This Book Will Help You to Lose Weight, Find True Love and Make Money

…not necessarily in that order.

Awhile ago a friend of mine told me that nearly all self-improvement books talk about one of three things.

Guess which three things? If you took notice of the title, that would be a good guess. These are all dimensions of your overall wellbeing, which along with anything else that is important to you, is how we decide if we have a high quality of life or not.

If you are overweight, it is easy to perceive your life as miserable. However, in all but the most extreme situations, you can do something about it.

It is very simple - Eat better quality food, less food in general and exercise more.

Dont have any friends? Not yet hooked up with your soul mate? What are you going to do? Sit around and wish that these people walk into your life? No, you have to be a better friend, you have to be worth someone wanting to know you. You have to like and love yourself before someone else will.

Dont have any or enough money? I have seen several instances lately of people saying (to everyone they know, everyone that is listening): I dont have any money, please give me some.

I dont know how that is working out for them … I doubt very well. I think of money as another form of wealth for which, like the other examples above, it is required to offer some kind of value for what you want. This goes back to Articles 2 and 3 about energy exchange and our inherent potential for wealth. If you want money, you need to offer someone value (in any number of different forms to get it). You need to invest it and take the risks associated with the return you expect on your investment.

No matter what kind of wealth you are talking about, you need both the desire to change and be able to make the decision to change.  Then you need to take action.

The nice thing about developing your Wealth Manifesto is that all aspects of your life, everything you want, can be attained using one systematic approach.

The Wealth Manifesto: Try it, you’ll like it!

Wealthy Goals

I want to talk about goals … look at it as a belated conversation about New Year’s resolutions if you will. A resolution is typically nothing more than a commitment to a goal. In my coaching practice, I often talk to people about how to get balance in their lives. They feel overwhelmed with work, don’t make enough time for family or themselves, etc. One of the first things I try to find out is what they do to identify goals. A high percentage of the people I work with actually do pay attention to their goals and have some kind of system they use to identify and track them. This is actually not that surprising. A good number of my clients are self-employed and as such have a higher than average level of motivation and have been working on self-improvement, increased productivity and such more so than the general population. However, it doesn’t matter how aware you are of what should be done, it’s whether you do it. The challenge is, that like many other things in our lives, its the tools you use that are the ones that count.

I have the same issues myself - I get into hyper busy mode and forget about the goals and routines I have committed to and just keep pushing through whatever is on my plate. I’m supposed to be setting an example for others and helping them in their lives and sometimes don’t have my own act together either. Hey, I’m human. And besides, ‘being perfect’ is not on my goals list…

In any event, we need to make the effort to use some kind of system for identifying goals. I have found that one of the best things is to make sure you have goals in all dimensions of your life. Since my philosophy is that everything we are can be categorized into one of the various dimensions of our overall wellbeing (or more specifically, wealth), this is how I suggest people set up their goals.

When you list out the various things in your life that you attach value to, you have identified the dimensions of your wealth that are the most important to you. These then become the categories of your goals. I create a table in MS Word (you can of course use anything) that looks like this:

————————Year ———|———Month ———|———Week———–

Physical:

Spiritual:

Intellectual:

Relationships:

Family:

Service:

Fun:

Business:

Investments:

Etc.

When you fill this out, keep these guidelines in mind:

1. Create higher level goals for the year.
2. Derive more detailed goals from the yearly goals for a given month (may require that you break it down on a separate page to identify “month-size-tasks” for particularly challenging goals).
3. Update Sunday night each week. Save a unique file for each week for future reference. Break down tasks to be listed here that can be accomplished in no more than one day.
4. For each day, write down the things that you will commit to accomplishing in that day. WRITE it down on a note pad or something that can easily fit into your pocket or purse. Don’t enter it in a computer or your PDA (a planner is OK if it is handwritten). Writing it down makes it more real. Once you have written it down, make sure it is something achievable in this day and that you mentally are committed to getting it done. Prioritize the items. Make sure there are not too many. It’s real easy to make a list that you never complete (done that a few times haven’t you?). If you can, avoid doing anything else in your day until the short list is finished off

The nice thing about this is that anything you come up with that is important to you can evolve to something you want to track as a goal you are committing to achieving. This method keeps all the dimensions of your wealth in “top of mind” prominence asking for your attention.

