When I launched this blog it was an extension of my unrealistic interest in  wiping the power of manipulative people off of the face of the Earth.  (Hey, everyone needs a super power, right?)

There’s no place for people who knowingly lie, manipulate and take advantage of others. (Except maybe careers as attorneys, politicians or owners of certain multinational corporations.)

Though our DNA is against us when it comes to being easily fooled by manipulators, it doesn’t hurt to try to learn how to have better radar against the tactics of predators.

The pain and cost of being a part of the flock of sheep is high. It is a price the majority of the population pays, but we don’t have to. A little common sense goes a long way.

Seth Godin just wrote a post on manipulation that encapsulates some of the best ways to identify and beat the manipulators. Here’s a sample:

Here are a few general categories of behaviors that manipulators seek out:

* Believing something because you heard someone say it on a news show on cable TV.
* Being a child (or acting like one).
* Buying penny stocks.
* Repeating a mantra heard from a figurehead or leader of a tribe without considering whether it’s true.
* Trying to find a short cut to lose weight, make money or achieve some other long-term goal.
* Ignoring the scientific method and embracing unexamined traditional methods instead.

Read the full article here …it’s short and worth it!

Magical thinking can kill you. Now it’s been proven. After James Arthur Ray, self proclaimed ‘self help expert’ and one of the stars of the book and movie The Secret charged 70 participants $9,933 each to attend a sweat lodge event, two died, 19 went to the hospital and the ‘law of attraction‘ will never be the same.

Somehow I’m guessing that James Arthur Ray didn’t have this or possible jail time and losing his millions on his vision board but somehow it’s in his life anyway. Hmm, how could that happen?  Do things ever happen in your life that aren’t on your vision board?

James Ray’s Twitter bio says “Create Harmonic Wealth in every area of your life: Financial, Relational, Mental, Physical and Spiritual.”  …not this time.

As I wrote awhile back, the biggest secret about The Secret is that the stars of the movie were all proven internet marketing/self help gurus with responsive opt-in lists of well over 100,000 each.

They seeded the marketing campaign for the movie on the internet to well over a million people for a year before it’s DVD release.  Remember that it wasn’t a theatrical release, it was a brilliant online marketing campaign.

The Secret movie and book had a low overhead and a high profit margin mixed with a planned back end of products and services by all of the featured ‘experts’ to offer to all the new people looking to experience “The Secret” in their lives too.

I know a couple of the people who devised the scheme, so this isn’t conjecture.  It was a smart way for them to joint venture their individual successes in order to boost all of their careers by creating a premium brand for self help.

Today they are all multi-millionaires based on how the success of the book and movie allowed them to send their speaking fees, products and course costs through the ceiling.  Self help is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it’s selling false hope at a premium price.

They are all master marketers who fill rooms of people with cheap tickets, and then pitch back of the room offers (their advanced courses and advanced advanced VIP courses with ever-higher dollar price tags) that promise to be THE answer to your problems.

Note the latest internet marketing technology on their Science of Getting Rich website if you don’t believe me.  They have gotten rich by selling the idea that they have the key to YOUR wealth and happiness though most of their customers have not gotten either wealth or happiness as a result of becoming their customers.

Preying on people’s hopes and fears related to their money, careers, relationships, health and death for profit is nothing new.  It’s the backbone and life blood of politics, religions and mainstream media.

Unfortunately, this time selling self-help snake oil resulted in tragic and preventable deaths.  I doubt that participants paying $9,933 to be a ‘spiritual warrior’ thought this would be what they got out of the seminar.

I have a friend who has spent $6,000 a year and used his two weeks of vacation every year for 7 years going to T. Harv Eker, the master of back of the room sales, seminars on how to get rich.  My friend is currently unemployed, but Harv’s doing just fine thank you.

Is positive thinking and visualizing a better life a bad thing? Of course not, but selling people on the fact that it will magically give them everything they want from God and ‘The Universe’ is a flat out sham.

Unfortunately, millions of people will still not wake up, even after this tragedy.  They’ll continue to part with their money to gamble on the hope that someone will deliver a magic book, CD or event to change their lives.

