True personal growth ultimately will lead to fulfillment, and it's my intention with these podcasts to connect more deeply with you. Thank you for joining me, Anne Corbin, and my guests, and welcome to this episode. What is it that sets successful people apart from everybody else? For that matter, how do you or how should you define success? Does it mean having plenty of money?
Well, certainly, that helps in the overall picture, but we all know there are plenty of miserable millionaires these days. I suppose we ought to say billionaires because being a millionaire just isn't that special anymore. I would say that being successful is having a balanced life and being in a position to recognize and appreciate abundance because we are all surrounded by abundance, but we can't see it when our lives are out of balance.
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Back to life balance. You may be familiar with the wheel of life exercise where you fill in a sort of a personal pie chart and each sector of the pie represents an area of your life. And you rate each area out of 10. But since we're not in a workshop at the present moment, and in the interests of time, let's just focus on what you could call the 3 pillars of everyone's life and they are, of course, health, wealth and happiness.
Now neither of those sorry, I should say none of those categories is completely defined within itself. I have a mental vision of one of those more complex Venn diagrams, you know, the ones that are composed of 3 circles arranged in a kind of a triangle where they all overlap. You see, that's the maths teacher in me coming out. But what I mean, for example, is where would you put relationships? Because one would aspire, I suppose, for a healthy relationship.
You would also want a healthy bank balance, but bank balances would come under wealth, wouldn't they? And relationships also come under happiness. So when we consider the 3 pillars of life, they're not like 3 separate pillars holding up a roof, I see them more like a Venn diagram. In the American declaration of independence, there is that famous sentence that goes, all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
And among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When I hear that phrase in my mind's eye, I can see children running around with nets attempting to catch butterflies without much success. And I guess it's because I was once told that you can't pursue happiness, that is you can't chase it. But in that declaration statement, pursuit didn't mean change, it meant enjoyment. Isn't it interesting how language changes over the years?
So putting all the threads together, talking about success, money, happiness, enjoyment and pursuit, you might imagine that everyone is pursuing something, but they aren't. The world isn't only made up of achievers. If we exclude the 1% who have ridiculous wealth and connections in very rich places.
I think there are possibly 3 broad groups of people in Western societies generally, those with no ambition, who will take life as it comes, probably complain when things get too bad, but they seem to manage somehow and get by. And at the top end of the scale are the seriously wealthy. But most entrepreneurs probably don't fit into that category. They're they're relatively wealthy.
They probably have a more balanced life once they're becoming successful, but it's generally not that easy at the very beginning. So some of the seriously wealthy will be entrepreneurs, some actually will be employees because there are very high paid staff in some professions. And, of course, there are those with inherited wealth. But the largest class by far, I feel, is the aspirational class, which is in the middle of the spectrum, and it's a very large middle.
I would say the other two classes I've mentioned, at the bottom end and the top end, are relatively narrow. So the aspirational class are those who want better, people who strive, people who expect to work for a living and probably, they make plans for retirement and they make investments and they generally conform to the norms of society. And this is the group that I would expect most of my listeners to be in, I'm in it, certainly.
And once upon a time, it would have been called the middle class in the UK at any rate. And then that description became sort of politically incorrect. But, hey, I've said 3 broad categories, and it's actually quite a big ask to, categorize in only 3. Remember we used to have lower middle class, middle middle class, upper middle class, and so on and so forth. And achievers tend to fall across trainers such as Tony Robbins. Oh, there's a whole raft of trainers out there nowadays.
It started, in recent times, with Jim Rohn and Earl Nightingale. There didn't seem to be too much competition in the sixties, not that I was around then, but those are the names that have lasted. There was also Zig Ziglar. Can't think of anyone else currently. And then, of course, nearly all coaches refer back to think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill, but he wasn't the first.
Wallace d Wattles wrote The Science of Getting Rich in 1910, and apparently, the famous book and film, The Secret, was based on this book, according to Rhonda Byrne. Both of those were published in 2,006. Nothing changes. It's just the method of delivery. Where those early books differ from the modern training is, these days, it's it tends to be delivered by webinar, which has been the natural follow on from seminars, which were the real live meetings, or I should say the in person meetings.
So when the early books were produced, there will have been huge fanfare and a nice income for the authors. Nowadays, everything is, well, it's that much more accessible with webinars streamed internationally and even one to one trainings available on Zoom and other similar platforms. If there's one thing we can thank those crazy lockdowns for, it's the ability that we all learned to, well, and we actually we had no choice. We had to get familiar with Zoom.
