Production Principle #8: People Are Assets

Successfully using this principle means learning to love yourself more. We don’t love ourselves because we have not been taught how to. We have been taught to be ruthlessly self-judgmental, which focuses us on our flaws and weaknesses, while ignoring our strengths and gifts. This can only change when we shift from fear-based thinking to love. Our definition of love is not love as an emotion. We see love as a choice and a way of being in the world. Love is choosing to be the greatest expression of your higher-self.

Love is choosing to be the greatest expression of your higher-self.

The lower self (ego) has mastered the fear response. Now it is time for you to learn to master love. We are all constantly making a decision between these two paradigms, fear and love. Fear is the natural energy of protection; love is the natural energy of creation. So if you are looking to CREATE new life results, love is the only way. Fear is the first programmed response people experience out of need for survival, and then love is the second. That means re-wiring your programming from the fear paradigm and all its habitual responses to the love paradigm. Your paradigm is a cultural rulebook of beliefs stored in your subconscious mind; it forms your version of reality. It contains rules of conduct in every area of life—what to like/not like, how to dress, what to eat, how we heal, how to earn, where to live, what a good or bad job is, what is or isn’t socially acceptable behavior, etc. It also contains hidden guidelines about what is possible for you to achieve in the world in which you were raised, not the world in which you live. Most people don’t freely choose or decide these things, their cultural programming does. While you think you are consciously making choices, the programmed paradigm stored in your subconscious mind is telling you what to do. By learning to choose love, you will transform yourself into a higher version of yourself. You will transcend all the fear-based neuroses that arise as negativity originating from the lower self. It is just part of being human. People become assets when they choose love, and act as liabilities when driven by fear. Those that increase suffering and destroy humanity do so out of hatred and fear. All the great artists, inventors, healers and teachers alleviated suffering and improved the welfare of humanity because of love.

Our paradigms serve as maps of reality. Your paradigm constitutes your total world-view belief system. Your beliefs drive your behavior, and your behavior determines your results. If the results you are experiencing in any area of your life are not acceptable, where must the change occur? Beliefs! Your beliefs drive your behavior, and behavior determines results. Each person’s paradigm map is a belief system that guides us through life’s journey, and, for the most part, that belief system is a product of culture rather than being chosen individually. The great majority of human beings are following a paradigm map that guides them to experience negativity and unhappiness. Worse yet, these same people believe that this negativity is their destiny and unchangeable. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you are one of these people, as I was, you are simply following a faulty map. It is not your fault, but it is your responsibility to make a shift, and shift you can. To facilitate this shift, please learn three Natural Laws that affect your life;

1. The Law of Creation – I co-create my own reality through choice, thought, word and action.
2. The Law of Focus – Thoughts that I focus on tend to manifest into material form.
3. The Law of Vibration and Attraction – People constantly vibrate energy; the energy I vibrate instantly attracts people and events in harmony with the original vibrational frequency. Like attracts like.

You are creating your own reality based on the thoughts and feelings you focus on, and then vibrate out. By choosing to energize love-based thoughts instead of fear-based thoughts, you will begin to speak and act differently. This different frequency will attract more love-based people who will believe and behave as assets to you and your life work.

How might your own beliefs be limiting your abilities to earn, enjoy life, and positively influence others? After reading each question below, take a moment to reflect on the truth of each answer. Please allow your commitment to self-honesty to supersede any negative judgments that may arise.

• Do you love yourself, and if so, is it acted on every day?
• Do you respect who you are, and if so, how do you show it?
• On a daily basis, are you living and using the potential you believe is really inside of you?
• Are you brutally honest with yourself, or skillfully honest?
• Do you berate yourself when things are bad, but rarely acknowledge yourself when you do well?
• Does your attachment to getting ‘your way’ cause you to worry and struggle to be in control?
• When your expectations are not met, do you get angry, frustrated and disappointed?
• Do you influence your own reality, or does fate determine results in your life?
• Is life random and accidental, or do things happen for a reason?
• When you see others’ greatness, does it result in diminished feelings of self-worth and self-respect?
• Is who you are and what you can achieve set in stone, or are they changeable?

Hopefully, these questions helped you see the possibility for positive change by observing limiting beliefs that habitually arise. To change them, we must first become aware that they exist, and tell ourselves the truth. This means taking ownership of the issue, with a commitment to resolve it. This commitment is the willingness to do deep soul work. We will then input an empowering belief to turn-around the thought pattern and create a new reality. Once you know that a limiting belief may be causing discontent, you can then shift paradigms. Empowering beliefs naturally flow from your higher-self, while limiting beliefs naturally flow from the lower-self. Looking at the qualities of these two very different belief systems side-by-side is always revealing and helpful:

Your beliefs are part of your history; they are programs from the past. As we now look at your core beliefs, and the powerful effect they have over your life, please be willing to examine them with an honest and detached awareness. I strongly urge you to keep those beliefs that have proven to be true, and functional beyond a shadow of a doubt. But please be willing to surrender all others. What do you love more, yourself or your beliefs? To shift paradigms, it is important for your self-love to be stronger than your belief love. If you sense there is an inner destructive aspect of yourself (ego) working against you (the soul) that is difficult to change, then you have come face-to-face with a major limiting belief. As you intentionally choose to be more aware of your core beliefs, you get the opportunity to choose them to empower yourself rather than limit you. By replacing limiting beliefs with empowering beliefs, ego-negativity dissolves, while your greatness begins to emerge more and more. This emergence is recognized as a deeper belief in one’s abilities to think, speak, and act with focused confidence in any given area. The belief in your own powerful ability to better your life is thus born. This is critical, for you will then begin to more deeply love and respect yourself. This love and respect isn’t forced, touchy-feely or strange. It arises naturally and effortlessly as a self-evident truth that anyone contributing to making the world better deserves love and respect. So you increase your own ability to be an asset by choosing love. In doing so, you repel all the fearful, hateful people who are liabilities to your success, while attracting the people who are assets.

