The Gratitude Formula: A 7-Step Success System to Create a Life that You Love
192
The Gratitude Formula: A 7-Step Success System to Create a Life that You Love
192Paperback
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Overview
For many of us, success can feel unattainable, as though others were given a secret that the rest of us are missing. But author May McCarthy says that success is a system, not a secret.
In The Gratitude Formula, McCarthy offers a definable, practical system that you can put to use every day to achieve success in your relationships, career, finances, health, personal pursuits, spiritual growth, and virtually any other aspect of your life.
While her method is built upon starting each day with a grateful heart, the details of her 7-step practice are unlike anything you've ever seen before, and McCarthy teaches that implementing them on a daily basis is the key to creating a life that you love.
In The Gratitude Formula, you will learn how to:
- CREATE POWERFUL, PRACTICAL, AND ACHIEVABLE GOALS
- DEVELOP YOUR SPIRITUAL INTUITION TO HELP YOU MANIFEST AND ACHIEVE YOUR DREAMS
- UNTANGLE FROM ANY DOUBTS, FEARS, OR BEHAVIORS THAT ARE HOLDING YOU BACK FROM ABUNDANCE
- SAY YES TO PROSPERITY AND LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES
McCarthy's experience as a business strategist and successful entrepreneur has given her the tools to create success in her life and for her clients, and now she shares those tools in this book.
The instructions contained in The Gratitude Formula are simple and clear, and if you follow them daily, you can begin to receive abundance and create a life you love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781938289743 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hierophant Publishing |
| Publication date: | 03/13/2018 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 1,149,431 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Section 1:
SUCCESS IS A SYSTEM, NOT A SECRET
That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.
— ABRAHAM LINCOLN
When you make the commitment to learn something new, don't you put in concerted mental and physical effort on a repeated basis to become proficient in the new task? You apply knowledge that's necessary to achieve the results that you desire. All of us have been using this kind of a system for success our entire lives.
For example, think about when you first learned to ride a bicycle. Didn't you spend hours learning how to balance and move on the bike without falling? I can recall vividly the times that I crashed and fell off my bike while learning to ride on two wheels. I spent hours practicing what I was taught over and over. I watched family and friends ride their bikes without falling. I dreamed about sailing down the street, feeling the wind through my hair as I expertly rode my bike. Every day I thought about and practiced riding. When I made progress, I expressed tremendous gratitude. Once I believed strongly that it was possible to ride my bike without falling, things shifted and I began to see more evidence of my improvement.
Can you remember learning to type? At first, the keyboard was scary: it wasn't even in alphabetical order! Now after years of practice, maybe you're one of those people who is able to type without much thought. I know some teenagers who can type as fast as they can speak. Wow!
What about reading? Didn't you learn to sound out each word with great effort? Then you had to understand the meaning of the words, relate them to a sentence, a paragraph, and a story. Years later, having read countless numbers of words, you're most likely able to simply skim pages of words with the same successful understanding of their meaning.
I hope that you're beginning to recognize that success is a system. Champion auto racer, Bobby Unser shared, "Success is where preparation and opportunity meet." As you continually prepare to be successful, you will notice more opportunities to achieve your goals. Both physical and mental repetition are key components of your preparation as part of the success system. In essence, repetition reaps rewards.
One of the best illustrations for this is the evening drive home from work. Have you ever driven home and had no awareness of large parts of the drive? This happens because you have become skilled at driving by repeating the behavior often. What was once a very conscious and deliberate effort has now become an ordinary and typical occurrence. Through repetition, you've mastered what you wanted to learn and developed a habit.
The same thing is true when using a new daily system for success to achieve more of your goals. Taking on the CSO as a new partner to help you and repetition of a daily practice with gratitude are necessary elements of your new system for success. As you incorporate and repeat the steps in your success system, you will find that it becomes easier for you to achieve more of your desired goals. Your goals can involve your health, happiness, relationships, work, finances, spiritual connection with your source, or any other achievement that you desire. It can take disciplined effort to get into a system of frequently manifesting goals, but, just like riding a bike or driving a car, it will get easier with practice. In some cases, these repetitive activities will become new habits over time.
Habits emerge through associative learning. University of Southern California professor Wendy Wood explained this in her session at the American Psychological Association's 122nd Annual Convention in 2014; "We find patterns of behavior that allow us to reach goals. We repeat what works, and when actions are repeated in a stable context, we form associations between cues and response." We can learn to repeat what works as a success system to reach our goals.
Types of Success Systems
There are a number of systems that people use to achieve success.
• In professional sports, athletes mentally and physically train every day to perform at the highest levels. The same is true for professional musicians.