If you want to change your life, it’s pretty simple.  Do something.  Drop the stories and excuses and just take action.  If you do smart things and have luck you’ll have a better chance of succeeding, but there are no guarantees.  As you know and have experienced yourself, both good and bad things happen to both good and bad people.

There is no magic pill, no magic teacher, no magic course and no magic book (including ‘holy’ books written and edited by powerful men with a vested interest in amassing and controlling followers.)

There are helpful tools, but when push comes to shove you have to keep taking action with good intentions and hope for the best.  If there was a magic formula everyone would use it and we would not be in a worldwide recession.  Focus on what you can control, let go of what you can’t and be thankful you did better in the womb lottery than people born in Rwanda.

If you insist on submissively following a guru then I encourage you to follow the wisdom, um, I mean Duhism, of Bob Tzu, Lao Tzu’s long lost American cousin.  His wisdom is encapsulated in three simple, yet life changing steps: 1. Shut up and stop whining. 2. Get off your butt and do something, and 3. Repeat (as necessary.)

I am not making light of this tragic event.  Far beyond that, I’m hoping that it causes more people stop paying money to these charlatans and start creating their own destinies instead.

Socialnomics has put together a video driving home the reality of how social media is fundamentally shifting how we communicate, connect and consume culture in the 21st century.  Share it with anyone who tells you that social media is a fad, technology is isolating people rather than facilitating face-to-face meetings, or that Twitter is stupid.

One of the most significant shifts that social media is driving is the spirit of collaboration rather than competition in some business spaces and in intellectual property systems.  These are both driving scalable innovations that will benefit everyone.  What you don’t know won’t hurt you, but it will leave you in the dust as life moves forward with amazing changes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

If you still don’t understand what social media is this will help:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Before you watch the video below I want you to have someone read a short poem by Robert Frost to you.  If you read it to yourself it may not have the same effect.  So go ahead, ask whomever is closest to you right now to read this to you:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
And I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Now think of a playing card.

Okay, you can watch the video now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Did you think of that card or were you influenced to think of that card?

Remember this the next time you or someone you know clings to a belief of ‘knowing’ something.  …especially if that ‘knowing’ is of the religous variety.  Yes, church and spiritual leaders are very good at mind control techniques.  It ain’t just for magicians, marketers, politicians, parents and con artists and never was.

Where there is a concentration of wealth, power, and especially followers, you can usually find a trail of someone or a group of someones selling people on what they want them to believe so that they can get what they want.

If you’re interested in how we are fooled, even by ourselves, and how our brains work check out some of the books on the ‘Book’ page of this site.

Have you heard of Brian Keith Voiles? Probably not, but if you have eyes you’ve seen his ad campaigns and you probably even bought products that he created ad campaigns for.

Would you like to have the formula he gets paid $12,500 to put into use for Fortune 500 Companies?  Are you curious as to how this formula is used to influence your buying decisions?

Well then, today’s your lucky day, isn’t it? You’ll notice this formula whenever you read a sales letter or an ad. Remember that the key to writing a sales letter is that the job of every paragraph is to make the reader want to read the next paragraph.  Now that you know this you may catch yourself thinking of this when you hypnotically continue to watch an infomercial or read an enticing offer.

This is the secret skeleton used to write the most successful ads that grab your attention and motivate you to give out those credit card digits.

1. ATTENTION – Write a headline that GRABS your reader. Fear or curiosity are good places to start. For example: “Ex-Truck Driver Makes $21,815 a Month Doing What You’re Not”

2. INTEREST – List the benefits of your product or service. Acknowledge their problem while showing you have the solution. Show that you’ve been where they are and you can help them.

3. CREDIBILITY – Mention referrals and references of how others have benefited from your product or service.

4. PROVE – Show testimonials with full names and cities or countries. Offer a risk-free guarantee.

5. BELIEVABLE – Give your full contact information. Make it easy for them to buy with no hassles. Let them know why they should trust you.

6. SCARCITY – Have limited offers, special time sensitive sales, discounts on a few products in limited quantity.

7. ACTION – Ask for the sale. Make it simple.

8. WARN – Let them know the pain they’ll experience if they don’t use your product. i.e. If you’re selling a wrinkle cream let them know how dry their face will be and how much deeper their wrinkles will get without your product – if that’s true. Don’t lie.

