THE LOVE FACTOR AND POSITIVE CHANGE

Post by: John Polk
Perhaps you are now like I once was in the past: There was a time after all when I viewed myself as a victim of a heartless world where that common saying became the prophecy of the times—life’s a bitch and then we die. If you’ve ever felt like that (or feel like that) you will know exactly what I mean. After all, sometimes the pain of hopelessness is so overwhelming all a person wants to do is escape himself. He or she can’t of course and so we do our best to endure with hope that some positive changes take place in our lives.
In these extreme circumstances most people will turn to the God of theism through prayer—please, please send an answer to me, save me from this chasm of unhappiness and despair; put a miracle in my life!
Perhaps you have never said these exact words but you may recognize the desperation I am attempting to describe. And hopefully you have never experienced the kind of anguish I’m talking about but the odds are that you have felt, at one time or another in your life, abandoned and alone, during which only a miracle would save you.
With this much said, please note that I have headed this piece with a date. I have done this because I am going to follow this piece with an entire course on how you can truly make positive change in your life. I am going to share with you what I have learned as a human being who has been worth upwards to a $100 million and absolutely penniless; of being on top of the world and to the very bottom and yes, of having love and losing it. My point of sharing this is to let you know that I have experienced what I am about to teach to anyone who is interested. I will be posting The Love Factor and Positive Change once a week with the goal of showing the reader how to create positive synchronicities in his or her life; to deconstruct the failure syndromes in one’s life and construct a life of peace, joy, success and love! I am in fact going to tell you exactly how to make a positive difference in your own life as well as the life of others.
Can this be so? This course is free so you have nothing to lose and much to gain by simply putting the love factor in your life. The very first instruction is to stop seeking the miracle and start seeking the miracle maker…you!

ASPECTS OF THE LOVE FACTOR

It would be nice to be able to say something like, give the vicious criminal a shot of serotonin and he’ll return to his loving, generous self. And, with this supplement—taken daily—we can now open all prison gates and release the inmates.

Well obviously there is no such simple solution to healing violent and vicious criminals. And, the raw truth might well be that many are too closed down from even their own hearts to ever retreat into the loving and lovable human beings that they were born to be.

In this light the evil doer has been cheated out of his goodness by the unloving and non-nurturing environment of his past. It is one thing to say oh, if that person didn’t want to do the bad things that he does, he wouldn’t…but no one can know this who hasn’t walked in that “criminal’s” shoes and lived through his or hers pleasures and pains.

While we all like to believe (or think) that we are above our impulses the truth is that our brains can become master of any of our fates under certain circumstances. As said in the above low levels of the chemical serotonin can be at the roots of deep depression and high rage in certain individuals.

So what’s the answer?

Well, it’s going to be many years before we’ll have a drug that truly heals the unhappy brain. Most drugs that even come (a little) close today merely cover up the symptoms. Nevertheless, we know enough to know that the real criminal mind is probably a product of a chemical problem—for example it can be said that unhappy endorphins produce unhappy emotions and so forth.

Sadly enough there might not be an answer for those men and women who are the victims of a harsh and unloving childhood. Perhaps the best thing that can be done is to simply be as unconditionally loving toward them and try to ease their deepest fears and pain.

What is MOST VITAL, however, is to LOVE THE CHILDREN THAT YOUNOWHAVEANDNURTURE THEM so they do not follow in the evil-doers footsteps.

Beware, NOT to neglect your children, but to forever raise them in the knowing that they are both loving and lovable. By doing only this much we  will reduce crime in the next generation and that wide-eyed child you are now looking at will grow up to be just fine…

This is the Love Factor working in all our lives!

ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE HEART

       PART ONE: A STUDY IN EVIL

Yes, we have heard all the scoffing and pompous declarations of boo-hooing for inmates who are doing long sentences and many for very vicious crimes.

No, no one here believes that these real criminal types should get off with a hand slap or any such thing.

We do have a theory, however:

Why these seemingly heartless, vicious people have become this is NOT because they are, by their natures, bad seeds or that they were born with certain genetic directives that turned them into constructs of the criminal. After all, even the criminally insane was once that bright-eyed, smiling and innocent infant in a crib; that bundle of…love!

The reader who is arrogant by his or her nature  may be stirred to say something like: Look, these terrible people who are a danger to the rest of us are nothing other than the dregs of society and should be locked up forever or executed and be done with it.

In our period of studying ex-prisoners with long records we have even heard some ex-inmates say this very same thing about themselves—they should have executed me.

But the real question is, how does a human being end up being a target of such social abandon and hatefulness? How does one grow a mind that is criminally dangerous?

Is the “criminally dangerous” a product of Nature? Perhaps if there is something physically wrong with the brain, that brain might—might—produce the evil doer but a healthily formed brain will not produce an unhealthy thinker.

In this regard, the world’s most well known thief and intellectual, Jean Genet, who the modern father of existentialism, jean Paul Sartre, named a prototype of existential man who, in this view, is the criminal by personal choice; the doer of evil by decision and so is the product of his own freedom. However, there is a kind of paradox that Sartre gives us at the same time as he creates a social ritual during which Genet is “officially” labeled and denounced as the thief. He later decides to take on the nature of the thief. Might this actually have been the case?

We’ll cover a little of his life—1910-1986.

When Gene Genet was a boy of ten he was accused of being a thief and during those adolescent years spent five years at a reformatory. He escaped at age 19, joined the Foreign Legion, deserted and lived as a free spirit in Europe where he arrested for such crimes as vagrancy, theft and smuggling. (He was also arrested for homosexuality which was illegal during those years!)

He started to write in 1939 and was given more than a taste of success as a writer and dramatist although much of his theater work was too daring even for French theater. He began lecturing in the 1960s and died in Paris nearly a quarter century later in 1986.

The question is what instilled evil and social hatefulness into this man who, most typically, lived a life of defiance; indeed as the proud criminal and law breaker?

Going back into Jean Genet’s childhood we discover that he was born—out of wedlock—to a couple whose names were Camille and Francois. The boy Jean was quite readily turned over to a public home for “unwanted children:” From that moment on he was raised in state institutions save for a family that took him in who lived in a village by the

name of Alligny-en-Morvan. (Jean Genet’s real mother had died when he was nine years old).

Interestingly enough, the boy’s foster mother had hopes that he would grow up to be a priest. Unlike the rebellious adult that he would become this homebody declared him as a “submissive child.” In fact, at this age no one probably suspected the deep-seated anger and hatefulness that Jean Genet was harboring on the darkest side of his heart.

With only this much retold about Jean Genet we can all but easily see how “Genet-the-thief-and-evil-doer” evolved. Indeed we can almost put all our analytical views into the single and apparent unwanted basket. That is, he had been abandoned by his unloving parents, he had been raised in the unloving environment of state institutions and finally in reformatory where the very spirit of youthful inmates is deprived of attitudes of self-worthiness by the workings of the systems of incarceration itself.

When one is raised in an unloving environment, the child will invariably believe that he or she is, in fact, unlovable and this will often be demonstrated into unloving behaviors. It simply isn’t unusual for a child, as a result of being unloved (unattended and not nurtured) to take on a persona (a public image) of hardness and callousness which he or she wears as armor against being hurt by others; against being vulnerable to caring about anything or anyone. Being unlovable is of course a very lonely place to dwell…

       PART TWO: A SOCIAL VIEW

The eye’s of general society see only the façade of the evil-doer; he or she may ride in packs boasting the colors of their affiliations; they may be hidden behind the ski mask or become the silhouette behind the gun that murders some innocent victim. He or she might well be more subtle than this: and have evolved into the dealer or perhaps even the rapist or some other harmful, hard and hateful human being. In such cases, the primal howl is that I am the unlovable and what I do is the unloving.

Most typically the general response to this is so what, if you do criminal acts you are a criminal and no one cares how loved or how unloved you have been; you have chosen your bed now lie in it.

This view is also commonly combined with the observation—lots of people grow up in terrible, deprived areas and they do not end up thieves and doers of evil.              

Since we all know that the ghetto, projects and other poor environments produce the greatest number of lawbreakers and, for that matter serious criminals, a first question that comes to mind is why is it that some of those children somehow escape the destiny of becoming the bad seed and grow up to be contributing and productive citizens…and this question is usually followed by all the clichés such as, people just want to take the easy road…they don’t want to work so they steal…they are all ruthless animals and should be caged as such…why look at this one or that one, born and raised in the same ghetto and

he or she is now a businessperson, a doctor, lawyer, priest…and finally, no one has to do bad things unless they want to do them…

To most ordinary citizens this all sounds reasonable. And, in many instances it is—society after all cannot have the dangerous and destructive left free to do their will. And, while there are so very many men and women who should not be imprisoned there are, of course, many who should be since prison is the only system we have to keep the (real) criminal behind bars and out of the free world.

Nevertheless, we need to address the question that asks, why do some children grow up to be good and honest citizens who are born in the same terribly impoverished environments of those many that end up in such serious trouble?

While there are exceptions to everything, we offer that no matter how harsh and/or impoverished an environment is, that environment will have no or little (bad) influence over the child…who is loved and nurtured by his or her family.

The child, after all, who is loved, experiences the condition of being loving and lovable…and loving/lovable individuals simply do not hurt or coerce others. But there is yet another side to this same coin, a person who is loved and therefore has the experience of being both loving and lovable will not do anything that is destructive to one’s self either. Remember living the life of an outlaw is never unencumbered by pain of one kind or another. While the most vicious and violent criminal may be more than capable of showing no mercy to his or her victims, he or she will NOT escape, at least from time to time, the stark aloneness and emptiness of the unloved child who still lives deep within that same criminal’s psyche.

Well, so what, society screams. Even if there is a speck of truth to what has just been said those people do not deserve to be loved because of their evil deeds.

This of course becomes the major issue. Remember the brief story of Jean Genet, the unloved child who grew up to do unloving things; to take on the nature of the thief and evil doer?

We will never know what great and truly productive things Genet would have accomplished had he been raised in a loving family environment, an environment that nurtured and cared about him. And in this light, to cast him aside as the mere criminal who had been born the bad seed is heartless and thoughtless in and of itself. It is in our view that in vast numbers the cold-hearted, true devotee to crime is in an unnatural state of being. That is, he or she is the result of the neglect and abuse endured as the abandoned child growing up. There is no greater poverty after all than the lack of love.

