my live Q&A sessions, you’ll be able to ask me any question you like from anywhere around the world.

Imagine that, thousands of dollars worth of complimentary wealth mentoring and money mentoring.  It’s my turn to give back all that I have learned from my mentors and this is the best way I can do it.

In a nut shell, the Ten Steps To Wealth is a journey of transition from the demands of a dead end job and frustrating debt, to a position of financial freedom and absolute happiness.

It doesn’t matter if you’re one of the growing number of work at home moms who want to make more money from the comfort of your own home, or one of the growing number of parents who are having to bail their children out of debilitating debt.

Maybe you one of the millions now reaching retirement age but the only future you see for yourself is more work because your savings have been destroyed by cons, falling values, increasing prices and share markets that are taking a hammering. One thing is for sure, the only way your financial results are going to change is for something new to come from you, or for something new to come to you.

Allow me to offer you a new way of thinking and hopefully, you’ll experience the relief of never having to work ever again and never having to suffer the distress of lost savings.

Let me ask you a question. If your current lifestyle results were seeds, and you planted those seeds in a fertile environment, would you like the same results to grow back, or would you like different results to grow back?

Think about your money results, are your results meeting and surpassing your expectations?

If not, why not?

Perhaps I can help change your results through the Ten Steps To Wealth. Don’t forget to send in your questions. Click here for access

Speak with you again soon

Paul Counsel