Inner Circle Coaching

I've been running since I've been back from Inner Circle Coaching (ICC) at the beginning of September. I still have several more classes to talk about as I get caught up over this coming week, but I did want to share at least a little flavor of ICC before it all leaked out of my brain. ICC was held on Maui on the Ka'anapali coast. The program was incredibly INTENSE!  However, there were benefits, the setting being one of them:

Imagine 5 consecutive days of coaching with five of the best minds in the coaching field. Keith Cunningham (one of my favorite mentors) gave us coaching about how to look at our business from a much higher and broader perspective. Larry Gilman coached us on working with our emotions. Blair Singer coached us on goal setting. Dave the Monk did a morning meditation and yoga practice, as well as the art of looking within. Harv was there in between, pulling it all together as well as providing a little R&R at his home in the evenings.

We're not supposed to share much about the actual exercises that we did during the program, since the content of the program is copyrighted by Peak Potentials. I have to say that's really a shame. There is quite a bit that I would love to share about my experiences and what I got out of the course, but it's difficult to talk about the lessons without sharing at least a little of the content that lead me to those realizations.

What I can say is that there was a lot of accountability by all of the coaches during every part of the course. It helped me to see how I show up (or don't) for a lot of my life. There are little things that I do or don't do that don't seem to have any impact on anyone but me. The program helped me to see that often, what I see as not having impact on anyone else is really not true - those things DO have an impact on the people around me, sometimes more than I realize or give credit for. So that change has already started to ripple through the choices I make - I show up with everything I've got to give as soon as I arrive and I arrive on time or early. So Be It.

Ultimate Internet Boot Camp (UIBC)

So here is a screenshot of my new website, created entirely at the Ultimate Internet Boot Camp or UIBC. The class is offered by Peak Potentials and run by Alex Mandossian and his team of wonderfully helpful coaches and mentors. Each of them specializes in a certain area of website creation, promotion, and social media funneling. They are extremely helpful and, true to their mantra, "no one is left behind." Everyone was able to create and monetize their site during the 5 day course. The cool thing is not the $13 that I made at the course, but the truth that I now have a formula for how to create a site, promote the site, do the regular posts on Facebook and Twitter - as well as creating blog posts directly on my new website - that will bring the traffic that will eventually buy something from me there.

A funny thing (for me) was that I went in feeling very skeptical about this actually working once I went home, since we had the support of the coaches and pack while we were at the course. I am now completely non-skeptical. While I did ask friends and family to get the website off the ground, they responded favorably and bought the product in order to support me. That got me the Facebook "likes" I needed to be able to register my custom URL for the Facebook fan page. It also gave me the confidence to go out and post on several Facebook groups that I belong to, asking for folks to help me out. They did!

Not only was I actually able to monetize the website (ok, in a small way, but still...) but our small pack was the winner of the points challenge! Each smaller pack (I think that there were about 15 packs in our class) totalled up the members' points for the last two days of the class. We received 10 points for our first sale of our $1 guide (these sales had to be from outside of our class) and 1 point for each sale after the first one. So my $13 in sales turned into 22 points to go to our pack total. I don't have the exact numbers with me, but we had well over 300 points for our pack total. In fact, our pack set a new pack record high! It came as an incredible surprise to me that we were tied for top score at the end of the first day, since one of our members had not yet made a sale. It was even more of a surprise when they called our pack's name as the winners. It took a while for it to actually sink in - they had to call us up to the stage 3 times before we started to move!

So I now have a little plaque with the signatures of all of the trainers and coaches on the mat commemorating our pack win of the point challenge at UIBC. I'll never buy into the skeptical mindset that I hear from many folks saying that "you can't really make money on the Internet." Yes, you can!

Wizard Training Camp

I just finished another Peak Potentials course, entitled Wizard Training Camp. What a ride! Peak Potentials isn't keen about us giving out the details of the course, so I can't share the meaning of the two of us standing in front of a stack of bent rebar, but trust me when I say that there really is a lot of personal meaning in that stack!

The setting is the Glacier Valley Farm campground located in the beautiful Squamish Valley in British Columbia, Canada. The campground itself is quite lovely, and has chickens and pigs for onsite recycling of our table scraps. The campground personnel provided the cooking for the camp as well, and it was quite good, with a wide variety of different entrees for lunch and dinner.

By the way, did you know that it's cold in the Squamish Valley, even in August? Well, I can now confirm that it is. I brought a sleeping bag rated for 30 degrees and I was still freezing at night, so I wound up sleeping in my clothes and fleece jacket.

