I was speaking recently with my friend Bonnie. Bonnie is a Facebook buddy but also a real life friend of a dozen+ years.  She’s always full of ideas for networking and promoting and she loves to help friends make the most of themselves.  Usually when Bonnie and I talk, it’s after church. The New Way POD has live music and the musicians and choir really rock.  So at the end of the service, my brain and my body are way over on the right hemisphere, dancing and singing for hours afterward.  Love drunk.  Bonnie, far more equal brained than I am, can hold a coherent conversation right afterward.  I, meanwhile, am just soaking up the vibe, and smiling is about all I can do.  And Bonnie, never superficial, is asking some remarkable questions she has been researching.

I knew if I did my best to just focus on her and her words, even if I wasn’t getting everything she said, I would have a chance at recalling it to contemplate later.  Later when my left brain began functioning again.  It would turn out that was a good metaphor for our conversation to follow.

She used the word competition as it relates to business, and I interjected that I did not believe in competition.  I don’t believe anyone does exactly what I do, nor can I duplicate what they do, so it’s not really competition.

She talked about someone being an expert in their field doesn’t have much competition.  Some say I’m an expert in my field, and I can’t disagree.  However, I don’t promote myself as an expert.  If someone knows who I am, and wants what I have to offer, they will find me if it is to be.  If not, I am blessed to have plenty of business without that.

Bonnie asked what steps did I take to come to that place where I didn’t think I was in competition with anyone, and I’m paraphrasing her from memory here.  I had to give her question some thought.  Because the fact is that I did not set out to become a magazine publisher or a psychic medium. I did not take steps A-Z to accomplish that, and I did not study nor struggle to get into the business.  I really just fell into both careers rather synchronistically.  I did not plan on either. But I knew this was a right brained answer to her left brained question.  But it was all I had.

I used to think I just had good luck, but then I came to discover that our thoughts create our beliefs which create our reality.  I’ve always been an optimistic person.  My mother always told me I could accomplish anything and I believed it.  From the time I discovered Shakti Gawain‘s 1978 Book on Creative Visualization, I began doing just that.  Here’s an except from the process.

This was years before I discovered Abraham-Hicks, whose playful exercises helped me refine the attraction process.  I found after awhile that I usually attracted a situation or result that was better than the one I had set as a goal.  That gave me increased faith that the Universe was indeed on my side, and wanted me to have all the things I wanted to have, and better.  So I can’t say that it was even a struggle to learn to have faith.  Faith was the natural outgrowth after connecting the cause to the effect, time and time again, and seeing what happened.  Taking note of what worked.

I wasn’t always so easy going.  I was always optimistic, though.  I learned as I mellowed and stopped worrying and started trusting that if I continued to bring to mind the fact that I have always had enough and plenty, and I would always continue to attract that, that kept that belief alive in me and that belief serves me very well to this day.  I cultivate that belief.  I remind myself that just as the giant oak tree comes from the tiny acorn, just so do my dollars flow out of who I am, and what I am being and doing.

What other things do I do that got me to be in a place where I don’t feel I have any competition? I have the skills to do what I do.  I don’t have personality conflicts with friends and don’t have drama in my life. I’ve done tons of forgiveness work, so I don’t harbor much unresolved baggage.  I realize on a deep level that we are all one organism here on planet Earth, parts of one whole.

I don’t have anyone I have to report to or answer for, so of course it’s easy for me, right?  Well, the point is that as a result of my past thinking and beliefs, my life has evolved to a place where I don’t have to report to anyone or have drama in my life or things to worry about.  The one followed the other.  It was a natural progression.

What do I do that’s different than what someone else wanting to succeed in their career, as an expert in their field, with no sense of competition, might do? Well, I don’t do any mainstream business strategies for succeeding in my career, other than discovering or acquiring the skills to produce what I produce.  But I do have a daily spiritual practice and I think it all flows from that. I meditate twice a day for an hour each.  I do daily creative visualization.  I don’t fill my thoughts or my consciousness with unnecessary words, like I seldom have the tv or radio on, and never in the background.  Always, if it is on, it has my full attention.  Otherwise it’s off.

I don’t have a lot of dramatic mind visuals from tv shows or movies going into my mind, or thrillers or horror shows or violence or unhappy words or images from any source. Including the news.  I am very unaware of what is going on outside my little realm of existence, in other parts of the world.  Unless AOL flashes it in front of me, I may not know it happened. I’ve cultivated this as a lifestyle choice.  I mean, I watch anything I want to watch, it’s just that most of it no longer holds my attention.  I’ve got bigger fish to fry.

All this simply adds up to me having a clear shot of no-outside-interference in my attraction process, which makes it easy for me to fall synchronistically into one good thing after another.  Another result of my optimistic outlook I’d say.  Always looking for the good in someone or something.  Of wanting to help friends be who they came here to be.

So, I pondered Bonnie’s heavy question this morning, what do I do that helped me establish myself as an expert in my field? If I had to give someone advice to duplicate what I have done to get to where I am today, I would be hard pressed to say anything, other than:

1.  Want the best – for everyone, all the time.

2.  Believe it can happen – anything.

3.  Have faith that it will work out better than you could have imagined.

4.  Pray as if it depended on God, and work as if it depended upon you.

5.  Do as much personal silence and meditation as it takes to really begin to know yourself and peel away your superficial layers.  A meditation session is over when you feel that mindstate of merging.

6.  Cut out unnecessary external input – unnecessary = does not add to your enjoyment of life.

7.  Read No. 3 again.

🙂

RELATED POSTS:  The Creative Visualization Process
When Horizons Magazine Began, Discovering Life’s Purpose
The Antidote for Boredom and Feeling Trapped; Spiritual Practice