9. NOW – Tell them why they should buy right now.

That’s it. Now you’ve got the skeleton that the best copywriters in the world use.  If you’re a marketer this won’t be gold, it will be platinum.

If you’re a consumer, this is a platinum shield to help you take a deep breath and question if you REALLY need that product or service before parting with your hard earned cash.  Read the formula a few times and you’ll start to notice it in the structure of commercials, the language of print advertising and the content of major marketing pitches that effectively get you to buy whatever they’re sellin’.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technology has rocked our world repeatedly in profound ways. This will happen many more times and is about to happen again with Google Wave.  It’s going to be a tidal wave!

Imagine email, instant messaging, document sharing and much more integrated into a real time platform.  Or don’t imagine it and just wait a few months because that’s when you’ll be using Google Wave. TechCrunch has a great overview explaining why this is a game-changing product.

With Google Wave being announced it seems like a good time to shine a spotlight on how our world has changed from the release of disruptive technologies.  Some of my favorites have been:

• Smart Phones – before them we actually used a phone for making calls.  Now we use our phones as watches, computers, Rolodexes, calendars, cameras, alarm clocks, jukeboxes, photo albums, yellow page directories, news resources, email clients, video game consoles and a hundred other devices-in-one.
• Pagers – First drug dealers used them with pay phones (remember those?  …pay phones, not drug dealers) and parents used them to get their kids to call home.   With their arrival we began to move into a world where we could be found at any moment aside from being in the shower.
• Mobile Phones - Remember when phones were used connect with a specific location?  Now they are used to connect to a person in any location.  This created a major shift in how we communicate.
• Satellites – Before 1957 there were no satellites.  Fifty-two years later we use them for many purposes across industries as varied as radio, television, telecommunications, navigation, meteorology, land mapping, business & finance, climate & environmental monitoring, space science to name a few.  When is the last time you used a paper map instead of Google Maps on your phone or computer?
• Cable news – I don’t watch it, think it’s moronic and a tabloid distraction, but when it first debuted it was a positive revolution to have 24 hour news.  It killed the habit of tuning into the evening news and broadened possibilities before imploding into itself and beginning to be killed by my favorite disruptive technology so far…
• The Interwebs – Also know as the intertubes or the internet.  Since you’re reading this on the internet you probably know how transformational the internet and personal computers have been.  Pause for a moment and try to remember what your life was like before owning a personal computer, much less a laptop or smart phone.

Some technologies that were revolutionary and became extinct include the betamax, laser discs, vinyl albums, Polaroid pictures, PDAs, 8 Track tapes, cassette tapes and floppy discs.  The thing is, they were all necessary bridges to our modern world of digital convenience.  Much like how email and verbal voice mail may be out of use in 10 years, but they are necessary and interesting to us today.

The key to new innovative disruptive technologies is to look for the opportunities rather than being afraid because the old ways are passing away.  Dinosaur industries like music, TV and newspapers could have done much better than they have in the last 10 years.

They are still blowing it by blaming the world for changing rather than blaming their antiquated hierarchical business models.  The old models had large overheads and made a ton of money for few people while taking advantage of many others.  The new models value human, social, financial and environmental capital equally while collaborating to benefit many through innovation with low costs of entry.

There are tons of great examples like Amazon that have changed our personal and professional lives in deeply profound ways by unleashing innovative products, services and distribution models to an unsuspecting public.  Google Wave is just the next best thing, but lets welcome the changes it will bring to help us to do life in better and more collaborative ways.

Last night I attended the Entrepreneurial Mashup hosted by Silicon Flatirons.  It was an event honoring the biggest entrepreneurs in Boulder.

It’s quite amazing to be in a room with 150 fun, successful, optimistic dreamers committed to building a better future.

As you’d imagine, it’s the opposite feeling of hanging out with people who follow every tidbit in the news about how the world is falling apart.  (Garbage in, garbage out.  Turn off the corporate news and go make your own news.)