The inner desire to investigate personal reality and to know who you are becomes paramount. Instead of accepting beliefs that you were force-fed by those who are clearly unhappy and unsuccessful, you begin to trust your deepest inner knowing in your own ability to create a better life. Begin to question long-held beliefs, and to enlarge your sense of who you are, and what is truly possible for you to accomplish in the world with a higher belief system.

For example, my family unintentionally held deep-seated limiting beliefs about money. I was raised believing that wealthy people acted as if they were better than others because of their money. I was taught to believe that if you made large sums of money, the government would attack you to pay more taxes, and that you would be viciously penalized when they did so. I observed that good honest people like ministers lived in a pious poor condition which was viewed as honorable, but that many people with dubious ethics made millions and lived in luxury. All these false ideas formed an inner belief system which caused me to unconsciously push money away. The lower self (which ran my life at that time) reasoned that if all these beliefs were true, I would never have to suffer their seeming negativity by being sure to not have money.

This all happened in the quietude of my subconscious, where deeper beliefs are typically stored. As such, they were difficult to consciously see, until the discontent became great enough. And so these scarcity-based beliefs led me to struggle financially for many years. When being broke became painful enough, I embarked upon a process of self-inquiry in which I saw harmful limiting beliefs, and discarded them in favor of the empowering beliefs that are now habitual. I shifted from a paradigm of fear consciousness to one of love consciousness.

Learning to practice A.P.R.I.L. will help you facilitate the shift.

A–Awareness. The first step is being aware and honest about the obstacles preventing you from accomplishing your goals. Awareness empowers you to tell yourself the truth about yourself.

P–Presence. Get present to the fact that only you are responsible for how you handle all life events. Then make the choice to do something about it, here and now.

R­–Releasing. Releasing is actively surrendering the negative stories and limiting beliefs to the universe or to your Higher power, whichever works for you. It is the act of holding your hand on your heart and saying aloud, “I surrender this (negative situation) to the Universe/God.”

I– Intention. Craft an Intention statement that turns around the limiting belief into an empowering belief. It is based on the truth received and co-created from you higher-self about what you want to be, know and do.

L–Love. Engage the transformative power of love to become your best self. Then you will begin to attract the people who are the assets who will help you claim your next level of success.

Please try not to get stuck on the word “God”. If it is in your belief system as a positive, great…use it. If not, insert the word “Universe” as you actively release your negative emotions. But please don’t get stuck, ok? Either way, it is critical to release the negative emotions because you cannot input empowering beliefs without clearing out the limiting beliefs. That is what releasing does, it cleans them up to you can input love. To be loving is far more challenging than being negative, but like anything else, when done long enough becomes habitual. It becomes a style of being that attracts people to you. This is because all human beings secretly crave love. The sticking point is that it is difficult to love people when they behave so terribly. You can go beyond this stumbling block by realizing that you choose love because of who you are, not because others deserve it.

Most people do not believe that you can be loving without compromising self-respect and safety. They equate being loving with being taken advantage of. This is untrue. The four levels of love teach us how to love consistently without compromising self-respect and peace of mind. They are detailed in order, from those who are easiest to love, to those who are hardest to love.

1. LOVE THE ONENESS in those who understand you and your deepest thoughts, dreams, and desires without question or effort. The amazing thing about these people is that they may be relatively new in your life, and yet the depth of connectivity between you both is obvious. They are kindred spirits to you and understand you thoroughly, as you understand them. It takes little or no effort to love these people as much as you love yourself.

2. LOVE THE SHARED FRIENDSHIP in those people who are good friends in your life but do not understand you all the way. You know they are good-hearted and that your life is far richer for their presence in it. But your deepest truths are not, and may never be, understood by them and are therefore questioned. Typically, these are relationships where social and light conversation works well, but more meaningful conversations fizzle. Without requiring any more than that, appreciate the gift of meaningful friendship they bring, and love it.

3. LOVE AT A DISTANCE those people who are great examples of how not to be, how not to treat people, and how not to be happy and successful in life. These are very important teachers, existing as examples of how not to be in the world. In many cases, these people may be family members, old school or childhood friends, or co-workers; they are in your life to learn from. They are takers and are draining to be around. Learn to have impersonal, concise communication in a short polite manner covering whatever necessary pragmatics are required with no extraneous small talk, and then move on.

4. LOVE THE LIFE-ROLE in those people whose behavior makes it impossible to find any redeeming human qualities whatsoever. These are the criminals and evil ones of this world who serve as the contrasting point that allows good to be an earnable experience. In the absence of darkness, you could never know light, and in the absence of evil you cannot know good. Their bad life allows your good life to be a knowable and appreciable experience. You see the same flesh and blood fiber of life weave through them as through you, not loving them for who they are, but rather that they are. You see that they have a role to play, without which you could never know your own goodness. Their life-role enables your life-role to have meaning and value.