Darn that Weather Channel website! I need to stop trusting that thing! It said that the lows would be in the 50's. If their data was really accurate, then why was I seeing my breath every night between 9 pm and 9 am!?

Our group was the largest camp Peak Potentials has ever held, with about 450 attendees. Since the campground only has five showers, sinks and toilet stalls each for both the mens' and womens' facilities, that was a real challenge in personal hygiene. Many of us opted for only one or two showers during the 5 day camp experience to keep the bathroom lines down. For me, brushing teeth daily is a must, so the twice daily line up at the sinks for brushing was worth the wait. Luckily, Peaks did get in quite a few Port-a-Potties, so the wait time during breaks wasn't too bad.

Back to the reason for the camp: the training is a great way to learn how to manage your thinking in order to manifest your highest good more and more of the time. Since none of us is perfect, I can't say all of the time, but with practice it can be most of the time. The exercises were designed to get you to catch what you are thinking in the moment, evaluate it, and then change it if it isn't working for you. With all of that practice, you can't help but get better at catching yourself and manifesting something better instead.

The exercises were lots of fun, even as they were challenging. Some of them were challenging physically, but all of them were challenging mentally and emotionally. They are designed to make you examine how you look at the world around you, what thoughts empower or dis-empower you, what holds you back from expressing your gifts fully, and how to shift your thinking immediately when you catch yourself getting stuck in negative thinking.

Here are two great examples of how well that training worked from the journey back home. When I got to the airport, I couldn't find my passport. I kept thinking, it's got to be here somewhere, but as I started to exhaust the possibilities and was on my second round of looking in every nook and cranny of everything I brought with me, I began to panic. I caught myself doing that and said, "Okay, lesson learned - keep track of important documents. Now that I have that lesson, my passport will be waiting for me at the Lost and Found." Sure enough, it was.

Then, when I got up to the check-in counter, I was trying to get on the early flight from Vancouver to Los Angeles (via Phoenix). As I checked in at the kiosk, I noticed that I was upgraded to first class. Okay, that's very nice, but I'd still rather get on the early flight than fly first class. When I went to the counter, the gentleman informed me that I could indeed get on the early flight to Phoenix, but the early flight to L.A. was already overbooked, so I couldn't get on that segment.

Instead of getting angry that I didn't get what I asked for, I recognized that here is a valuable lesson in clarity - I had to admit that I was only thinking about the first leg as I was considering the switch. Instead of sulking about the lesson, I switched to being gratefully enthusiastic that I got to fly first class from Vancouver to L.A., despite it not being the early flight that I had wanted.

As a result of allowing myself to be enthusiastic with what happened, I was rewarded with a great couple of hours chatting with several other members of the group who were also on my later flight from Vancouver to Phoenix. I have to admit that previously I might have buried my head in a book ignoring them because I was upset about my circumstances and wallowing in my victimhood. This feels so much better! I am a Wizard! :-)

Phoenix 2% Club

Support is always a blessing. For me, staying in the energy of the Peak Potentials classes can be difficult for a few reasons. One is that I live alone, so I don't have someone around me to reinforce what I've learned. Another is that, here in Sedona, there is a big split between the up and coming or wealthy crowd and those who aren't particularly driven or interested in generating wealth.

There are very limited opportunities to break into the local wealthy group, even if you do already have some wealth. As a result, most of the people that I hang out with typically have less than I do, so they don't help to stretch me - I tend to make them stretch. That's neither good nor bad, it's just what is.

The Phoenix 2% Club is a group that Jeff Fagin started. It's a group of Phoenix-based people who meet in person monthly and hang out online in a Facebook group in between meetings. The members of the group reinforce the thoughts and behaviors associated with success. They share successes, celebrate wins, help as a mastermind group to give others ideas when they get stuck, and generally help to boost each other up the ladder of success.

Nice! I went to my first meeting on Wednesday evening and it was a lot of fun. They run the meeting Peaks-style, with lots of high fives, participating out loud, plus informative and entertaining speakers who have been trained to engage the audience with enthusiasm. It was very enjoyable and one of the members gave us plenty of concrete ideas for writing articles and blog posts that I found very helpful. So, you'll probably be seeing more from me here in the future.

In the meantime, I'm sharing this partly to say that if you don't have a support group in your area of like-minded folks who are cheering each other on, you might want to consider starting one yourself. It can start out small - our group had about 50 people in attendance and several people mentioned to me that it was the largest turnout yet. So you don't have to start with a huge crowd, a small pack meeting in someone's home or business might work better to start with.

I may even take my own advice and start a group closer to home...

Awesome weekend!