The other wonderful aspect of this is that Silicon Flatirons is a center for law, technology, and entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado.  The university and state government actively participate in supporting the visionaries, investors and advisors who are creating the next generation of meaningful companies to impact local, national and international concerns.

I spoke with a 23 year old entrepreneur who is getting free legal help through the university and other free assistance from advisors, investors and older successful entrepreneurs.  These are the kinds of things happening right now that aren’t in the news.

I’m sharing this with you as an invitation to look at the power of your own attitude and the attitude of the people you choose to surround yourself with.  By hanging out with smart, fun visionary people I’m constantly in creative conversations with people taking action to build a better future.

When those people are venture capitalists, tech geeks and entrepreneurs, it’s all about building community and  companies that are creating the architecture of our new societal systems.

After these conversations everyone in them leaves inspired, excited, connected to new great people, turned on to make great things happen and to give back to the community.

They’re also in action, not just talking about what they’re going to do ‘someday’ (have you noticed that ‘someday’ never actually comes?)

When I’m around people who are not in those circles I hear conversations about how horrible everything is.  These people are hanging way too much hope on the government and people outside themselves to solve our problems.  They are also notably in depressing moods most of the time because their minds are living in a victim mentality with a dark perception of current affairs.

Yes, the old status quo systems that have been corrupt and debilitated for 30 to 50 years are dying.  This is great because now we’re forced to create new and better systems.  Most people do not change unless they are forced to.  Now we all have to swim in new, better and more inclusive uncharted waters.

If you find yourself surrounded mostly by the Cathy and Ken Complainers of the world, then how about searching out the folks who are so busy creating great futures that they don’t have time to whine?

You can have the attitude of an entrepreneur even if you’re an employee.  Simply take responsibility for whatever is in front of you and start making something greater out of whatever opportunities and materials you have.

Ignore figuring out how to do it; that only comes by taking action. So do something now.  Make it happen.

Commit to the brighter future you know you deserve and get on with it before you waste any more time and miss out on more happiness.

The people in your life, the thoughts in your head and the actions you do or don’t take will either take you up or down.  You won’t be in the same place in one, five, ten or twenty years.  Which way do you want to go and what are you going to do today to create a better tomorrow?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Laws are not selective, unless you’re either rich, powerful, a celebrity , politically connected, or know someone who is when you break one.

Gravity is a law. It works 100% of the time with no excuses whether you like it or not.  In fact, you don’t have to buy a book or movie to see how it works; nor do you have to believe in it.  Gravity is a law of physics and doesn’t care what you think. It just does it’s ‘gravity’ thing and you cannot fight it and win.  Ever.  No matter what.

Attraction, the new age kind rather than the law of physics kind, is an emotional or electromagnetic force that does not occur consistently but appeals greatly to our greed, arrogance and inherent need to feel special.

If there was a Law of Attraction then the millions of consumers of the law of attraction and Oprah viewers worldwide would be manifesting every material desire for their health, relationships, careers and financial material wealth that the NYT #1 Best Seller, The Secret, promised them rather than there being a global recession.

Have you talked to a law of attraction believer lately?  How’s it working beyond believing results will arrive at some soon yet undisclosed time after years of practice?

Obama could mandate that every American citizen has to think better thoughts so we can attract our way out of economic crisis and have everything our hearts desire.  Yeah, an army of attractors, that’s the ticket.  Someone get that idea to the Treasury Secretary stat!

Good Emotional Marketing = Many Believers and More Manifrustration

Forget for a moment that the stars of The Secret are seasoned professional marketers who became even more rich and famous after inventing The Secret as a brand, and are about to unleash a sequel to get even more rich and famous.  (Cash cows have got to be milked, even in spiritual capitalism, right?)

Forget that the unfulfilled promises in The Secret just happen to be for the four things every psychic and marketer happens to sell you hope for – money, relationships, health and avoidance of death, lets look at the definitions of attraction from Dictionary.com that apply:

5.Physics. the electric or magnetic force that acts between oppositely charged bodies, tending to draw them together.

6. an entertainment offered to the public.

For #5 note that it says “oppositely charged” which is contradictory to the Secret’s formula of aligning yourself with what you want to attract.  So maybe thinking about poverty is the true road to attracting wealth. hmmm….