But can any of this be grounded in anything other than a bunch of psychobabble?

While we do not claim to be scientists our studies reveal that the chemicals in our brains can be changed by our experiences. For one example, truly violent people who we have been referring to are known to have lower levels of serotonin (a brain chemical). It seems that the lower someone’s brain is in serotonin the more apt that person will be vicious or suicidal. The question then is why would so many violent, evil doers have this problem…a lower level of the brain chemical than other more mellow people have?

The answer is simply this. It is now known that people who have the well being of being loved and nurtured have increased serotonin levels while those who are not loved and nurtured have lower levels.

While we may not be able to blame all vicious and ruthless human action on this brain-state we can see that love truly is physiological. Indeed, the very hatefulness, resentments and rage that the criminal feels in his or her heart is not of the heart at all but of a physical brain that has been deprived of enough love to maintain its good health…

Giving Love / Talking Business

It was this realization–our differences are only apparent–came from my years of study. Now I can say that I love you without any hesitation, embarrassment or underlying motivations. While I do not know everything about you, I know enough to love you even if we have never met. This ability to love even strangers may be a very new idea to you, but once you grasp it, make it your own. You are going to discover that your world is fuller with meaning and purpose and wonderful changes will begin to occur in your life. Many set-in-their-ways people in business will feel that they are too trapped by circumstances or old systems to even attempt the changes that I am advocating. However, when you do, you are in for many wonderful surprises not only in your business, your job but at home and at play as well. This may be very difficult for you to believe, but please keep reading. You’ll see!

William James, one of the most beloved and respected pioneers of psychology, told us that, “If we but love our own family, but have no love for strangers, we are signaling our inability to love at all.” And the world-renowned psychologist of more modern times, Erich Fromm, told us that, “…love of one person implies love of man, as such.” Even if you are skeptical about being able to love everyone, it is in your potential to do so. Indeed, rich or poor, struggling or successful, all of us want more than anything else to love and to be loved. Our clients and customers are the same.Just imagine how a customer would feel if she heard what is said about customers at one of your sales or marketing meetings. The chances are she would feel dehumanized, a kind of statistic, a number or mindless ninny whose only value was  her purchasing power. If that were you listening in, you would  be outraged or, if you had previously trusted the salespeople or marketers attending, you would feel betrayed and hurt–leading you to go someplace else to shop for the product or service you needed or desired.

            .

            You should always act as if one of your best clients or customers is in the room whenever you have a sales or marketing meeting. You can’t very well muster a glow of love from a flame that has been lit with arrogance or contempt, the motives of battlefield sales tactics, and neither can your staff, employees, clerks, sales team or the person who answers the phone.

In the old days, you could maintain a double standard and do well–calling your customers your most important commodity in one breath and talk about pushing him against the wall in the next.Those days are long gone. Not every entrepreneur reading this book lacks sincere motives regarding customers and clients, but that double standards still persists in most business. When the double standards do exist, your store, office, warehouse or shop creates an unloving atmosphere, even if the salesperson on the floor attempts to cover it up. Most do not.

            Complacency is most damaging to success in business. Complacency is just the opposite of warmongering sales tactics, but it is as destructive. We have all gone into a store and were“helped” by a complacent clerk. By the time we exit the store we’re agitated, if not extremely angry. We want service, just as everyone else does, and when we don’t get it, we tend not to go back. But even conscientious service is not enough these days to motivate customer/ . Someone will always be waiting in the wings to add your buyer to their customer list, most typically they will be offering greater variety and lower prices than you. Or they are probably far more powerful in their marketing and advertising than you are. Your basic challenge is quite simple: You want to keep the customers/clients you have while attracting new customers/clients at a lower investment than you are now making. You want is to create an income-multiplying factor in your favor. Obviously complacency will not accomplish this or any other of your positive goals.

            Many companies aggressively focus on obtaining new customers, but in the process they pay little attention to maintaining their existing customers. As a result they often lose excellent customers to the competition merely because they have been complacent in their customer concern.

            Imagine a company that lost or misplaced 10% of their product in one year.  Suddenly the accountant came to the CEO and said, I don’t know what happened, but over the last two years we have lost or misplaced over 10% of our inventory.”  Management would freak out and hold emergency meetings to get to the bottom of the crisis. They would take immediate action and heads would roll. Yet many companies lose customers and may not even know it. Many don’t even know who their customers are, much less if they’ve been around for a year or so. Managers, CEOs, even owners can be just as complacent as staff and other employees–and complacency always drifts down to the sales force; always affects the bottom line in sales and/or production.

            Ask yourself a few questions:

1. How do your employees treat your/their customers?

2. Are your employees themselves treated with care and concern? (If not, they cannot then be expected to treat customers accordingly.)

3. What is your investment to secure “customer preservation”? (In the past this was commonly called “customer retention” but the phrase doesn’t work in the love-economy.)

4. How aware are you that your company’s value will increase through a focus on “customer preservation”?

5. Do you regularly discuss this aspect of your business with ALL of your employees? Do you solicit their input and ideas on this subject?

6. How often do you remind yourself that word-of-mouth remains the best and most effective advertising of all?

You want word-of-mouth advertising to work for you, as this kind of positive, productive marketing always increases business and ensures profitability. By becoming a love-based entrepreneur, your greater success will simply begin to unfold. And, you will soon discover that the motivation to tap into your customer’s or client’s heart will produce far more financial success than tapping into their pocketbook. This new love economy is quickly entering our business lives, giving us a new paradigm of doing business and of entrepreneurship. Many new “techno” terms are being used to describe this change in thinking, such as “CRM,” and “e-CRM,” along with other buzz words  finding their way into the business arena, such as, “relationship marketing,” “loyalty marketing” and others. The message is clear: the sterile and impersonal company will no longer survive.

  This projection of non-survival is really a simple evaluation of past, present and future in terms of studying how Mom and Pop businesses gave way to the new wave of image advertising and the constructs of social growth and change. Downtown businesses were affected by the advent of mall mania. As far as observing the present (the last twenty years), the rising cost of doing business, not excluding advertising and customer receiving, has lowered the profit margins and widened the cracks of potential failure or even extinction for countless business that continues to compete in the markets today. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see around the future waiting around the corner. On the other hand, we do not have to be subject to the dictates of that future nor do we have to be part of a negative history repeating itself. And this is the very magic, the miracle of it all. You and I can, as Wayne W. Dyer tells us, manifest our own destinies. If we choose to ground our businesses and lives in love and in the expression of love, the future naturally becomes brighter, happier and rewarding for us. What the world wants now, perhaps more than any other time in history, is love.

People, we call them customers and clients, have been realizing or sensing this for the last half-century. This is not only because of the dehumanizing direction that big business keeps heading. This is also about the general worldview that came from the entire war economy that we live with daily. The uncertainty of world peace, the overwhelming quantum leaps in technologies, the loss of family ties–this list goes on and on. As businessmen and women we get so caught up in mental webbing of profit and loss that we lose sight of who we really are. We tend to abandon our loving natures and, instead, caress our greed and our yearnings to control. At the same time everyone else is enduring their own lives, living more in cocoons of survival as opposed to enjoying their humanism, and they forget to love the world and themselves. We all lose heart and begin feeling and thinking that the world is heartless and aloof. But the truth is, we all have heart to give and love to share–but we don’t. Why?  We fear that we’ll be taken advantage of, or rejected, or made a fool of, but nevertheless, we yearn—often secretly—to share our love, our innate kindness and caring. But what we typically find is the sour-faced banker, the uncaring or even snippy clerk or even our next-door neighbor????.   As a result of all this, added to your personal experiences, we all begin feeling far more lost than found.

A subtle change has been occurring collectively and individually over the last fifty years. This change can best be described as a yearning to reawaken to our own humanism, to our own loving and giving natures that connects us to others and to the universe in a meaningful and purposeful way. And this is the reason we all feel such inner-joy when someone simply treats us nice, and when we have been kind to someone outside ourselves.

The irony is that we all continue as if we are condemned to do business as usual. Indeed, these days we have even accepted the idea that when we deal in business we may not even get “what we pay for,” but, we can be assured of paying for what we get. Our customers and clients also identify with this idea. This iswhy you will benefit by choosing to create a unique love position for your company.  What does this mean? It means that as you strive to do sound, progressive and profitable business by inspiring the minds of your customers and clients, you touch their hearts also. When you do this—when you create your unique love position—a win/win situation results. You win, your customer/client wins and, in the process you have grown your business and forwarded your life.

This gives us a clear realization that the old ways—the warring ways of doing business—taps only into the customer/client’s intellect. The love marketer understands the heart value; that customer security, fidelity and longevity are much more about how we make the customer feel as opposed to think. So this question: What is it that you (really) want?

            You want to create a loving environment and have your clients and customers feel the glow. In order to accomplish this you need your executives, staff and employees to be inspired as much as you are. This includes everyone, custodians to chiefs. You want everyone to replace complacency with conscientiousness, aloofness with sincere concern, you want helpful and loving service to energize your business environment no matter if it is a plant, a shop or office, no matter what your business is. You want your customers/ clients to feel as though they are visiting a happy family when they enter your workplace, which  is really only possible if your staff and employees are happy at what they do. This is not up to them, though, not initially. This is up to you. In fact, you don’t want to have your own people groping about in your shadow. You want them finding their way in your enlightenment. If you’re a “do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do “person, you’re not about to accomplish the goal of becoming a love-based enterprise. This brings us to the difficult part. If you are not love- orientated or a love-based entrepreneur at this time, you are going to have to change you before you can change anyone else or create a loving environment in your business.

If you are already love-based and sincere, you will already have made many creative and, positive changes. If not, don’t worry. I am going to tell you exactly how to make loving changes in your life..I promise that when these great changes begin to occur for you, they will begin to occur throughout your work environment. They will also change your home environment and make wonderful changes in both your private and public life. Soon enough those who know you will begin seeing the changes. They won’t know what the changes are based upon, so they’ll ask if you’ve changed your hair, been taking vitamins, exercising, or won the lotto? They won’t know or probably even suspect that they have entered your glow, and the glow they have entered, is love. Your staff and employees will start responding to you in this way as well, and you want them to have the same glow. This is why it is so important to become a love-based human being yourself, because you cannot give what you do not have.

