Rock Thomas, who works with high achievers who are not living up to their full potential, spends a lot of time seeking out other self-help gurus and thought leaders. Together, they explore all of the aspects that make up a wildly successful and fulfilled person.
Rock’s goal is to empower high achievers with a proven curriculum and high-level network that they need in order to create their success story, achieve financial freedom, and reach the next level as a whole-life millionaire.
In his quest to gather as much knowledge and insight as possible, Rock sat down with the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers, Marianne Williamson. Rock and Marianne discussed the power of transformation and making success a part of your identity.
Marianne is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and an activist. Six of her ten published books have been New York Times best-sellers and she has also been on Oprah, Good Morning America, and the Charlie Rose show. Marianne brought her new book, Tears to Triumph: The Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment.
In Rock’s experience, not many people believe that they can lead an epic life until they’ve heard the adversity that some other people have had to overcome. Marianne is no stranger to adversity; she failed to graduate from college because she just could not find herself. She struggled with focusing, and ended up dropping out in her junior year to wander. She began to get in touch with her spiritual side.
In her twenties, Marianne read a series of books called A Course in Miracles. These books were life-changing for Marianne, who learned that if she loved the person in front of her, she could be a better person and a more loving person. If that was her goal on any given day, miracles would happen in her life.
Several years later, she found herself living in Los Angeles and working at a place called the Philosophical Research Society. They asked her to start giving lectures on A Course in Miracles, which she gladly began doing. This was the birth of her career, although she didn’t realize it at the time – she was just speaking about something that she was passionate about.
Marianne did have a personal tragedy and a nervous breakdown that led to a very difficult time in her life. But because of her study of A Course in Miracles, and her belief that a higher power does lift us up when we fall, she believed that a higher power would give her new opportunities when she brought her thinking back to righteousness. When she took responsibility for her mistakes, atoned for them, and forgave other people for theirs, she found that miracles do happen. In her life, she did not separate her spiritual devotion from her career goals. Marianne’s goal of her life is also the goal of her career.
Make Love Your Priority
Whether you’re in science, an educator, a business person, you’re in the medical field, or you’re a lawyer, you should be in the business of love. In any system, we should be seeking to be more positive, impeccable, and ethical, and really ask ourselves how our product and our relationships with which we work might be of use and of service. This just makes you more successful as a human being, which leads to professional success. And if you fail professionally, you can usually go back and see the root cause in yourself. And then you dig deep, which can be very painful.
You can read about any great business leader, and you’ll learn that the only true failure is one you don’t learn from. Stories abound about people with huge successes, who had their failures on the way. But if you learn from it, whether it’s a personal failure or a professional failure, be ready because the universe is going to bring you a new opportunity.
The reason that people can’t be as loving as they may want to be, is that the mind is split into two parts. One part of the mind is in touch with the love that is the truth of who we are. The other part of the mind is the spirit of fear, which dominates this world. It’s easy to be lured into fear and greed, but if we meditate, if we put our dedication to love, whether that’s through a spiritual or a secular dimension first and make that our bottom line, then we’re not at the effect of all that fear. Fear is what makes us angry, what makes us attack, and what makes us defend. But there’s another way to live.
Coming from a place of love, and loving what you do, is this other way to live. This doesn’t only include your professional life, but it very powerfully influences your professional life, because it gives you that winner’s edge. It gives you charisma and leadership. People realize when you’d be doing what you do even if you weren’t making a living doing it. That’s when the universe responds to what you’re doing.
Rock himself suffered from a traumatic and brutal childhood that led to him searching for self-love throughout his adult life. But as Marianne points out, the love that sets the world free is not self love. The love that sets the world free is love for everyone.
Suffering gives you x-ray vision into the suffering of others. You can use your experience to ask, how can I be a better person now? If you went through this pain, let it not have been in vain. How can you be even more of a channel for love?
But the truth is that many hurt people, turn around and hurt other people in the same way. That’s why spiritual work matters so much. That’s why it’s so important to process our pain and that’s really what Tears To Triumph is about. The tears must be cried; it’s dangerous to neglect the inner life. The processing of these things, and the surrender of these things to a higher power can heal our hearts, transform our thoughts, transform our feelings, and transform our behavior. Anything less than deep spiritual work doesn’t do that.