• In religions and spiritual organizations, forms of prayer are used in a repetitive way along with gratitude, confidence, and faith. Prayer may include gratitude statements for achieving the outcomes desired in advance as well as the confidence that it can manifest. Repetitive chanting is often used to successfully reach a deeper level of connection with a spiritual source that can provide directions and orchestrate opportunities to achieve desired outcomes.
• In business, leaders and managers set and revisit goals regularly and measure their efforts against them. Often, they will post their goals for performance, safety, or customer satisfaction where all employees can see them. This promotes an attitude of agreement.
In the daily system for success that I describe in this book, many of the most effective elements of the success systems above are combined into an efficient daily practice for the greatest results.
Look at the world's top athletes. They are known for practicing their routines, their workouts, and their skills a million times over in training, especially before big competitions. According to sports psychologist Michael Edgar, "Three (must have) keys to success in sports are good instruction, practice, and repetition." As athletes perform a successful behavior repeatedly, they improve their chances of achieving excellence.
In many religious traditions, there are examples of repetitive prayer leading to increased confidence and desired outcomes. As we speak our prayers out loud and focus on the completed goal, whether it is a healthy body, increased financial wealth, harmonious relationships, happiness, etc., we stop the fearful mind from having any power to attract what we don't want and we enable our desires to manifest. As we focus our attention on something that we desire, our subconscious will illuminate evidence so that we notice its presence. One of my favorite new thought teachers from the 1920s, Florence Scovel Shinn, said, "We cannot always control our thoughts, but we can control our words, and repetition impresses the subconscious, and we are then master of the situation." Repetitive prayer or spiritual chanting can drown out negative thoughts and take us to a peaceful place where we are still and receptive to our ultimate spiritual advisor. As we repetitively describe a desired outcome and have confidence that our spiritual partner can help us to achieve it, we are conditioning ourselves to realize more answers to our prayers. We will recognize more opportunities to take steps to achieve what we desire.
Business people establish a course for their desired growth, profitability, sales, efficiency, and other areas within their businesses. Leaders often convey the plan for successful outcomes to their teams. Management gathers employees together to communicate the projected goals. Many even post these goals throughout the company and talk about them regularly so that all employees are aware of the goals for their departments. Zig Ziglar, one of the greatest business and motivational speakers, said, "Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment." I agree! As we keep our goals at the forefront of our thoughts, we're likely to see opportunities to achieve them.
In one of my recent healthcare ventures, we employed a number of entry level implementation specialists. These workers traveled the country assisting our project managers to install software and equipment to automate hospital pharmacies. Pete, one of the implementation specialists, used repetition as a key to his success. Each day he would use his daily success practice to describe his goal with gratitude in becoming the best that he could be in his job. While on site with a supervising project manager, Pete felt intuitively guided to ask to do more of the implementation, and subsequently thought of innovative ways to perform his tasks. His project manager was impressed.
Several months later, Pete volunteered to work on the biggest projects and continued to practice what he was learning. Pete not only wanted to do well in his assigned work, but he wanted to create new solutions to help the company and its customers succeed in their missions. He used his daily practice to gratefully describe what his life would be like as he served his coworkers, company, and customers in valuable ways. He followed the intuitive guidance that he received.
One day, Pete had a strong intuitive thought to ask his boss if he could take customer service calls in the middle of the night so that he could practice problem solving while helping more customers. As he learned more about the common problems that customers were having, he received strong intuitive ideas about solutions. He discussed these with his boss and got approval to develop ways in which he could train customers differently during the implementation process to prevent the same types of problems in their organizations. This reduced the number of customer service calls and resulted in happier customers.
Pete's efforts didn't go unnoticed by his bosses and it wasn't long before Pete was promoted to a project manager position, earning a raise of more than $25,000 per year. All of this happened for Pete in less than two years. Pete's repetitive daily practice combined with following his CSO's intuitive directions helped him to reach his goals for himself, his customers, coworkers, and company. It allowed him to achieve a higher level of success sooner than he expected. You can use your daily practice and partnership with the CSO to experience greater levels of success, too!
According to British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson, and John A. Sluboda in their published study, Innate Talents; Reality or Myth, "Large amounts of regular practice were found to be essential for excelling." They further indicated that the most successful people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice" rather than to what has been described as innate talents.
This is great news! As you incorporate gratitude with a regular deliberate daily practice, you will begin to excel at achieving more of your goals. In the daily practice system that I will describe more fully in this book, I show examples of how it has helped people to achieve personal and professional success. Abundance, prosperity, happiness, health, harmonious relationships, and more are available to anyone who is willing to set aside time for their daily practice and follow directions from their new partner as the CSO.
It's my belief that as we master the use of spiritual tools and rely more on the intelligent source of our intuition as our CSO to guide us, we can experience extraordinary events as miracles with greater frequency so that they become typical occurrences in our lives. Wouldn't you love that? It's possible! I'm so thrilled that you're beginning today to create the life that you desire.