6

The Bitter and the Sweet

Haveyou noticed a number of negative changes in your business over the past few years?

• A decrease in response rates to your direct mail, print ads, yellow pages, radio and TV spots?

• The cost to make a sales call is increasing?

• Your sales force may show an erosion of effectiveness of your customer acquisition activities?   A drop in margins or greater pressure to reduce prices? The investment to acquire a new customer has slowly been increasing while at the same time your customers are leaving you in greater numbers than ever before?

Lots of things are shifting in bitter waves, and many entrepreneurs are not aware of what is causing the erosion of businesses. Adding to this list of negatives it also seems obvious that the lifetime value per customer is shrinking, and the average value per transaction is slipping. Most companies are spending more money to attract fewer and fewer customers.

A few years back I noticed that my direct mail and TV ads were pulling less. Why it was costing so much more to acquire a customer? My first inclination was to blame the copy.  I thought my ads weren’t being written as well as they had been, that probably I was at the core of problems in the creative aspects of my marketing. After a time, I realized that it is just too noisy out there–we are bombarded with a zillion images and messages everyday–so it was getting harder and harder to gain the customer’s attention, much less his or her patronage. Suddenly I  understood the old warring ways were already obsolete, or quickly becoming so. As I studied how business was changing for me, I began to believe more and more that we had to change how we were doing business if we wanted to survive. When the light bulb turned on, I began thinking about love marketing and began to see a love economy evolving.  As all these pieces began falling together , knew I wanted to share the love and the metaphors of love­– and the new paradigms with as many people as possible.

Some of the major problems are because the abundance of companies, too many undifferentiated products and an overflow of advertising. For countless businesses confronting these difficult challenges, the added obstacles to their success are lack of vision, purpose, meaning, and core values. Add all this to indifference (if not plain rudeness directed toward customers), and you can clearly see why business failure or stagnation is not only coming in from the outside, but also being created from the inside.

            What is needed to create positive changes from within? An entrepreneur is a person with a vision, one who has the courage to risk time, effort and money to achieve his or her goals and fulfill those ambitions.  Most say that  entrepreneurship has made America strong and great, and I believe it. Once success is achieved to one level or another, greater success is usually at the top of the priority list and so a higher yield of profits is nearly always on the agenda.

The love-based entrepreneur is different from the traditional entrepreneur in that he or she is also an intrepreneur. Small business is extremely challenged today and is being forced to make positive changes if it is to survive and excel. The love-based entrepreneur realizes that what this calls for is intreprenuerial commitment.  

Entrepreneurial commitment reminds us that, as a verb, love requires action. If the love-based entrepreneur merely makes the mental decision to treat his or her customers nicer, with more sincerity and even love, this is not enough. This attitude, this way of conducting business, will merely be a personal attempt to “be” loving and caring and end up as more of a ploy than anything else. The action of love must begin with the in-house relationship of executives, staff and employees. It is impossible to have a love-based environment only after your doors are open for business. In short, putting on a happy face will not work unless that happiness is real and sincere. Both the attitude and action of love must prevail throughout your family of staff and employees, as individuals and as a collective. What you want is a company of Love-Based Entrepreneur–an LBE, not just a new policy posted on the bulletin board. Remember, we used the metaphor of love creating a glow into which people enter? It is this glow, this (joyous) feeling that you want to spread throughout your facility. Believe me, when customers and clients enter they will respond, because they will be aware of the caring and concern in the environment itself.

I am a realist, and  fully aware that we all have our difficult days, and sometimes bring our home-life problems to work. Any of us can have a bad day,  but inn spite of these emotional and/or psychological down modes, once the company has achieved a loving and positive spirit, the overall feeling does not wane. Love prevails over all such temporary obstacles! In short, a clerk having a “bad” day or a salesperson not feeling up to par is not going to cloud or diminish the high spirited love-based environment you’ve created. I repeat:  Love prevails over all such obstacles.

            After you made sure that you are love-based, then you can and will inspire your staff and employees to become love-based intrepreneurs. As soon as this begins to happen, you will begin seeing positive results. These results will not only be personally rewarding, since you will begin to feel happier and healthier, but as they occur, they will also produce practical rewards. Your business will increase, you will earn greater profits and your clients and customers will begin doing a lot of very effective advertising for you. I know, because I have gone through the transitions and the personal transcendence into becoming more loving and so more giving, more compassionate and more understanding than I was before the day I decided to seek out a few answers.  I am both emotionally and psychologically at peace with the world and myself and I am grateful for this. I can’t tell you how wonderful this is, but I can tell you that you will soon find out for yourself.

I’ve given you a lot to digest and think about. What follows are workable ways to open up your mind and heart to loving unconditionally and how this will produce (in real and practical ways) the greater wealth and success you are seeking.

hey, everybody,

I am sending the love your way. Have you looked in the mirror and told that beautiful face and soul of yours that you love him/her?

I am going to post the first two chapters of a wonderful book I wrote called The Love Merchant.

come on. just read these first two chapters. Tell me what you think.

If you like it, you have the whole book right here on the website.

here it is…

Lenny never expected it. The past two years had been especially rough and at age twenty-five, he already had a lot of responsibility. He had rushed into marriage just as he had rushed into most things during his life. He had joined the Army on a whim when he was eighteen, served three years, met Donna and after only three months, asked her to marry him. She was twenty and he was twenty-two at the time. Well, who wouldn’t have fallen in love? Donna was fun, shapely and pretty. A perfect lover, a best friend! So they had married and a year and a half later the first baby arrived. A second baby followed a year later. Those great nights in the sack had consequences.

And like so many others, they were slipping deeply into credit card debt. He had been so “clean” getting out of the service and had gone to work for Puffer’s, a local trucking outfit that delivered shipments to the retailers in town. It was a no-thinking job but the first one offered him and so he had taken it. The credit card forms flew in and so furnishing the apartment was easy. Everything seemed easy. Cars. Dinner with friends. And, what was twenty miscellaneous bucks every now and then?

Now, they could hardly make ends meet and they began bickering a lot. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that when money is tight, so are the nerves. He wanted to do better and so he quit Puffer’s for a sales job. The ad had read, minimum wages but opportunity to earn more than $2,000.00 a week. Two thousand a week would be heaven, he thought, a road paved to a better life and the security Donna craved. She would be happy at last, things would get back to normal and maybe she would start turning over to face him in bed again at night like it had been in the beginning. Donna was outraged, however. He had quit his job without discussing it with her and taken minimum wage to sell pressure cookers. She began to scream.

As it turned out, “the screaming” became his inspiration and he was determined to do well. He would sell the hell out of those cookers and turn their lives around. As it turned out, he was soon back knocking on Puffer’s door, wanting his old job back. He got it!

But Puffer’s was not his ambition. And Puffer’s was not Donna’s idea of a career goal either. And anyway, she wanted to get a job and help get them out of debt but this was the one area where Lenny had put his foot down—their babies needed a mom at home until they were at least five and Donna had agreed. She had agreed because Lenny kept promising he’d find his niche and all would be, in his term, okay.

Things got increasingly tense between them; she was accusing him of being a dreamer. I don’t think things will ever be okay, she said. And that hurt Lenny a lot. Maybe the truth was he had fallen “in lust” in the beginning, but now he truly loved Donna and he loved his children. He realized the day was coming when he could lose them all.

For two months he put his application in at numerous places. Someone advertised for an ad executive. He didn’t know anything about advertising but he applied. He answered an ad for a stockbroker’s job. That sounded great to him and they would pay for any classes he needed. They never responded. The jobs he applied for all were no-goes, so there he remained at Puffer’s, making a fair wage, knowing he’d still be making a “fair wage” twenty years from then. He wanted more. He didn’t know how to get it.

Then a stranger in a coffee shop told him Mahoney’s Rent It was opening a new location and they were seeking a person to train for a managerial position. As it turned out, the stranger had worked for Mahoney’s for nearly twenty years. He said it was a great place to work and this was a great opportunity for somebody. Lenny was grateful and excited about the possibility. He knew it was a real shot in the dark but he decided to take it. What the hell; nothing ventured, nothing gained.

He arrived late at Puffer’s that Tuesday morning because he had gone to Mahoney’s main office and filled out an application. He actually felt good about it when he left. The person taking applications was the friendliest face he had greeted in a long time, including at home. Donna had been in such a depression he couldn’t remember the last time she had smiled. Tracy, the woman who had interviewed him, was in her mid-fifties, bright-eyed and enthusiastic. When he left Mahoney’s he felt better about his world. Even if he didn’t get the job, the lady had been so friendly that she had given him the uplift he had needed.

Mahoney’s Rent It already had three locations in town and now there would be a forth. People also franchised them all over the state and the company had truly become a large, successful business. This was one of the reasons Lenny didn’t think he had much of a chance at landing a manager’s position. He had little experience with only two years of business courses behind him and so he didn’t have a degree to back him up. One more trouble spot, he thought.

Three weeks later he got the call. The woman on the phone said he was among the top three candidates for the position and if he was still interested to call for a meeting with Mr. Mahoney himself. The news felt too good to be true. He and Donna celebrated that evening and it turned out to be the nicest time they had in over a year.

That night, before falling to sleep in each other’s arms, Lenny said, “Donna, what I want more than anything is to find some reason to celebrate life. I’m so tired of struggling against it all the time.”

Donna didn’t reply. She simply gave him a tender hug and fell into sleep.

2

Lenny felt anxiety in the pit of his stomach as he walked from his car looking up at the impressive Mahoney Building. He remembered reading in the newspaper years before about David Mahoney’s rags to riches story but he couldn’t remember much about it except that Mr. Mahoney had been born and raised in Virginia. Well, the “riches” part was apparent. The Mahoney Building was modern and an impressive ten stories, not bad for someone who only rented tools and equipment. He loosened his tie a bit because he felt it was choking him and anyway, he wasn’t used to wearing one. He looked down at his brightly shined shoes and continued into the building. There was an African-American woman behind the reception desk who had a most welcoming smile. “Hello,” she said, “I’m Marsha and you must be Lenny.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Take the elevator to the seventh floor.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Don’t be nervous,” Marsha said. “David is a very nice man.”