It’s so important to know that God created everyone perfect. It’s all about re-identifying who we are. A Course in Miracles says that enlightenment is a shift from body identification to spirit identification. You have to face the exact nature of your wrongs and seek to be a better person. If you have atoned, if you have owned your mistake, if you have made amends, if you’ve made an apology where necessary, then at that point, you are not affected by anybody who wants to judge you, because you’re doing your best. That’s self love itself. It comes with a level of self-acceptance.
Resetting Psychic Pain
We do have people who are living in emotions that are less than what they could be. There’s a rainbow of emotions for a reason. But we do have a culture that seems to be addicted to depression or stuck in it somehow. Over the last few decades, they have medicalized normal human despair. The fact is that so many people are saddened by what’s happening today, and that’s not a sign of a lack of mental health. It’s actually a sign that we are mentally healthy.
The idea of taking pills to numb our pain and our depression, when most of the time that pain and depression is simply a product of the society in which we live, is something that needs to be seriously looked at. Psychic pain is like physical pain. It conveys information. If you have a broken leg, it’s not enough to just take morphine. You have to reset the leg. And if you have psychic pain, it’s not enough to just numb the pain.
You have to reset the thinking that produced it, or else that keeps you on the wheel of suffering because you won’t forgive somebody else. You have not yet forgiven someone else for what they did.
Some of the people who are the most successful in business, or in any other area, are successful because they feel deeply what it means to be human. That’s what makes a successful business. It has the mark of your deep humanity on it. If you’re going to play life big, then your chances of failure are greater. If you’re going to live a passionate life, you know it’s not always going to be safe. But you get to a point where you fear living a small life, more than you fear going after a big life.
That’s why Tears to Triumph is helpful. Because if you don’t know how to navigate the troubled times in life, you don’t really know how to navigate life. If you’re going to try to be big in your career, you must expect that sometimes it’s not going to go the way you want. Success is not guaranteed in any area of life. It’s only guaranteed in the sense that if you learn from it, and become more humble because of it, and live in a more meaningful way because of that, then even that was a success.
We need to stop being so afraid of feeling the lows. Being depressed drains you, it’s true. But once you go through it, the universe lifts you up to a higher place.
Lessons on Letting Go
Remember that forgiveness is everything. Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. When you fail to forgive, you withhold your love. The way that consciousness operates is whatever I’m thinking about you, that thought is effecting me. So if you’re attacking someone, you’re actually attacking yourself. And if you withhold love from someone, you’re withholding love from yourself. You must stop withholding that love. That’s the only way you can go forward in life. You can’t remain bitter and see yourself as a victim, and also be happy, and that really becomes a decision.
Do you wish to be happy? If you’re not happy, you’re going to have a harder time being successful in any area, whether it be in relationships, or personal, or professional. You will have a cramped kind of energy, a bitter kind of negative energy. Who wants to help you, who wants to work with you? Ultimately, there’s always going to be someone with a resume as good as yours. There’s always going to be someone with a success record as good as yours. In the final analysis, whether it’s people investing in you, people promoting you, people hiring you, or people buying from you, it’s going to be because of the feeling that they get from you and what their gut says about you. If you’re coming from a place where you haven’t processed your own stuff, then unforgiveness will be an unprocessed lump in the middle of your psyche. If you don’t think other people deserve to win at the deepest level, you’re programming yourself to not allow yourself to win.
A Daily Practice That Will Propel You Forward
Every morning, spend five minutes closing your eyes and thinking of all the people that you’re going to be around. Think of not only the people that you’re going to be around, but the people that you don’t even know yet that you’re going to be around, and just send your love to them. It’s amazing because you’ll realize how much love you’ve been withholding from your employer, employees, colleagues, and your associates. You’ll realize that every bit of love you send out is success. Love is the vibration of success. An amazing difference will begin to take place in your personality. People subconsciously know everything. When people are being loved by you, they feel it, and it attracts them.
You’ll realize that whether something was an immediate success today or not, is not the hook on which you hang your self esteem. It’s that you lived a decent life today. Our sense of self esteem and self love and excelled acceptance and even happiness begins to rest on the fact that you know you lived a decent life today. Somewhere, things were a little better for someone because of something that you did. When that’s what you start to lay your foundation on, then everything will unfold from there.
Planning Your Success
You’re a high achiever wanting big results in your life. The challenge is you have so many things on the go, you have trouble prioritizing the big stuff and get caught in the weeds. The result? You miss out on living a life that fulfills and excites you. You feel behind every day before you even get started. The Epic Life Planner was created for big thinkers, like you. Click Here to gain clarity on your direction, take massive action in order to accelerate your growth, and build better habits TODAY.
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