The Daily Success System
The daily practice that is part of the system for success includes seven simple steps. This practice requires you to spend 30 minutes each morning with your spiritual partner or CSO to do the first four steps. Throughout the day, you will do steps five and six as you interact with your CSO. You'll recognize and follow intuitive messages, or you'll ask for clarification of additional leads on your path to achieve your goals. In the evening, you will do step seven as you give forth anything within you that is taking up room and not benefiting you, so that you have more room available to receive more of the good things that you desire.
Let's break this down into the morning, daytime, and evening practice.
The Morning Practice
Each morning, you will hold a 30-minute meeting with your CSO to review your goals in every area of your life: your health, your finances, your relationships, your work or use of skills and talents, your recreation, and your spiritual connection. Your morning meeting with your CSO should happen first thing when you wake up. I've found that it's important not to look at any mobile device or let the world's happenings take my attention before I hold my meetings. Let your family know that this time is important to you and to not disturb you during your morning meeting time.
Starting your morning by reviewing your goals with your new partner will set the tone for your day and lay a foundation of peace that will be evident no matter what comes up. American artist and New Thought spiritual teacher Florence Scovel Shinn tells us, "If you don't run your subconscious mind yourself, someone else will run it for you." As you become focused and proclaim gratitude for desired outcomes that you want to experience, you will train your brain to look for possibilities to achieve what you want and you'll feel happier and more energized throughout your day. If you allow others to program your attention, you'll see more evidence of the things they feel are important.
To demonstrate to yourself that you are serious about achieving your goals, it's helpful to create a comfortable space in your home (that is not your bed) to hold your daily planning meeting. It's perfectly fine to wear your pajamas to the meeting, but get out of bed and move to a different part of your home. A couch, comfortable chair, or dining room table are all appropriate places to hold your meeting. You will need a few tools to use during your meeting: an uplifting book with stories that put you into a receptive mood, a journal or notebook to write in, and a pen or pencil.
Take your meeting time seriously and commit to attending with your new partner every day in order to realize the greatest benefit. Think of this meeting with your CSO as you would a meeting with the most successful advisor that you can imagine. Often, when I ask people to describe the most successful person that they can imagine — whose advice they would highly value — I hear names like Bill Gates, Gandhi, Oprah Winfrey, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, Indra Nooyi, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, and similar powerful people from the past or present.
I want to ask you the same question. Who is one person, living or not, that you believe could give you the most valuable advice to help you achieve what you want in life? Now, imagine that this person has agreed to meet with you every morning to go over your goals and give you advice throughout the day to achieve them. After receiving their advice, you could choose to take the action they suggest, or you could ask for more information. They would provide additional clarification if requested, and eventually you would feel comfortable taking the steps they recommend to achieve your goals. My question to you is this: would you agree to meet with that person every morning? Most people would say "yes."
You should treat your morning practice meeting and partnership with your CSO the same way. The all-knowing power of the universe has access to information that is beyond what your rational mind can imagine. This information can be helpful in guiding you in miraculous ways to achieve all that you desire, require, and more with greater ease and joy. Everyone can choose to access this source of intelligence through their partner, the CSO. Make a commitment to meet with your new partner each day.
Each morning, set aside 30 minutes for your meeting to perform the first four steps of the daily practice. Let's go over those right now.
Step 1: Read Something Inspirational
Step 1 requires you to read something inspirational and uplifting for five to ten minutes. I find that short stories about ordinary people having extraordinary accomplishments as a result of using a spiritual system for success are great for this step. It makes me believe that it's possible for me to have similar kinds of successes. Any book that inspires you is fine for this step.
As I started to read about other people's success and experience success for myself, I developed more confidence that all things that I desired were possible if I continued to use gratitude with my daily success practice. I got a chance to test this on a new level when I was asked by my clients to write a book based on the spiritual coaching I'd been providing for years.
My first thought was that I couldn't write a book because I wasn't trained to be a writer. I had a strong belief that I couldn't compare to the brilliant authors whose books I loved to read like James Allen, Catherine Ponder, Jack Canfield, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Napoleon Hill, Jane Austen, Michael Gerber, Malcolm Gladwell, Eckhart Tolle, and more. To help shift my beliefs, I started to read uplifting stories about some of these authors and their journeys to success. I also read other stories about spiritual guidance and intervention as part of achieving seeming impossible goals.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Gratitude Formula"
by .
Copyright © 2018 May McCarthy.
Excerpted by permission of Hierophant Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface xiii
Introduction 1
The Chief Spiritual Officer 5
Section 1 Success Is a System, Not a Secret 11
Section 2 Achieving Goals 55
Section 3 Beliefs Drive Your Brain 95
Section 4 Purpose to Prosperity 125
Appendix 149
Acknowledgements 169
About the Author 171