“Thank you,” Lenny said, managing a smile.

The elevator door opened on the seventh floor to Mr. Mahoney’s office. Just outside the wide arch that led inside was Mr. Mahoney’s secretary. “Good morning, Lenny,” the woman said brightly.

“Good morning.” Lenny managed another smile.

In a moment David Mahoney entered extending his hand in greeting to Lenny. Lenny was a little shocked because Mr. Mahoney’s handshake was as strong as it was friendly. It was the strength in Mr. Mahoney’s hands that surprised Lenny because Mr. Mahoney was an older man. He had to be at least in his early seventies. “Nice meeting you, sir,” Lenny said politely.

“Call me David,” Mr. Mahoney smiled. “Come on Lenny, we’ll talk.”

Lenny glanced at the secretary who was smiling and gave him a positive wave. He followed Mr. Mahoney into his office. It was not what Lenny had expected although he didn’t quite know what to expect. There was a large desk with two armchairs on the client side but on the other side of the big room was a large fireplace with two large leather chairs sitting before it. The entire wall surrounding the fireplace was a library of books from floor to ceiling. “We’ll sit here,” Mr. Mahoney said, sitting down in one of the leather chairs; “it’s a lot nicer than trying to communicate over a desk.”

Lenny nodded and sat across from Mr. Mahoney. “Would you like coffee, tea, a donut, anything?” Mr. Mahoney inquired.

“Coffee would do it,” Lenny shrugged. Mr. Mahoney rose and walked across the room to a door that opened into a small area where coffee was perking. Lenny wished he hadn’t asked for anything. He thought the secretary would bring in the coffee and now there was Mr. Mahoney serving him and that made him feel all the more uncomfortable.

“Cream, sugar?” Mr. Mahoney asked.

“I’ll get it.” Lenny started up from his chair but Mr. Mahoney waved his hand as a signal to stay seated. “Just a little sugar,” Lenny said. “Thank you.”

They sat in silence sipping the hot coffee for a few minutes and Lenny was scanning the books before him. “Are you a reader?” Mr. Mahoney asked.

“Not as much as my wife is,” Lenny answered. The truth was he wasn’t much of a reader at all, but he felt a man with so many books would want him to be a reader and he didn’t want to screw up the interview on a technicality.

“I saw on your application that you’re married. Two children.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Everyone calls me David.”

“Yes, sir…David.” Lenny could hardly get the name out.

“So tell me about yourself.”

“Well…” Lenny was working hard at wanting to say the right thing. Donna would be disappointed if he didn’t get this job. “I was raised here in town and then I was in the service.”

“How’d you like it?”

“It was okay,” Lenny feigned a smile. “I took a college course in business while I was in.”

“That’s good.” Mr. Mahoney looked pleased. “You’re over at Puffer’s now?”

Lenny nodded.

“I’ve met Sal Puffer,” he said. “Kind of a gruff old boy, isn’t he?”

Lenny nodded again. The idea of Mr. Mahoney knowing his boss made him feel uncomfortable. Puffer had no idea he was looking for another job.

“So Lenny, what inspires you to join our team?”

Lenny took a moment to think. He kept feeling on the spot and that every word he muttered would either advance or harm his chances of getting the job. “To be honest with you, Puffer’s is a dead end job and well, I need to earn more and another thing…” Lenny changed his tone. “I always liked going to your place. When I was growing up my Dad and I used to rent a lot of stuff from your yard over on Carson Avenue.”

Mr. Mahoney smiled. “That was number one,” he said and his eyes sparkled at the memory. “It’s still going strong.”

“I haven’t been there for a while,” Lenny said, “but I remember all the tools and the equipment. I used to pass the forklift and I always wanted to take one out for a spin.” There was laughter in his voice. “I was around fourteen,” he added.

“So what kind of salesman are you?” Mr. Mahoney asked pleasantly.

Lenny was taken back by the question. He had never been very good at sales and that was the last thing he wanted Mr. Mahoney to know. “I’m probably best at organization and that sort of thing,” he admitted, but now he was very nervous hoping he had evaded the question without revealing the evading. “But I can sell!”

Mr. Mahoney chuckled a little. “Everybody is in sales one way or another,” he said. “Managers, secretaries, the people in the yard. Why, we’re trying to sell ourselves to each other right now, isn’t that right?”

Lenny felt embarrassed by the question, “Yes sir.”

“As long as you can sell, you’ll always make a good living,” Mr. Mahoney added with a friendly wink.

Lenny nodded. He didn’t know what to say.

Down to Business

Not too many years ago I would not have said, “I love you” to anyone except those closest to me. In fact, I could never have imagined myself saying this to strangers. As a young and aggressive entrepreneur, my goals were targeted toward financial success and reaching my goals. Yes, I was often guilty of blind ambition. I wanted to excel, spread my wings, gain “the good life” and have it all. And, like you, I was willing to work hard toward these goals–I was a dedicated businessman, devoted to my career, and … winning. Then, in time, I came to a point in my life where I began to feel that while I had all this stuff, and plenty of money, something was missing. I began feeling like I was in a bubble, a kind of Internet bubble, sometimes even aloof from those closest to me­–friends and yes, even my family.

Maybe you’ve felt this kind of isolation, or maybe you’re stranded in your own bubble right now? Perhaps you look into the mirror and say, hey, I’m not as happy as I’d like to be, I’m not celebrating life–I just keep being challenged by it. If this is true for you, you’re not alone. It doesn’t matter if you are the owner or top executive of your company, if you are an employee, staff member or the newest salesperson just coming on board, the person who answers the phone or a file clerk, the chances are that you, more often than not, spend a lot of your life feeling far more lost than found. Many people share your dilemma, so you’re not alone in your uncertainty of self and of others, of where you really want to be, and what you really want to have.

When I began to realize these feelings within me I was confronted with my own fears, and this forced me into a lot of self-examination. I realized how cavalier I had always been about keeping up with trends and changes that affected my business and personal life. I belonged to Shakespeare’s worldview: Life was a stage, and I was merely a player. I was so busy trying to make money and to succeed that I often got lost in the process. I didn’t like the feeling, and began soul-searching and then realized what I needed was not a change in career, not a cruise to get away from it all, but a new perspective of life itself. Because I wanted to discover what was truly important to me, I began adjusting some of my values, those that were not serving me well, or anyone else. And from my reading and study I gained an epiphany. For one thing, I wanted the best of all worlds. I wanted to make a lot of money, but also I wanted to do some good along the way.

With the goal of inquiring into the meaningful, I began to seek answers, and over the following three years I read hundreds of books in a sincere attempt to pursue the knowledge that I was seeking. Since I didn’t know exactly where to look, I looked everywhere. I read philosophy, religion, psychology, ancient writings, and science, doing this with more passion and more commitment than I had ever given anything in my life.

            Guess what? As I got deeper and deeper into all these wonderful books, and many of them were wonderful, I began to realize I had known the answer all along. I had simply buried it beneath a lot of materialistic concepts; concepts that taught me we live in a dog-eat-dog world, and success is the result of how well we fight.

It doesn’t matter if you were born in the richest or poorest family, you were taught that this is the way of the world. The idea and part of our socialization of “getting ahead” is based on all the warring methodologies starting with the most common of all, beating the competition. If we take the time to look down at our lives and down at our businesses, as opposed to trying to look into or past them, what comes into our overview is that we are spinning a lot of old wheels and are working a lot harder and under a lot more stress. While you have been “fighting” the competition, you have not been gaining ground but losing it. Does this make you wonder where you’ll be in the next few years since the competition is obviously growing and getting more and more aggressive. Additionally, your cost of doing business is and has been rising. “Receiving customers” is costing more and more as the price of advertising increases and the result of advertising decreases in effectiveness; lifetime value is eroding and the “commodization” of everything is going to put most business not only in a precarious position, but against the proprietary wall. 

These are the stark realities in the changing marketplace that quickly come into focus when we take a bird’s- eye view of how business is going for the entrepreneur these days. Most do not see that the new love economy is a reality that is entering into every facet of so-called consumerism. The consumer has been creating this over the past few years. Big business knows this, but the margins do not permit the mammoth companies to respond to this desire of the customer very easily. Indeed, most feel condemned to think of their customers as numbers. But this also applies to many attitudes of small- and medium-size business where leadership can easily reinvent themselves with open hearts and loving policies. They don’t, of course, because they have been educated to believe that (real) business is basically a war machine. Just stop and think about the arsenal of war metaphors that we use in business:

Tactics                                 Go get them                                                         Execute

Armament                        Sales hits                                                                Assault

Win battles                             Knock’em dead                                              Beat

Defeat the competition                       Capture                                               Attack

Take no prisoners                                 Target                                               War room

Go for the throat                               Headhunter                                           Hostile takeover

Potent weapons                                    Make a killing                    War zone

Guerilla warfare                                             Aim                                       Etc.

And, in addition, business is filled with possessive, greedy terms such as retention,  retain, acquisition, locked-in, we own them, they’re mine–and the list continues.

More on how these traditional business conceptions actually hinder our progress and success in a later chapter, but the point is that we have been conditioned to believe the road to the top is about defeating the competition, “doing what it takes,” and if it takes stepping on a few toes, being a little ruthless, so what? And what about customers and clients? Executives, bosses, owners and sales managers are constantly talking about “customer concern” and “customer service,” but soon enough their message returns to the war metaphors: “Let’s pull out our marketing weapons and take no prisoners. We need to target our customers!”

It is not at all unusual to call the customer/client liars, cheats, disloyal, dishonest and, in general, pain in the asses while putting up signs that read Our customers are number one with us! Can you imagine how the customer or client would feel if he or she stood invisible in the room and heard all this? But this is how business has been conducted, at least since the advent of money some three thousand years ago. As soon as someone says something like, Let’s get down to business, we are accustomed to thinking in terms of “butting heads,” “going on the offensive,” and so forth. The warrior in us is aroused, and we merge ourselves into visions of victory and defeat, gains and losses. Typically, the moment we sit down to discuss business with anyone, our first inclination is to watch our backs. And when it comes down to the jargon of the entrepreneur, what is more common than asking,, “How goes the battle?”

