Strategic Discipline Blog

My journey through Acute Myeloid Leukemia continues with Chapter IV of CANCER CURED – Patience & Focus

(Previous segments of CANCER CURED are available here:  CANCER CURED BOOK -to read these from the beginning you’ll need to scroll through to the bottom to find CANCER CURED – What do You Feed?, which is the first in the series.)

This is the third segment from Chapter IV - Conquer Fear, Preparation, The Environment, Body and Time

CONQUER FEAR

By following the five steps in Crossing the Red Sea, I became acutely aware of how crucial it is not to fear.

As a business coach, early in my E-Myth coaching experience, I learned how crippling fear is. It frequently surrounds cash flow problems for a business. Any business with a cash flow challenge is nearly helpless to grow and build a solid foundation until they conquer their fear of running out of cash.

As Scaling Up coaches we have tools and resources to help a business achieve cash flow, however until the business achieves steady cash flow, the work they achieve in every other aspect of the business suffers. It’s like trying to slow dance with handcuffs on.

If you believe your outcomes will be good, your attitude will be positive. If you fear your outcomes will be bad, you will have a negative outlook.

Since starting my career as a radio salesperson, my habit has been to start each day with affirmations. As an introvert, my first fear to conquer was cold calling. I had to build up my belief in my service, its ability to deliver results, my belief in myself, and my ability to overcome my fear of contacting potential prospects.

If you’re a negative Nelly, chances aren’t very good you’re suddenly going to change once you’re sick with a terminal illness.

What I learned in Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, from Dr. Joe Dispensa, is positive affirmations and thinking are not enough. You can have a positive mindset, but still feel negative. At this time in my cancer journey, I hadn’t come to an understanding of how important rehearsing and feeling how I would feel as my future self was to achieve the outcome I desired.

Having achieved the outcome I desired with Michelle; I had tremendous faith-power someone else might lack.

The key to meditation is getting out of your mind, body, and the environment. Meditation propels you to a state where you are no longer conscious of the environment, your body, and time.  

If you believe you can achieve something, through God, or through your own personal talent and ability, you need to combine this knowledge with a positive emotion to elevate your mind to achieve the result you want.

Confidence

When you can conquer your fear, a feeling of confidence arrives. If you’ve never felt this feeling of certainty, it is difficult to describe. It includes a sense of calm, peace, and assurance.

If you’ve ever been in the “zone” as an athlete, or in your work, where you get completely caught up in the moment, the sense that everything you do is going to work, where you’re completely removed from any fear or discouragement, you know this sensation.

This knowledge and courage James Stockdale shared in the Stockdale Paradox, from Jim Collins Good to Great:

The Stockdale Paradox

“Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the

difficulties, AND at the same time, confront the most brutal facts

of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

      -Admiral Jim Stockdale in Good to Great

As a person of faith, I see all obstacles, challenges, and misfortunes as a gift from God. They appear just when you need them to push you forward.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

~ Henry Ford

It’s not just Christians who recognize and respond to life this way. Stoics have long believed this: the ancient Greek philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience. Stoics focus on the things they can control, let go of everything else, and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, tougher. As Marcus Aurelius put it nearly 2000 years ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

First, you recognize the challenge, then you overcome the fear, and finally, you proceed with confidence you will be better, and stronger because of it.

When you’ve overcome previous obstacles in your life, you have a storehouse of energy and knowledge to rely on. It’s a treasure chest you can dip into.

Preparation

Life is a journey. Each obstacle, challenge, or setback provides the preparation we need. It provided exactly what I needed to prepare for Acute Myeloid Leukemia. When you realize the power your life provides, you can face any obstacle with confidence.

Did I realize this at the time?

I did not.

However, it didn’t prevent me from calling upon my past experiences to help me move forward, face my fears, and focus on a purposeful future.

In the first chapter, when Dr. Begum told me to give up, I called upon the inner reserve of experience. My mother had once told me my first-grade teacher, Sister Maryatina, told her at my first parent-teacher conference, “Doug loves a challenge!”

Acute Myeloid Leukemia may have been my biggest challenge. Yet compared to losing who I thought was the love of my life, cancer was easier to confront.

Meditation

Meditation is a search for yourself. Meditation literally means to become familiar with. In the Tibetan language, to meditate means “to become.” In Sanskrit, meditation means “to cultivate self”

Sitting alone, all by yourself, you need to become comfortable with yourself, who you are. You confront many things you don’t like about yourself. Just having to sit still is a burden to someone with an active mind and body. Your mind wanders. You need to get comfortable with sitting and doing nothing. Thoughts enter your mind, your past, your future, your mistakes, your clumsy misjudgments, and words, what you need to do, or missed doing that day.