Also for #5, there is a “tendency” rather than a law (i.e. – a principle based on the predictable consequences of an act, condition, etc.: the law of supply and demand) though for #6 we’re getting closer.

It is practically a law that the public will pay to be entertained – especially if that entertainment makes them feel like they are special.

Instead, most people practicing the law of attraction techniques live in constant hope and manifrustration which ironically was the same state they lived in before buying into the marketing campaign for the law of attraction.

It Works Fine, You’re the One Who’s Broken

The scapegoat is that when the law of attraction doesn’t work there’s an easy answer; the law works, but YOU are the problem.  You’re not believing hard enough.  (You and the tens of millions of others who aren’t getting results.  Would you keep taking a drug with results like these?)

This is what bothers me the most.  It’s the same crazy making blame game that people get in multi-level marketing and sales rooms with no proven sales system.

Remember that you only need a handful of success stories (or actors reading their lines) on your infomercial to appear successful and deflect the fact that 99% of your customers didn’t lose weight with your plastic exercise device.

How many people do you know of who appear to have great relationships, material wealth, successful careers or great health?  Out of those people who enjoy the results promised by marketers of the law of attraction, how many do you think practiced the principals in The Secret?

Most successful people I know have been so busy taking action to create results that they didn’t have time to watch the Secret movie much less buy into it’s superstition.  A couple of them do have vision boards and the like, but they use those tools to remind them of what they’re working so hard to achieve while taking massive amounts of action.

Notice that the correlation of success to taking action, reviewing results and taking more action (very concrete steps) is much higher than the correlation of success to ‘believing the right thoughts’ – which is pretty damned nebulous.  Who determines what thoughts are right and whether they’re ‘right’ enough to attract what you want?

Note that magnets attract 100% of the time by being in proximity to what they naturally attract, metal.  A magnet needs to be close to it’s target (humans do this by taking action) and it does not attract anything else like sand, carpet or plastic (which would be what for humans?  Bad jobs? Mean people? Losing money?)

The Secrets to Success

Sorry Charlie, the secret to success is that there is no perfect formula to follow that anyone can sell to you.

See, there are also people taking tons of action and not getting results with or without playing The Secret game.  Heck, you may even know some or be one of them.  Look in the mirror real quick and check.

Why aren’t they succeeding?  Luck, timing, how they did in the womb lottery (being born in L.A. gives you a better shot, though no guarantee, at success than being born in Uganda), how rich and powerful their families were or weren’t, whether their talent was nurtured or not, who they did or didn’t  meet as they grew up, how industrious their attitude is, and so on.

Read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success,  Geoff Covin’s Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else or Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets to really wake up to this.

Can the principals work?  Maybe.  Are they the principals most successful people throughout history have used?  No.  Will they work for you? Magic 8 ball says “probability doubtful.”   Will a little focus and a lot of action give you a better shot at achieving your goals? Probably.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing

The mind makes up meaning and is not very good at it.  That’s it’s job like a teenager’s job is to push their parents buttons.  That’s just how the wiring works.  Deal with it.

In hindsight, you will probably attribute your success or lack thereof to a misguided conclusion that getting up early, practicing the law of attraction, going to a good school or whatever explains your situation.  The truth is that many factors, including many we miss, contribute to our perceived failures and successes.

Do your thoughts create your reality? Well, thinking positively and consciously is never a bad thing, but we’ve all experienced both great and terrible circumstances without either consciously believing that we could or couldn’t experience them.

Did most of your happiest moments occur after intense practice visualizing them?  I didn’t think so.  How about your unhappiest? Uh huh.  And you’re moderately not-so-notable experiences?  Okay.

If You Believe in the Law of Attraction it Can’t Just Work for the Stuff You Like.

Are children molested, adults contracting cancer or drivers getting in car accidents because their thoughts attracted that experience?

Did the US Airways flight crash into the Hudson with no casualties because the passengers were attracting an exciting yet non-lethal experience in an airplane?

Or maybe it was because the pilot was skilled and had been flying since he was a teenager which enabled him to react in the best possible way to a random life threatening occurrence.