But why is this true?

            Other business is not the enemy. While big business is certainly powerful, andcan be overwhelming competition, it’s not the enemy either. The “enemy” is within. Just as individuals can become their own worst enemies, the business owner or leader can become self-defeating as well. This is true not because he is a defeatist but because he is being defeated to one degree or another as each fiscal year goes wistfully by. As a result, the owner or leader is trying to push harder against the rising costs and expanding competition. You know this because you hear it even in casual conversation: It just seems that the harder you fight, the harder the fight becomes…You think you’re winning the battles and then the bombs begin to fall…I don’t know, it’s one step forward and two steps back…I’m telling you if the economy doesn’t change, I’ll be out of business.

            These statements are so representative of today’s entrepreneurs  because they—and the odds are that you, too—have not recognized that the economy has changed. 

            The war economy, the so-called “real economy,” is no longer applicable to growing one’s business. Even for big business, these economies are mere metaphors. The economy that is truly on the rise is the love economy, and I will make this bold statement that those in business who do not make this new paradigm their own, will not survive. And, even if they do, you can bet that over the next five or ten years, the grip they have will become even looser and sweatier. I will say it again:  It doesn’t have to be. The love-based entrepreneur will not only succeed but will excel right now and in the future by making only a few easy and rewarding changes. As long as we keep living by the old battlefield metaphors we must ask ourselves, is it any wonder that by the end of most of our business days we feel exhausted, weary and anxiety filled, or we endure some other symptom from the challenges we’ve faced in the “war zone” we call work? Sure,  some days are better than others, so I’m speaking in general.

I did a lot of thinking in general during the three years I spent seeking answers and pathways to a happier, more meaningful and purposeful life. I paid a lot of attention to these negatives in business. What was I after? First of all, I wanted more happiness and harmony in my professional and private life. I wanted to get up in the morning looking forward to my day, celebrating the challenges, as opposed to fighting them, having fun making money and giving joy as I built greater success. I wanted to stop getting down to business and start getting into the pleasures of doing business. I wanted to quit coming home with such a heavy load on my shoulders, a load that often stopped me from being as attentive to my family as I wanted to be. I simply wanted to bring the positive and loving into my life and the life of my loved ones–:the best of all worlds: financial wealth (success) and to do some good along the way.

            Earlier I said that  I had experienced an epiphany, or a sudden realization of something profound. I really did! After all the reading, the research, the contemplation and meditation, I realized I already had the answer. It did not come to me in some wild “brainstorm,” or derive from intellectual theorizing. It came from the heart or, if you prefers, from the depths of my own consciousness. It was, simply, love.

            Love?

            Don’t roll your eyes upward in a skeptical response?  Why?Because  love is more, much more than you have ever thought it was. In fact, one of the world’s most renowned physicists, Fred Allan Wolf, tells us that, “Love is the glue of the universe.” It is the cohesive factor of our connection to the world and to others. It is also the most incredibly powerful tool we have for success in business as well as in our private lives. I’m going to show you exactly how love can work for you to increase your sales, increase your productivity, increase your client and customer base, increase your profits and gain the success that you desire for your business or career and for yourself. I am going to share the pragmatism of love and loving–a pragmatic and practical guide to the attainment of an abundance of good fortune…if you’re willing to open up your heart and mind.

            Here’s where you may decide to stop reading, but if you dare to read on, I will do my utmost to make it worth your time.. You have nothing to lose but a little time–and so very much to gain. Secondly, the old “warring” ways of the entrepreneur are rapidly becoming obsolete. A new paradigm is on the horizon for the businessperson, the entrepreneur who must compete in the shadow of changing times and new challenges. This paradigm demands real and sincere customer/client concern, and conscientious service–both are qualities of love. I believe that if you don’t begin implementing the love strategies I am detailing, your business may be doomed to mediocrity at best, or failure at worst. This is not a scare tactic, but rather what I’ve seen by observing how much competition is increasing and margins are declining.

Let me give you a current example: We are used to including the large supermarket chains in our view of bigger business success, and typically believe that the big supermarkets are safe and will keep moving forward and keep expanding. Not true! Wal-Mart has announced that they will open 40 “super centers” across California alone within the next five years or so. California supermarkets no longer live in what they imagined was a sanctuary of security. Why?  In other states where the Wal-Mart discount-plus-grocery stores have located, they have eroded the profits of many big and small businesses. If this can happen to the mammoth supermarket chains, where do you place your business in this scenario? Hopefully you can see the writing on the wall and agree that positive change is necessary. The most positive results will occur if you only apply the principles and techniques of becoming a Love-Based Entrepreneur–an LBE!

I want to make it perfectly clear that I am an objective, rational and realistic businessperson. I have earned financial success and have overcome the obstacles and hurdles we all meet along life’s journey. I say this to assure you that I am sharing practical results. You will enjoy greater success in business as well as greater success, happiness and peace of mind in your private life. I By becoming a love-based entrepreneur your life will not suddenly become perfect, a panacea, but it will become enriched, and you will become unencumbered by many of the problems and challenges you may now be facing.

Let’s talk about you first. You may be very set in your ways, have deep regrets or angers, be an egotist, be overwhelmed by uncertainties or fears of loss. You may even be afraid to love…unconditionally. Only you will know if any of this is true. But pay very close attention to what H.R. Lewis and H.S. Streitfield tell us about ourselves:

 “You are almost certainly much better than you think you are. More than you now permit yourself; you can be happier, stronger and braver. You can be more loving and giving; warmer, more open and honest; more responsible and responsive. You can perceive worlds richer and fuller than you now experience. You have it in you to be more creative, more zestful more joyous. All these prospects are within you. They are your potential.”

Getting StartedA student of Albert Einstein’s once said to his professor, “These are the same questions you asked on last year’s test. Nothing has changed.”

Einstein answered, “True enough, all the questions are the same; but this year, the answers are different.”

For nearly a decade I traveled the country speaking to hundreds of thousands of people about business and personal success. One of the most commonly asked questions was, “What about saturation?” My response was, “All the average person needs is to carve out a little piece of the pie–a little niche–and presto, you succeed.” In some ways that is still true, but things have changed since I gave this advice. For one thing, large corporations are looking closer at those “niches,” when in the past they had far less interest. Merchandising, for example, has virtually become obsolete for the person whose vision is a small retail store. There are exceptions, but the point here is that today’s entrepreneur is facing the challenge of finding new answers to the same old questions.

• How do I increase my customer base?

• How do I profit more?

• How do I keep my employees dedicated?

• How do I augment sales?

• How do I best secure my future, enjoy growth?

• How do I enjoy life while I’m doing all this?

The questions really are no different than they were a century ago, or even ten years ago, but the answers are quite different. We are going to discover the answers. And yes, no matter how well you are doing now, you will be doing better by the time you’ve read the entire  book. To qualify this positive projection. what I am sharing will not be accepted by everyone. If you are not a progressive thinker, if you can’t open your mind and think out of the box, you might just as well stop reading right here, because this text probably won’t do you any good. However, if you can be receptive to new insights and have the courage to test the waters of fresh ideas, you will be able to succeed in your business and in your personal life even more than you ever thought possible.

Who am I to be making these claims? Since it may seem a rather egotistical to tell you that I AM a success story ement, I ask your indulgence so I can explain exactly what I mean by this. Yes, I have earned a great deal of money in my life, and as an entrepreneur, have turned visions and dreams into realities. As we know in our hearts, even great wealth does not equate to great joy, happiness or to real success. Real success begins with looking into the mirror, knowing who you are, and liking that person. This is so intrinsic to the book’s message.

I am a success story not because I have acquired a lot of money, but because I have faced the challenges in my life, the ups, the downs, and become enriched as a human being because of them–not in spite of them. If you are having a very difficult time at present and facing what you deem to be even impossible situations,  know that I have been there, too. My messages are not born out of theory or thought alone, but from my personal experiences and wonderful lessons along my path as both a businessman and an individual. This is why I am anxious to share my discoveries . Indeed, I am setting out to give you real ways of growing your business and forwarding your life.

Are you a little skeptic? After all, these days a lot of business folk are contending with tremendous pressure and this includes large enterprises. Perhaps Gary Hamel brings home the point when he tells us, “Compaq, Novell, Westinghouse, DEC, TWA, Kodak, Kmart, Nissan—these and a hundred other incumbents have found themselves struggling to stay relevant in a topsy-turvy world.”  But even in view of these kinds of observations and no matter how your business is doing right now, you will learn how to make immediate positive changes, including an increase in your profits. Are you wondering: What am I in for here? One more positive-thinking book?  I assure you, you are not. While we all know positive thinking is important, positive thinking is merely the prerequisite for positive doing.

Even if you are still skeptical, that’s okay, as long as you dare to read on. Just remember the old axiom: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

2

Aspects of the New RealityEven before we get into the “new reality,” I want to make two positive changes: No longer use the terms, “customer retention” and “customer acquisition.” We will be calling these motivations customer preservation and customer receiving. As you will discover along the way, the words we use are intrinsic in creating the realities in which we live.

Chances are what you have been confronted with is the lifetime value of your customers is shrinking and margins are eroding. The multiplying effect is headed in the wrong direction. As entrepreneurs we obviously have to turn this around by decreasing the costs of customer preservation and customer receiving. While we will be covering ways of doing this, this book is not about the mechanics of change in the ordinary sense. These changes alone are enough to stir us into positive human action, into creating our own changes!  The book’s major focus is to humanize the machine.  Now let’s look at some of the challenges of the past fifteen years.

Going back (only) fifteen years, we could have run an infomercial and put almost any product on and sell a zillion of them–but now we can’t do this. Today, it’s more like a miracle to create a successful infomercial or ad campaign where the “customer receiving” cost (meaning “customer acquisition”) is not prohibitive. The question is: What is going to happen in the next ten or fifteen years? For sure, there are going to be more companies, more products, more me-too-ism,s and the “commodization” of everything is going to become heavier and heavier. IEverything has become a commodity, from bottled water to canned air. You can get the same product down the street for the same price, and like the old gray mare, the competitive way of doing business “just ain’t what she used to be.”  It is important to not only compete wisely but it is essential to compete in a positive, productive way.  Relative to that, here’s another term: “non-combative competing”!