So, here I am, sitting in the LAX airport after a FANTASTIC few days here in Los Angeles.  Who would have thought that those words would be leaving my lips?!  Not me.  I used to hate LA.  Why the change of heart, you ask?  Well, over the past year, I've been taking quite a few classes here in LA.  Peak Potentials runs the vast majority of their classes out of this city.

Over time, taking these classes have created quite a few plusses and minuses for this fair city.  The reason for most of the minuses is the budget hotels that Peaks tends to use for the classes.  They are trying to save money for the folks who are traveling from out of town to attend, so they choose hotels where they can get good deals for the students.  Most of those hotels aren't the greatest quality and there are quite a few issues with food service for so many people going on breaks all at the same time.  On the other hand, the classes themselves have greatly contributed to my growth over the past year.  They don't call this program Quantum Leap for nothing!

This weekend I was in town for the Freedom Trader Intensive with Courtney Smith - trader and trainer par excellance!  Not only is he constantly harping on how capital preservation is more important that capital appreciation, but he also teaches the rules for how to make big money by trading for only 15 minutes a day!

I know that sounds counter intuitive - shouldn't you have to spend more time doing research in order to do better picking in order to make more money?  Nope.  Actually, the less attached you get to your stock picks, the better you will do in trading, because you'll be willing to follow the rules and use your discipline to get in and out when the rules tell you to do so instead of getting so attached to the stocks you've chosen that you're willing to bet against the market.

By the way, that's a major Bad Idea!  In a battle between a single investor and the market as a whole, you will always lose!  Never Bet Against the Market.  Rule number 1.

Rule number 2: Lose small.  Never risk more than 1% of your portfolio on any single trade.  That way, if the market doesn't agree with your pick, you only lose 1% and you use the rules to get out quickly, before you lose very much.  Remember, capital preservation is more important than capital appreciation.  I now have the knowledge on how to trade with minimal risk, while knowing how to maximize profitable trades.  Great stuff!  Thanks again, Courtney!  There is a lot more to the training (2 days worth), so there's no way to share it all here.  Various tips may come out from time to time as I get the hang of his trading system and make major money from it.

I ran into a friend, John Lothian, on Friday evening at FTI.  Then, just like after the Mastering Wealth class finished, when we got done with FTI on Saturday evening, we wound up going to dinner with a few very interesting folks, including John's girlfriend Ferry, as well as a couple named Rob and Elizabeth Schaumann, who were new to the Peaks family.  It was a fun group and we had a wonderful dinner and good conversation.

Complete change of topic: Yesterday, I got to hang out with my nephew Joe.  We spent the day wandering around the Santa Monica area.  We did a little shopping that I wanted to take care of first.  I have had a goal for the last year and three months of fitting comfortably into size 14 clothes.  After working out six hours a week and changing  my eating habits over that time, I have now achieved my goal!  Whoo Hoo!

When I set that goal, I was a size XL or 20 (and even that was sometimes tight).  Yesterday, I asked for some help finding some jeans that would fit my shape at Nordstrom's and the sales clerk directed me to "Not Your Daughter's Jeans."  Not only does a size 14 fit me (just barely snug, they were almost too loose!), they make me look tiny!  Double Whoo Hoo!  I almost cried!  With joy!  It's been so long since I've been a size 14, this was a major victory.

Then we wandered around the Santa Monica pier (click on the image to enlarge it), had a pretty good seafood lunch, and then started wandering around the Santa Monica Promenade area.  The bad news was that I had made the mistake a few days prior of walking 2 miles in incredibly inappropriate shoes for walking.  I wound up with a big blister on each foot.  My head and eyes were saying "This is fun, let's keep walking," but my feet kept saying "Ouch! please stop!"

Since my feet cast the overriding vote, we decided to watch the movie Thor since it's already left Sedona and Joe hadn't seen it yet.  Fun action/adventure/Sci-Fi movie - I would definitely recommend it.  After the movie, we decided to take advantage of the fact that I had rented a car for the day.  We drove up the Pacific Coast Highway, past Malibu and then turned around and came back.

Oops, they're calling my flight.  I'll finish later...

A lot later...

On the way back, we stopped in Malibu at Nobu for sushi.  I really wish that Sedona had better sushi.  Since it doesn't, I tend to take advantage whenever I find myself somewhere with the good stuff.  Now that was a VERY enjoyable dinner.  When we got back to Santa Monica, I dropped Joe off at home and headed back to the hotel.  That was a great treat for both of us and a sweet, memorable day!

Now I'm back in Sedona, about to head to bed.  I love my life!