Or maybe we’ll never know because our brains are experts at making meaning out of the first possible plausible explanation it comes up with or is exposed to.

Did every single one of the 9/11 victims or the millions of Iraqi’s killed in the last 8 years envision those experiences to manifest them?  If some of those 9/11 victims would have told someone their visions of planes crashing into buildings maybe we could have prepared better.

Law of attraction? Nope.  Theory of attraction? More accurate by definition.

If it helps you to take better action in your life great.  If it’s another late night infomercial emotional crutch to provide false hope, not so good.

Ask your doctor if the law of attraction is right for you and then remember that results WILL vary.  You can count on that.

As the new year begins our hopes, dreams and goal setting flourish.  …and then the year moves on.

As time clicks by how strongly do you influence yourself to follow through with those hopes, dreams and goals?

Most people don’t even set goals and the majority of those who do set them find it challenging to stay on top of taking action.

Here are five tips to achieving these goals.  They’re basic, but usually ignored, therefore making them a bit helpful.

Years ago I wrote an article on Creating The Best Year of Your life that goes into more depth for you, though I have to admit I have trouble following through on the steps as much as anyone who has read the article.

Yep, I’m the guy writing about influence and admitting that he has the same human experience of not always being able to stay disciplined in influencing himself.  Because I’ve found this situation to be the case for most humans, not just me, it makes me wonder about  how realistic our influence is when it comes to the discipline of goals.

So many people make new year’s resolutions that excite and motivate them for a week or two and then they drop back into old distracting habits.  Gym memberships and attendance traditionally soar in January and then plummet in February.  Hmmm…. I wonder if Krispy Creme sales plummet in January and skyrocket in February too?

If you’re one of these folks, don’t beat yourself up.  Realize that influencing others who like and trust you is actually more effective than influencing yourself.  You have your own internal doubts and insecurities to live with and others don’t see those, though they have their own to live with.  Others probably see your strengths and value shining brighter than you do.

On the other hand, if you’re one who is very disciplined and have a good track record of internal influence please post a comment and share some of your secrets with the rest of us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Influence is all around us and most of us are blind to it.  Hence, the title of this blog.

In reflecting on this I was amazed to see how far reaching influence is in our lives.  With the boom in social media this is becoming more and more obvious as people who were “nobodies” yesterday are using tools to influence, and be influenced by, thousands or tens of thousands of others from around the globe.  Learning and growing together and from each other is a beautiful thing.

On Twitter I am following people varying in age from 12 to over 70 who live small towns in America and cosmopolitan cities in Australia with a wide range in between.  I learn amazing, entertaining and helpful things from them all.

But to back up a minute from the new-fangled online world of communication tools and kick it back old school to mother nature, lets see how there’s nothing new in this.

I’m on my annual holiday family visit right now.  At my brothers house he has a 7 year old dog, Jake, that’s wonderful and has always been a little bit excitable and strong willed at doing his own thing.  This year he’s a different dog.

What changed?  He now has a little brother to influence.  After growing up with 3 boys this shouldn’t matter.  But, since this new brother is Gunner, a Golden Retriever 8 month old puppy it seems to matter a lot.

It’s amazing to watch how better behaved Jake is as he’s become a leader and an influencer to a puppy looking up to him for cues on what to do and how to behave.

We do the same thing.  We find deeper and more powerful aspects of ourselves the more we share ourselves and spread our influence.

In many spiritual texts the remedy given to someone feeling depressed is “Go do something helpful for someone else.”  At first this is counter-intuitive because if you’re depressed you think you need someone to pick up your spirits.  But it’s not.

Think about why people love being parents and owning animals and giving to causes.  It’s because they are extending themselves to contribute to someone beyond themselves or a cause greater than themselves.  A great example of how big this can be is the Global Hug Tour.

Have you given of yourself to someone and not felt better afterwords?  Probably not.  The phrase, “The more you give, the more you get” is a truism.

This is a great time of year to be aware of how influential you are.  I invite you to look for opportunities to extend yourself, your knowledge, your talents and gifts to influence others.  Not in an arrogant way, but in a humble and helpful way. ‘Tis the season, you’ll make someone else happy and you may even feel a little more expansive and joyful yourself.