Non-combative competing will soon play a major role in your own success story–and is extremely important to my entire message. In order to arrive at a new reality, we need to know exactly what direction we’re taking.  Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re standing at a crossroads and there are two road signs. One reads WAR MARKETING and the other LOVE MARKETING. Which road do you take? The chances are that you will have the intuition to take the Love Marketing direction but you may fear that “love” and “business” are pretty strange bedfellows. But why is this? Love is positive after all and that which is positive most naturally produces positive results. Nevertheless, most of us have been seduced by the ideas and concepts that business is war. This is how it has been portrayed.

Indeed, you have been taught, trained and engineered to believe in the survival of the fittest, that the strongest, biggest and most powerful are the winning players, the celebrating gladiators of the marketplace. You believe you’re not among them because you don’t have the weapons to fight your way to the top. Maybe you don’t put it this way, but down deep in your soul , you want to be a predator, too, and be able to fight the grand battles and go toe-to-toe with your competition. And, the chances are that you try in your own way. Perhaps you call meetings and talk about targeting accounts, creating strategies that will capture your clients and building ad campaigns that will somehow have more “recruitment appeal” than those ads and/or commercials you’re running against.  Often leadership calls where they gather their marketing team or sales force for meetings: The war room!

Meet with just about any business owner, CEO or devoted manager and ask how they are intending to grow their business or, in some cases, to merely stabilize its operations, and you will generally hear something like, “we’re putting our attack plantogether now” or “we’ve launched our biggest bombs so let’s see where they land.”

As you stand at the crossroad of love and war, the warring route will tend to make more sense to you. It did for me, for years!  In fact, one of my favorite saying was:  When the going gets tough, the tough get going.  This seems to be a positive attitude, but tough is to determined as aggressive is to assertive. The love marketer is determined and assertive,  bothpositive and productive attributes. Today both men and women in business keep believing that business has to be about being tough and aggressive. Ask just about anyone in business how things are going, and the odds are they will answer tsomething like:  Still fighting the battles or just taking one day at a time and seeing how the war goes. 

ints made! Typically, business continues in the old reality of war metaphors and paradigms. TA new reality is entering the consciousness of the consumer in massive proportions, both domestically and globally. (This is not talking politics, but talking about people.) I may lose some of you here,  because I want to share my passions about the new love economy. I’m taking the risk even those  some readers will be stoic businesspeople unprepared for and skeptical of my message. If that’s you, please read on anyway, because what I am so eager to share can and will create great and wonderful changes for you and for your business:

            Since the Age of so-called Enlightenment we human beings have been growing farther apart from ourselves and so, others. The paradigms from science  are that we live in a dead and mechanical world. As a result, our great human quest has been to control nature. Consequently, we lost our connectiveness to the universe and to our own hearts. The mind became all, and we were taught that maturity is about controlling our feelings and reacting in cold calculation to the world around us. If we want to succeed in life, you have to be tough, hard and aggressive; you have to win by beating/defeating the competition. These concepts told us that we’d better be willing to step on a few toes before we are stepped on, or over by others. Amidst this basic training of our becoming, we grew up believing that the only “real” goals of life were getting ahead, winning the races and grabbing the brass ring. All these metaphors belong to big business no less than they have belonged to conquering armies since the advent of civilization itself. You no doubt connect to these metaphors, after all, the world has been turning on them for a very long time. In the end, we have lost meaning and purpose in our lives and, by and large, have become either soft or hard materialists to one degree or another.

            Over the past few decades, however, the new science—called quantum physics or quantum mechanics—has been suggesting that there is more to life—much more—than what we have been told at least since the time of Descartes (1596-1650). (Incidentally, the “new” physics are not so new anymore, they have been around a little over a hundred years, beginning with Max Planck’s theory of quantum in 1900.) The philosopher and mathematician Descartes gave us a world model that the universe was a mere machine, and from this view, resulting in the soul-less, spiritual-less, lifeless view of classical science that has been centered in the belief that the universe evolved accidentally and that all living things—including ourselves—are a result of that ancient accident. In short, our human value has been scientifically compared to the value of a pebble on the beach. Indeed, according to classical science, there is no essence to us at all, only our physical attributes that by some odd chance include an incredible mechanism called a “brain.” 

Tthe point is simply that the “new” science is telling us that the old view is not correct, that the perception of I am here and you are there and the trees of the forest are over there is not how “reality” really is. We are told thatsomething, perhaps consciousness itself, connects us all to everyone and everything else. We are told that the world is not made up of isolated, separate things but is rather a “web of relationships.”

            Much of this writing is about connecting to those “relationships” in a more conscious, loving and productive way and finally creating or, in other words, manifesting positive results for ourselves,  our businesses or jobs or careers.

            Thismay sound very weird or odd to a businessperson who has been living the belief that business is—or should be—cold and hard. This is not something I’ve made up (and I will be reminding you occassinally), —but is instead something that has been said since very ancient times by mystics and is being said now by many of the most advanced scientific minds on the planet. Based on this much alone, I will ask you a question that would have been asked you thousands of years ago, and might be asked today by any number of devoted quantum scientists: How are you actualizing your world today?

            I am writing this  to show you how to actualize your world happier, healthier, more successful and secure–as these are the natural benefits that evolve when we choose to take the “quantum leap” into the new reality.

Now let’s return to business. A new (I could also say a “renewed”) world model is occurring and has been over the past forty-plus years. People in mass want to bring back meaning and purpose into their lives; they desire to feel (to experience) meaningfulness in their daily lives. They have awakened to the thought that there is more to life than news, weather and sports, and they are anxious to rekindle their connection to the universe. New paradigms are forming in the human psyche that—regardless of what some will say—is spiritual in nature. The effect of this is naturally spilling over into business. It doesn’t make any difference whatsoever if you’re the owner of Freddy’s Tire Service, or head of General Motors, at the real bottom line, the customer has the power!

In light of all this, business has at least one major consideration to make: You cannot afford to do combat anymore. The competition is already too vast and overpowering. We need not forecast what the entrepreneur will no doubt be facing ten or twenty years from now in terms of gaining market share. But, guess what—you already have the edge, if you choose to use it. This “edge” is called love marketing and love marketing belongs to the “new reality.”

In the new reality, the old warring metaphors and paradigms have no place because they are destructive and tyrannical. And, as this new reality is spreading more and more in the hearts and minds of people, I suggestthat business must catch up with the aspirations of simply creating a safer, happier and more loving world, at least in their own environments. There is not only a humanitarian reason for this, but this will truly bring immediate profitable results. After all,  the price of “customer receiving” has become too costly, advertising doesn’t work even as well as it did ten years ago–much less as it did fifty years ago when product all but assured success and when (good/attentive) service was prevalent and expected.

There is a blossoming of a new love economy, and for those leaders in business and for the entrepreneurs who are willing to open not only their minds but also their hearts to it, success will follow.

My book really begins here–and hopefully I have done an ample job of inspiring you to do more than read on. I urge you also to rethink your world. Upon rethinking your world, you will create change in it. By changing your words, you truly change your world.

That’s right. By changing your words, you change your world.

Yes, it is this simple. This easy! The quest is to become a love marketer, a love manager and a love-based entrepreneur. If terms like these frighten you, if you are skeptical,  I don’t blame you.  There was a time when all that I have just written would have sounded too magical or mystical for me. There was a time when I was the one sitting behind his desk believing that control and combative competition was the only way the warrior won in business. Our chore in life is not doing what we have been told, to conquer our feelings and forge ahead against the challenges of a hostile world–but quite the opposite.  The world is not hostile although some people in are.  You don’t have to be among them. It is not only okay to put your armor away, it is essential! And, when you do only this much, you will immediately begin to profit.

But greater profit for you is not the only goal of this book; gaining greater wealth is only one part of what is soon to unfold for you if you are willing to act upon the message about creating a greater prosperity of positive (and productive) energy not only in yourself, but also for your customers and clients, your employees, and everyone you greet. By the time you have turned the last page, you will know exactly how to create a greater prosperity of joy in your life at home, at work and at play.

Since this all sounds so promising, you may have become even more skeptical, asking something like, If this guy has all these answers, if he knows how to become richer, happier and more successful, why the heck is he sharing these secrets with me? The answer is simple and essential to everything I have discovered over the past few years, everything that is intrinsic to what the rest of this book is about. I am sharing these “secrets” with you because…I love you.

This message contains a secret.

It is a wonderful and profound secret, a world changing secret and it is also a secret you already know! But wait, if you already know it, how then might it be a secret at all?

The truth is your mind may not remember the contents of the secret because  your thoughts have been filled with many of life’s  uncertainties and other confusions. Maybe you have had many disappointments or endured much pain? Maybe you’ve filled your mental calender of events with business or career? Maybe you have busied yourself accumulating great financial wealth or you’ve been submerged in the struggle’s of poverty? There are so many reason why you might have forgotten this secret; only you will know if you have or not,

The secret I am talking about is…

The Love Factor

The love factor is really not a secret because it arrives with all of us when we are born.  There was a time in our lives when we loved the world and all that are in it…unconditionally. And, when we loved the Universe in this way, our world was a place of enchantment, both magical and miraculous. The only thing that makes the love factor a (real) secret is the fact we typically hide it from ourselves or it has been taken away by the authorities  in our lives. We are taught the world is an unloving place and we have to be cautious  in our journey through it. After all, what if we love someone and they don’t love us back?

What if other’s misuse our love or make fools of us because of it?  Another reason why you have probably forgotten this secret because a lot has happened to you since you were a very young child.

And so, given all these warnings, we begin to withdraw from the wellspring of love in our hearts and begin to trust our brains to do our thinking for us. The first rule we typically give the 3-pound organ between our ears is love must be reciprocal and from this we begin to value only that which pleases or regards us in some way.

This isn’t love, of course, because love, to be love, is always unconditional.

I will tell you now that I know a real “secret” about you. It doesn’t matter who you are; a top executive of some Fortune 500 company, a gardner, mechanic, store clerk or even if you’ve taken some seriously “bad” turns in your life that created a lot of problems for you, you are love!