And then, of course, the upside was the reduction in the need for travel and accommodation, which even when you're accessing training in your own country can be time consuming and expensive. So back to the question, what is it that sets achievers apart from the rest? They plan. They create goals for themselves. They set target dates. And as each goal is achieved or met, then they'll set another harder goal. Have you ever heard of a BHAG?
It's a big, hairy, awesome goal or you could use a different word instead of awesome. I'm making two points here, achievers set goals and achievers are never satisfied but if you don't have a plan for your life then you'll just become a part of someone else's plan, In other words, you will lose the starring role in your own movie. So while goal setting is good and to be recommended, bear in mind that what we tend to do until we know better is set the goal with our left brains.
That's the analytical, strategic, calculating brain. And we develop clarity around the goals, how long will it take and so forth, where will I be when, the next 6 months have passed. And the next 9 months, just say, supposing it's a year end goal or a 12 month goal, I mean, not a calendar year. The fact is life tends to get in the way. Most of our energy is spent fighting the obstacles that crop up as we try and chase this blessed goal.
And then if we manage to achieve it, there's a huge chance that we are burned out. There's a vast number of high achievers out there who aren't achieving their goals and they're beating themselves up, but they haven't done anything wrong. They certainly aren't lazy. They haven't been procrastinating. It could be a mindset problem, but more likely, they've hit the wall of frustration and they burn out because life isn't turning out the way they thought it would.
I've worked with many high achievers who consider that they're failures for exactly these reasons. It's very, very common in today's frenetic and demanding society. So I want to talk now about an alternative approach to goal setting which could be called the woo woo way. Firstly, clarity is critical when you choose the goal And you have to comprehend exactly whether your starting point can possibly lead to your designated endpoint.
Secondly, since this saying first landed with me, I've heard a number of different coaches say that the true purpose of setting a goal is to become the person you need to be to attain the goal. So rather than set a goal from a what's in it for me perspective, try a what will I be able to give attitude.
Yes. To be precise, if you're setting an amount of money, say, half a $1,000,000 or pounds, rather than, I will have half a1000000 in the bank this time next year and then I'll be able to provide for my family, Rather think I'll be able to provide my family with that much value from my business along with providing incomes for, say, 3 employees. This subtle difference is working with the laws of the universe. Power moves to those in direct proportion to their willingness to serve.
That's one of Tony Robbins' favourite sayings. Thirdly, know exactly why you want this goal so that you can set your intention on the so called end goal rather than the method involved. So you focus on how it will feel when you've achieved the goal rather than the means or the effort or even the mechanism of how you're going to get there. And trust, this is the woo woo bit, trust that the how will just present itself. Number 4, have unity of heart and mind.
Get excited, be adventurous, don't hold back. The very last thing you wanna be setting are outcomes that please someone else. Oh, and also forget the realistic, quote unquote, dare to dream, dare to believe, get your heart involved and then you're broadcasting signals to the quantum field and you can expect synchronicities and serendipity, everything you need to achieve success. Here's another thing you are advised to expect. The goal will present itself when you're ready to receive it.
I wanna finish with a little metaphor for something in life that often presents a distraction and a massive energy drain. One of my mentors, Peter Sage, calls it the curse of the white rabbit. Picture a dog racing track. When the starting gunshot or bell signals the gate to open, those dogs are off round the track chasing what looks like the rear end of a rabbit. In other words, a fluffy white tail.
If it looks to the operator that a dog is getting too close to the fake rabbit, then automatically the rabbit moves a bit faster. It's not meant to be caught, ever. And that's how dog racing is designed. But the dogs don't care. They love chasing rabbits. They will happily chase all day and all night until they're worn out. On the racetrack, the race ends and all the dogs get a good feed. Nobody caught anything but they weren't supposed to. And that's why this is an analogy for life.
We are the dogs, we wear ourselves out chasing success or happiness, but those things can't be caught. That's how the system is set up. And unlike dogs, we want more. We feel frustration when we're unable to pin down our target. So, suppose we are simply chasing the wrong target. We're humans and we spend our time chasing an illusion called happiness or success, and these aren't objects that can be caught.
We should rather be seeking fulfillment not by chasing it, but by recognizing the abundance that already surrounds us, the people who love us, the goals we have reached, and the lessons we have learned along the way as we grow outside that famous comfort zone. You can set yourself up to win the game of life. Become familiar with the laws of the universe. You have infinite potential. You can influence reality.
Quantum growth and connection explores success strategies, power principles, relationship rescue, and the quantum field.