Use the principle of love to deepen your connection between your mind and your body. Quiet your mind, turn your attention inward, and just listen. What do you hear? Does your body report any problems that need action? Do you feel any subtle emotions arising? What does your intuition tell you?
The principle of love helps you connect with the foods that are most naturally attractive to you. Pay attention to which ones feel intuitively right and which feel intuitively wrong. How do you feel about an apple? A hot dog? A bowl of rice? A stalk of broccoli? Do some items feel healthy to you while others don’t? Could you improve your health simply by doing a better job of honoring what you intuition is already telling you? Are you treating your body in a loving manner?
Overweight doctors write new diet books. Supplement manufacturers publish health magazines. Drug companies sponsor television news programs. Uncovering the truth about health can be difficult if you’ve been overexposed to disguised marketing messages that favor sales over truth. Health-product marketers often seem to follow Mark Twain‘s classic advice: “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
My (Steve Pavlina) goal here isn’t to convince you to adopt my personal beliefs about health. Instead, I want to give you the means to think intelligently about the matter for yourself. Consequently, I won’t overload you with statistics because that would be entirely pointless. I can track down the data to build any case I want, but you’d never know if you could trust that I was sharing the whole truth with you. If I was really manipulative, I could even use distorted facts and figures to try to convince you to buy a special line of overpriced supplements, the kind that enrich only two things: your urine and the manufacturer’s pocketbook. I’m not a trained research scientist, and most likely you aren’t one either, so let’s skip the chest-pounding stats battle and consider a more sensible approach.
Do you treat your physical body as your soul’s best friend or as a friend that plagues you? Is it a temple or a tomb? Your body is your avatar (the image that represents you) in the physical universe. It’s the character you control, and you’re the consciousness that controls it. It’s subject to the laws of the physical universe, but your consciousness isn’t so limited. Your body is the channel through which you express yourself in physical form. It’s your paintbrush on the canvas of physicality. Consequently, its health is important. If your body is in poor health, its brush strokes will be flawed. But when it’s vitally alive and full of energy, it contributes to masterful art as the purest extension of your thoughts.
When I (Steve Pavlina) am in poor health, I’m keenly aware of my body. I grasp the importance of health most clearly when I’m lying in bed with an illness. I keep thinking, I want to be well again. However, when I’m in good health, I scarcely notice my body. It becomes an almost invisible extension of my consciousness.
Intelligence is the ultimate source of wealth. You can provide tremendous value to others by cultivating your own creative self-expression, thereby generating all the income you desire. Instead of trying to get money, focus your efforts on creating and delivering value to others, and plenty of resources will flow back to you in return. True wealth comes from within.
By making intelligent choices, you should be able to increase your capacity to provide social value, thereby increasing your income. This requires that you optimize for long-term value creation instead of short-term profit. Bypass the low-hanging fruit and go after the big opportunities, the ones that inspire and challenge you to grow.
Don’t expect someone else to know what your skills and talents are worth. If you let others determine your salary, it’s a safe bet you’re being underpaid. You must take the initiative and ask for what you want. If the price you ask is fair and reasonable and if there’s genuine social demand for the value you can provide, someone will surely pay you for your efforts.
Don’t be timid or wimpy when it comes to asking for money. That’s a sign that you don’t believe in your value. If you really can’t provide what you’re claiming you can, then don’t ask to be paid until you’re ready. But if you know you can contribute genuine value, summon the courage to ask for fair compensation in exchange. Be direct, but be able to build a solid case for why you deserve it.
How can you generate enough value to achieve the level of income you desire? You’re in command, so this is your decision to make. If your current approach isn’t effective, you may need to experiment to find something that works. Keep asking yourself these two questions: How can I create and deliver more value? How can I increase my capacity for value creation? Then use your power to act on the truths you discover.
When we start out in life, most of us have few skills that can be used to create social value. With our bodies we can perform unskilled physical labor, but that doesn’t provide much value because it’s too common and readily replaceable. In order to generate significant value, we must invest in ourselves by developing our talents and skills. If you want to earn more money, you must train yourself to create and deliver more social value. You can certainly take advantage of educational resources, but never forget that you’re responsible for your own learning. If insufficient education is holding you back financially, it’s up to you to remedy that situation. Keep developing your skills to the point where you’re capable of making a meaningful contribution; then develop them some more. You may be in a weak position right now, but that’s no excuse because you’re perfectly capable of making small improvements each day, and incremental improvements lead to major changes. If you start on such a path today, you won’t even be able to fathom where you’ll be in five years.
The best way to earn money is through honest contribution. Do what you feel is best for everyone, not just yourself. Align your financial results with the highest good of all. Ask yourself: Would anyone be deeply saddened if I stopped contributing? Would anyone cry if I went out of business? If the answer is no, it’s a safe bet you’re one the wrong path.
Contributing social value is the primary strategy for making money consciously, but by itself it isn’t enough to guarantee success. The problem with focusing on social value is that your personal values may not be aligned with the social consensus. When you attempt to provide social value without achieving congruence with your personal values, your motivation will be weak. You won’t be inspired because you’ll be doing what you feel you should do, not what you want to do. Alternatively, when you attempt to satisfy your personal values without providing any real social value, you get the starving-artist syndrome: you may be inspired by work you love doing, but it won’t pay the bills.
The principle of power says that you’re responsible for your own financial situation. If you dislike your current circumstances and want something better, it’s up to you to make it happen. You can yield control of your financial destiny to others, but final responsibility always rests with you. You’re the one who must live with the results you experience.
Self-help literature often recommends that we set clear financial goals. We’re told to decide in advance how much money we want to earn and how much we want to have in the bank. I (Steve Pavlina) have often set such goals for myself. Sometimes I achieved them; many times I didn’t. Eventually I learned a more important lesson: in order for our financial goals to be sound, they must reflect our truest, deepest desires. A goal is worthless if it doesn’t empower you.