You may desire all kinds of stuff for your life like a more extravagant home, new cars in the driveway, countless luxuries…wining the lotto? But, down in the depths of you there are two things you want most of all:

To love and to be loved.

There is something else. You would like your world to be a better, kinder, safer and more loving place and you would make these changes if you could.  I have a surprise for you. You can! You can by simply returning to the Love Factor that is already yours.

I want you to think about what I just said and ponder these truths. I will continue this narrative tomorrow.

Here is something I want you to try today:

First. Go right now to the closest mirror and look yourself in the eyes and say, “I love you.” No one is looking. Give it a try. It is magical. The power of words and what I am sharing with you is one of the ways to tap into the genie within. The next thing I want you to do is for the next 24 hours, quietly say to every person you come in contact with, that you love them.  Say to yourself, “I love you.” You have to emote it and feel it in your heart.

Watch what happens. If you could do this for a week straight, it would change your view totally. There is magic in doing what I am sharing with you.’

I have books available on this site that discuss this at length. Even the science behind it.

anyway. Have a wonderful day today and put the love in what you do.

Peace and love.

John Polk

Check out some of my other websites.

www.thefelonproject.com

www.thebranddepot.com

Hello everyone.

You know, I have been meaning to share some of my thoughts about life and what I have experienced for a long time.  I used to be a public speaker and author of over a million books in print. So what! I remember thinking how cool it was to travel and fly and speak all around the world and then I remember the day I didn’t know what city I was in.

It was a wake up call.

I had lectured to hundreds of thousands of people and the joy had left me. I think back now and realize it was more the subject than anything else. Since that period of time, I have created a body of work that i would love to start sharing with the public. Hell, I have succeeded in such a big way in my life but guess what, I have failed a lot too. I am now in a position in my life where sharing what I have learned is very important to me. wow, I must be getting old. I hate saying that. sounds kinda creepy but life is too short. That’s not just a cliche.

anyway.

I am going to start this off with a little chat about what i call the love factor.

Guess what? I went to prison. yes, I went to prison and so should you. No, I am not some violet criminal or anything crazy. although some have treated me like that. I lost my freedom over 13 years ago and people act like it was yesterday. I am a guy who has been worth over a hundred million dollars in my day and have lost it all. yes, all of it!

If I can overcome the crazy shit i have overcome, I promise you that you don’t have it as bad as you think.

I am here to tell you that no matter how far down in the crap you are, there is a way up. the only way up through the shit, is in your own mind.  The genie is within and i am going to–through this blog–and other writing, videos and other mediums, attempt to share this crazy ass story and adventure i call my life. let me tell you. Ihave been through shit that would curl your hair. many men would have ended their lives. My dear old grandfather blew his brains out and I have had times where i fully empathized with him.

I am hoping somehow through my stories–through my writings–that you will have more hope. that you will be kind more often. that you will love more, smile more, make love more and hey, even make some money.

when I was in prison, I set out to own the word, “love” in business. I failed. you know what happened? i got greedy and built companies and created multi-million dollar ventures. i kept saying: “oh, I will do that love factor thing.

I created a company out of prison and actually called my sales reps love agents and gave a free book when you purchased my energy drink. lol. that is a whole other story.

enough.

let me share this little diddy with you.

I will have all kinds of good stuff on here after a while. bare with me.

here it goes:

ASPECTS OF THE LOVE FACTOR PHILOSOPHY

                                                       THE INSIDE US

We at The Love Factor disagree wholeheartedly with so many of today’s scientists and scholars  who tell us that we are all nothing more than gene machines that muck about through our lives believing that we are conscious and eternal.

In the far reaches of this theory is that, in the end analysis, life has no meaning or purpose and is, indeed, the existential experience of being and nothingness…

Fortunately there are other scientists and scholars who disagree with these rather grim views of our existence…In light of this we can almost divide those who offer that we  are not living organisms are but basic robotic creatures (gene machines) and those that offer we are physical manifestations of spiritual significance.

In the positive living-world corner are such profound physicists as Fred Alan Wolf, Paul Davies and David Bohm (many others) and in the dead-mechanical-world corner there are scientists such as Daniel C. Dennett, Richard Dawkins and the now deceased Carl Sagan. There are many others in this court too.

On the brighter side of “the living-world” coin are great inspirational and motivational writers and speakers such as Wayne W. Dyer, Deepak Chopra and the voices of such teachers as Tony Robbins and our own John Polk.

The radical difference between the two sides is that those who hold the mechanical world view tell us that while we have some volition to better ourselves and therefore control our destinies we are, by and large, destined to the limitations given us by our DNA. One thing that this indicates in that we can improve your present conditions but there is little chance that we will ever rise above them. The other side tells us the opposite; that we are in charge of our lives and, in a term, we can overcome the challenges we confront.

In regard to this, some years ago a tattoo became popular among many convicts. The tattoo read: Born to Lose.

The owners of this self-defeating message in body-art have branded themselves helpless and hopeless. If one is “born to lose” after all, there are no alternatives and life becomes a rocky road leading to a series of dead ends…

Indeed, the thought of being born to lose is in and of itself a message to one’s own brain and, at the same time, a projection into the Universe. (What is projected into the Universe is always reflected!)

What we are getting at here is a proposition that is at the cornerstone of The Love Factor philosophy. That is, what we tell our brains (or whatever our brains are conditioned to believe) is how we manifest our world. This is precisely why having loving and nurturing parents while growing up is so important. It is as simple as this: When the child grows up feeling loved and cared about, the child’s brain grows up believing that it is of value. A person of value never mirrors itself as “born to lose.”

Indeed, the term “born to lose” is a sad metaphor for deeming oneself of little or no value. The interesting part of this dilemma is that when one deems him or herself of no value, the world becomes an extension of themselves and therefore holds no or little value either. We are not just referring to prison inmates here but to all persons who never succeed in life, are never really happy or productive. There is after all not much difference between having a tattoo that states “I was born to lose” than it is to live one’s life in a brain-state that creates negative realities such as…I can never get ahead…nothing ever works out for me…if it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have none at all and so forth.

The key message here is the observation: “creates negative realities.”

When you can grasp that it is how you project the world, the world becomes, you will  realize too that you are forever the creator in the continuum of creating. You can test this easily. Take a person in your life that you now hate and no matter how difficult it is for you, begin telling yourself every day that you forgive and love this person and see the results. That person will not change but you will have “created” your world more loving and therefore more positive. Indeed, your love or hate may have little (and probably no effect) on the target-object but you will begin noticing both your mind and body becoming “brighter” and so happier. Happy people do not fail!

There is a tremendous amount of food for thought in what has been written in the above. We will leave you to ponder why it is within The Love Factor’s view that you and I and every other individual is empowered to make positive changes inside the self and so in the world; in the entire Universe. In regard to this, there is a most beautiful and profound statement made by Joseph Clinton Pearce we will leave you to dwell on:

            “Mind mirrors the universe that mirrors man’s mind. Creator and Created give rise to each other.”

                                        THE POWER OF THE BRAIN

It is probably safe to say that we have all been taught that we are subject to the way our physical brains work. In a sense this is true because our brains have stored within them

all our experiences. Indeed, this is one reason why the father of modern existentialism, Jean-Paul-Sartre, tells us that we are nothing other than “the totality of our experiences.”

The Love Factor does NOT agree with this in that while it is true we habitually draw from our experiences to create our realities in the present we are not condemned to being limited by them. In other words, just as we can choose to rise above our circumstances we can choose to draw from our experiences but, at the same time, refuse to be the result of them.

The real value of experience is that it is a masterful teacher.

For example if one has had a poor or even terrible childhood and makes the statement, if I’d been raised differently I would have turned out so much better, richer, more loving and generous…happier, what is really being said is that yes, I am merely the totality of my experiences. Another way of saying this is I am what the world has made me.

This scenario works ONLY if we deny that we human beings have free will. What the Love Factor says about this is that our free will extends the possibility of simply making choices and therefore choosing alternatives. For one thing, if we stand at a “T” in the road and can only turn left or right, free will really doesn’t come into play since we are condemned to going one way or another. We have to choose a direction of course but, in this example, we are not free to choose (or will) other alternatives.

Nearly everyone is conditioned to go through their lives feeling and believing that they are confined and so limited by these kinds of barriers to their freedom. This view creates a kind of swim or sink philosophy and all of our socialization, our training and education has indoctrinated us to exist in a world that we have absolutely no control over. Well, there are lots of things we can’t do…we can’t flap our arms and fly or walk through stone walls. Because we are, ourselves physical beings, we belong to the laws of physics. And, although physics is proving that what we see and so call “real” is really a mere projection or “conjuring” of our consciousness. We need not go into this, however, since the fact remains that if we stub our toe on a brick, it’s going to hurt.

Skipping the more magical and mystical aspects of the potential of our free will, we want to dwell on the power that we all have to “will” a happier and, for that matter, more successful life for ourselves. For simplistic purposes we will call it, brainpower.

While there are a rash of scientists in the world who insist that we are nothing more than our brain-bodies, we at The Love Factor agree instead with those scientists and other renowned thinkers who tell us that, as Doctor Paul Pearsall states, we are NOT our brains, our brains only think that they are us. And he adds:

                        “…the “I”, the self, is much more than the reverberation of neurons and

                          we are much more than we “think” we are. We are also what we believe,

                          hope, feel, and sense. We can tell the brain not only what, but how

                          to think.”

This is vital to The Love Factor’s philosophy because it reverses the proposition that we are subject to the workings of our brains bur rather tells us our brains our subject to the “I” of us which is housed in our bodies. Religious people call this our soul-selves or spiritual selves while many physicists would call this our consciousness. The bottom line is, we are more than the skin, bones and organs that make up our physical beings…and, in this light, it becomes essential to realize that our brains—wonderful and magnificent as they are, are merely one more organ that we possess.

Now then, to keep all this as simple as we can, imagine your brain as being likened to the genie in the lamp that grants your wishes. Returning to physics for a moment, no, of course your brain cannot turn the pebble in your hand into a nugget of gold.What your brain can do, however, is create positive synchronicities in your life that will, in turn, bring joyful, loving, positive and yes, profitable occurrences into your life

Most people are extremely skeptical when they first hear this and we understand this since it does sound a little far-fetched, a little too magical and mystical. The problem is that nearly everyone has been indoctrinated to, in the least, curve their imaginations and deny that they are endowed with the freedom to manifest in an objective world.