These categories are what make up your quality of life: don’t ignore the list.

Mark T. Rafter, Author
The Wealth Manifesto: Transforming Your Life from Survive to Thrive
(Pre-publication release now available at The Wealth Manifesto

Zen, Motorcycles, Mud and Quality

That should get someone’s attention. This is not one of those “MAN BITES DOG!” headlines … these things are actually very definitely connected….

Anyone that read books by Vonnegut and JD Salinger in High School back in the ’70s probably came across Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It is a semi-autobiographic, road trip, father-son bonding book about Pirsig and his son Chris. It’s is about Zen, some about motorcycle maintenance. And a good bit about Pirsig’s emotional and mental breakdowns that led him to spend part of the early ’60s in and out of mental institutions (with Electro Shock Therapy thrown in as well). But the book is really about is Quality.

Which is why I was assigned the book as a text for a Ceramics class. Read more

The Dimensions of Wealth

In the last post, I talked about wealth having many dimensions and not being confined to the financial domain. Somehow the idea of wellbeing was hijacked a few centuries ago and the ‘wealth=money’ idea entered into popular thinking. I see this changing. I started in on the idea of wealth beyond money going on 3 years ago. I just saw an interview in Inc. magazine with Bill Zanker, one of the guys that founded the Learning Annex. They were talking about real estate and how with the market downturn the attendance at the Learning Annex seminars for real estate investing was waning. The interviewer asked him what was next (or something to that effect) and Zanker said they were putting together something “…called ‘How to Attract Wealth’ - It’s different from getting rich. It’s a different mindset.”

There a bit of jumping on the bandwagon here with the popularity of things like the Law of Attraction and other new thinking beliefs such as was seen in The Secret. That’s fine … anything that gets more people thinking outside the religion-specific Dogma Box is OK by me.

Back to wealth. OK, so there are many dimension…what the hell does that mean. The different dimensions of wealth are identified by our system of values. This is how we identify and include what is important in our lives as well as how we prioritize and make decisions (often in the form of some kind of tradeoff). What specifically are those dimensions? They can be very high level: financial (yes, it’s still very much in there), physical (fitness and health), relationships, spiritual etc are all aspects of our wellbeing. If you want to go down another level, you can start talking about things you want to do or learn about but dont take the time (e.g., musical or artistic wellbeing). It can be specific relationships: with your kids, spouse, or parents. Your relationship with God is apart of your spiritual wealth.

Wealth covers everything about our lives. This is the first thing we have to understand before we can keep the dialog going. And I could talk about it all day long ….
Let Bill Zanker know I’m ready.

Article 1: Wealth is the Quality of Your Life

That title sounds like a quote or something, doesn’t it? It’s supposed to: it is the 1st Article of The Wealth Manifesto: Transforming Your Life from Survive to Thrive, my upcoming book on creating Quality of Life based income. Let me start with a simple question:

Are you wealthy? Well, are you?

Before reading any further, think for a minute about what “being wealthy” means to you. Close your eyes and imagine that fabulous wealth is yours. Where are you standing? What are you doing? What’s going on around you? Who you are with? What is your state of mind?

Done? When imagining wealth, you may picture yourself on a yacht in the South Pacific, throwing a big party in your Park Avenue penthouse at Christmas time or golfing at St. Andrews in Scotland. Others imagine thrilling lives filled with momentous events such as climbing Mt. Everest, ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange or traveling into space. The vision is frequently accompanied by a substantial sum of money in the bank.

Whatever you might imagine, one thing is clear: while wealth includes money, it also involves great people and places, peak experiences and the time, freedom and health to enjoy them.

With that in mind, please take another moment to really imagine what wealth is to you. Finished? Good.

I want you to know that just by doing this simple exercise - by visualizing what you really want in life - you have already initiated the chain of events necessary to achieve wealth. Visualization is a part of intention, the first step in manifesting wealth and the beginning of your Wealth Manifesto.