The young children know, by their very nature that they belong to the entire Universe and nothing is impossible for them…adults see this as “their playtime” and work hard to draw their children out of it placing them in their reality of hard knocks and so-called objective thinking. In short, most parents are anxious to take the “magic” out of their children’s lives and fit them snuggly into their own mundane world.

Some of this is necessary and positive of course. After all, the physical world has its demands! What is negative, however, is that the socialization that the child gets takes away his or her power. The child is indoctrinated to believe that this is how things are done, these are the rules of living life and everything is all about cause-and-effect.

And so, by the time the child is around seven years old he or she has separated the subjective from the objective in such a way that his or her subjective self is invalidated. Doing home work has its rewards in the real world while imagination only delivers the unreal.

What results from all this is a belief that each individual is subject to the workings of the world, that, as said, there is no magic *only cause-and-effect.

The idea then belongs to the ideal…we are more than a brain/body and it is the “I” of ourselves that is “conscious.” We might call this consciousness, **Mind.

*What scientifically challenges the concept of cause-and-effect is beyond our understanding and so we

will not attempt to explain it beyond saying that (scientifically) it describes something termed “time-forward causality” and, based on this, our claim is that it is within the human experience to influence both past and future; that through our consciousness we can (and do) alter events!

** The scientific arena is packed with scientists and other so-called scholars who believe that mind is a mere epiphenomenon (function) of the brain. The Love Factor’s philosophy offers that the “I” of us or, in other word, that mind is separated from the brain/body or what the spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, calls the pain-body.

And so, okay, if you can bring yourself to discard your doubts and reassess the “who and what” of you and realize the two as distinct. Read on:

When you can grasp that your brain is only part of the “what” of you and that the actual you, the “I” of you (the spirit, soul or mind you) is the temporary tenant in your physical body, you can therefore more easily grasp the possibility of being in charge of your brain as opposed to being in servitude it. There are cases when the damaged or unhealthy brain

can take control but that is a subject for another time. At this juncture what we are struggling to say is that you are NOT your brain and it is your brain that is in servitude to you.

Indeed, think of your brain as a thoughtless organ forever operating on automatic. Except for a few survival techniques, it ONLY knows what it is told. And it has the ability to deliver just about anything that it is told. This is why we use the metaphor of the genie in the lamp; the mythical granter of wishes.

When you were a child and those adults in your life that you loved and believed held the truth were the first authorities that your brain knew. And so if they told you that you were mechanical, artistic, bad, good, positive or negative, hateful or loving, naughty or nice your brain began its magic and produced the attitudes that would best demonstrate what it was told you were.

We are not only talking about parents here but all the significant others in your life, teachers to peers. All their words were taken literally since your brain CANNOT discriminate between truth and fiction. If for example, you are alone in your bed at night and in the darkness of a room and you decide that some terrible monster is hiding in your closet or under your bed, your brain will give you all the feelings of fear and anxiety that would arrive if you actually confronted someone horrible hiding in your room. And, the more that you tell yourself that you are scared, the more frightened you will actually become. You will soon enough find yourself out of bed, turning on the light and checking every nook and cranny of the house to make sure that you are not in any real danger.

If you told your brain (enough times) that carrots were deadly poison, the time would quite possibly arrive when you could not bring yourself to eat a carrot or, if you did, you would suddenly feel all the symptoms of being poisoned. Children fool themselves this way but regardless of age all neurotic behaviors are the result of believing something that simply ISN’T true.

For example, this is why we feel such devastating hurt when we lose a romantic lover. With all the emotional power within us we tell our brains that we can’t live without the other…we will never be happy again…we hate life…we have been trampled on…our hearts have been broken and so forth. Our brains supply the unhappy endorphins that these declarations have demanded through a network of complex processes.

With this in mind there are some scientists and others in the medical professions that tell us that if we call a child “lazy” enough times that child may develop a slow (lazy) heart beat, a slow functioning liver or even a slow immune system.

We do not know how this works but that it does work is so obvious that it is all but undeniable.

With all this in mind, it is important now to conceive of what “reality” you are giving your brain when you tell it that you a hate a person or a thing. The brain conjures up all the chemicals that you need to become hateful. And being hateful you necessarily become unhappy.

If that hate continues and grows into neurotic proportions, you are apt to become destructive, say cruel things or more even do cruel things. When this happens you areacting out of your experiences and giving yourself over to your brain/body; you become the hate, so to speak, that you have harbored. Hateful people do hateful things!

But remember what we said at the top of this article? We are NOT the totality of our experiences, we can transcend experiences (rise above them) and use our free will to take control of ourselves and as a result take control of our world. We can do this by simply calling the hated object an object of our love for only one example. As a result, as long as we’re persistent enough, our brains will supply us with all the love we need to overcome our hatefulness. We soon enough become happier. Happy people do happy things!

An easy way to test this is this: look at a plate of food that you are about to eat and tell yourself a few times that it is really sickening and see what happens. Remember your brain doesn’t know much of anything until it is told.

The major point here is that our brains not only deliver what they are told by others about ourselves (best example our parents) but what we tell our brains about ourselves.

In thinking about what is being suggested in all this, here’s a list of things people say without ever knowing that when said enough times or with enough sincerity, their brains will deliver the chemicals and other processes that create the declarations into realities of one kind or another. Just think of what people are creating when they say:

This makes me sick

I’ll die if I have to go

This is really a pain in the ass

I cant stomach this

It’s enough to drive me crazy

I’d rather be dead

This is really the shits

There’s nothing worth living for

I’m just sick and tired of it

The entire thing is nauseous

We’ll just have to suffer it out

I can’t tell you how hurt I am

I just don’t feel good about it

It’s enough to give you a heart attack

All these rather mood motivated remarks become declarations and finally instructions when we understand that the brain can’t tell fact from fiction in terms of what it is told.

We are NOT saying of course that (in a fit a temper) you declare that someone “is driving you crazy” that your brain will suddenly deliver insanity to you. But if you make this declaration enough you may just get what you have given reality through your words to. And, indeed, if you say this enough about someone, you will begin finding more and more wrong with their attitudes and actions that, well, in a term, drive you crazy. Your brain will be begin supplying those chemicals that give you high anxiety as soon as that person walks into the room. Remember, as it is with the rose bush that you call a thorn bush—whatever you call a thing it becomes. Call anyone a crazy-maker time and time again and that is what that person will become…for you.

In this sense we all create our own worlds…we “will” things to become what we desire or declare them to be. This is part of how we use our free will in “creating” our own realities. Accordingly to say anything such as “I was born to lose” is to manifest “losing.”

But wait, it is one thing to say that what we tell our brains changes our interior worlds but surely what we say to our brains or what is given our brains by the authorities in our lives can’t affect the exterior world that we live in, right?

Wrong.

Read part two of this piece.

I am going to talk a great deal about what I call the love factor. It is a term I came up with over a decade ago when I thought I might be able to own the word “love” in business. I fell away from the love factor and came back and synchronicity is back brother. The Love Factor is working in my life again and please let me help you find The Love Factor for you!

THE LOVE FACTOR

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

A lot of people reading this material will not be old enough to recall a most profound and beautiful song from the 1960s. *The name of the song is, “What the World Needs Now is Love.”                                The Hal David lyrics begin with:

      “What the world needs now is love, sweet love It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of What the world needs now is love, sweet love, No not just for some but for everyone.”

The message of this song has been applicable since the advent of so-called civilization some 10,000 t0 15,000 years ago. At least from the ancient times of the Egyptians the topic of love (and its meaning) has been a personal and social issue for just about everyone in every place. The ancient Egyptians, for example, said it was “transcendence.”

Over the course of time we will be seeing just how correct those men and women were who built the pyramids and gave us so many other universal observations but for now we will make the overall statement that, in all probability, love is NOT what you think it is or were raised to believe that it is.

Actual love is NOT the cohesive bond between lovers or, for the matter, even parents and children that we have been taught that it is; actual love is NOT an emotional tie such as other human qualities as great respect, admiration and affection are. Actual love (as opposed to our common view and interpretation of love) is the most empowering component of our existence. Indeed,actual love is, if you will, your connectedness to the **Universe or, if you prefer, to your godliness.

If you are at a juncture of your life when you can be receptive to this, I will be showing you how to reopen your path to love and, as a result, become the magician or, if you prefer, the miracle maker that you were born to be.

This is primarily what The Love Factor is all about, the returning to the enrichment and empowerment of our free will. In this regard, you have probably heard the Christ-axiom *What The World Needs Now is Love was written by Hal David (lyrics) and Burt Bacharach (music) and released in 1965. Since then over 100 singers have recorded this meaningful and thought provoking song!

**A friend of mine once asked the world renowned physicist, Fred Allen Wolf what love is and he replied. Love is the glue of the Universe.

that tells us that the truth is what sets us free. We are here to tell you that this is not metaphor but absolute on both levels of our human existence. That is, for both the subjective and objective consciousness that creates us whole and…real.

We will tell you now that you—no matter where you are at in your life—are far more powerful and yes, magical than perhaps you ever dreamed or thought that you could be. Yes, we fully realize that this is a profound statement and can easily be scoffed at by many who have been indoctrinated to believe that they are subject to their fate, or to the workings of the world or, for that matter, even to their genes as many of today’s scientists will insist.

We are here to tell you that, indeed, every time you simply change your mind you change the universe. And so, in this view, think about how much more powerful you are when you add the love factor.

Read my “little book of big changes” and learn fascinating secrets of the Love Factor that can start changing your life (for the better) right now.

 This little gem of a book can be read around the timeit takes to eat lunch but can impact your life forever.

We help support this site by selling it for only$7.00 but for a limited time, you can have it for free if you just donate a dollar for shipping.  This book is a hardcover, embossed little gem of a book. It makes a perfect gift for someone you care about. Someone who needs to feel and understand the true power of love.

A midst the other wonderful and often surprising insights that you will gain from this little publication, you will learn about the genie inside yourself and the miraculouspowers that you already possess.

Come back in a couple days and i will have a link for you to get my book for a dollar.