Dr. Joe Dispensa reserves up to two hours to get into a meditative state and struggles at times to achieve it due to his mind being occupied with challenges.

Meditation requires you to be still, and know, first yourself, then your part in the universe, and then your Universal Power (God).

If you like to keep busy and active, it’s uncomfortable to stay still for 30 – 40 minutes, let alone an hour. At first, it seems like a complete waste of time to someone whose nature is to keep moving.

In my case, I didn’t have much of a choice. I’m not about watching TV. Unless it’s a movie or sporting event, most TV feels like a waste of time.

Each day in the hospital I scheduled time to meditate. Often, twice a day. If I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall back asleep, I would mediate. It always relaxed me. Falling asleep after meditating was easy.

The audio I’d received from Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself contained three mediations: 49 minutes, 1 hour and ten minutes, and another for one hour and 15 minutes.

I’d ordered the CDs, downloaded them into my iTunes library, and then saved them to my iPod.

When I wanted to meditate, I would put a sign outside my door to prevent anyone from interrupting me. When I received chemo treatments intravenously, I would mediate during the long process of infusions.

Well-practiced meditation moves you from consciousness to a state where you lose track of time, the body, and your environment. It’s where we can access the subconscious part of our mind and make change occur.

Dispensa studied people who recovered from fatal diseases and maladies. After my recovery, I listened to an audio Dispensa shared on research he’d done on people who have achieved spontaneous remission from serious illnesses and cancer.

He found 4 major commonalities in the people who had achieved spontaneous remissions. I’ve previously shared this in CANCER CURED – CHAPTER III - Spontaneous Remission

The people who had spontaneous remissions got so involved in what they were doing they lost feedback from the body, lost feedback from the environment, and time. The moment this happens, Dispensa explains, you move into the quantum field, it’s the moment when we re-pattern our brain.

When you make new patterns in your brain, you suddenly see the world differently. You become a new personality, and this new personality allows you to change the patterns in your life and achieve spontaneous remission.

Do I know how this works? Do I understand how it works?

NO!

Absolutely not!

Dispensa explains we don’t have to! The UNIVERSE/CREATOR DOES!

Did Moses and the Hebrews understand how the Red Sea was parted so they could cross, and then have it collapse on the Egyptians behind them?

Of course not. They didn’t have to. God took care of it!

To achieve this state isn’t enough. To attain a miracle, you need the heart and the mind working together in unison.

Time, The Body, and the Environment

Here are some facts about your heart to magnify how critical emotion is to achieve the result you want to appear in your life.

• The heart acts as an emotional conductor and radiates how you are feeling to every cell in the body via the heart’s electromagnetic field; this energy field can be detected up to 5 to 10 feet away.
• The heart’s electromagnetic field is 5,000 times more powerful than the brain.

Can you see from this how critical, as Emmet Fox shared earlier, connecting the mind to the heart is? Can you see how powerful emotions are in achieving the results you want?

When Dr. Begum shared her insights on what I should do with the limited time I had remaining in my life, I went through the process I’d been following with my meditation. My faith in getting a result in meditation from my previous miracle with Michelle allowed me to remove the emotion and fear from Dr. Begum’s prophecy. At the same time, my process-oriented mind recognized I was responsible somewhere in the loop for failing to do the steps correctly.

After years of training as a business coach, my mind thinks systemically. It thinks in terms of what’s working, and what’s not. Where’s the diminishing return from one task or function in the system to the next? If one piece of the system is working but the outcome isn’t being produced, what’s the system breakdown that needs to be fixed?

In Turning the Flywheel by Jim Collins, Collins shares how Good companies become Great by slow continuous pressure on their flywheel. At the same time, he offers that if each component on your flywheel isn’t functioning at the highest level, momentum slows down. While I didn’t have a flywheel to visually see, I was aware of each step in Dispensa’s model for achieving the outcome. I’ve reconstructed a flywheel here to share how my mind was thinking after I visited with Dr. Begum.

Step 1 - Meditate: Lose Track of Time, My Body, and My Environment.

Step 2 – Meditate: Release Negative/Survival Emotions

Step 3 – Mediate: Create a Vision of My New Personality

Step 4 - Stockdale Paradox: Confront the Brutal Facts yet Retain Faith in the End You Will Prevail Regardless of Difficulties.

Step 5 – Meditate: Combine Faith/Vision with Elevated Emotion

Step 6 – Unexpected Result: Don’t Predict Your Outcome.

When I now work with a customer to define their Flywheel, when finished identifying it, we score each component to determine how the customer is doing, and where they need to improve to build momentum.

This is exactly what I did immediately following Dr. Begum’s no-choice solution. I reviewed how I was doing on each step, and quickly realized I was failing at Step 5.

At every other step, I felt (I could score myself at an 8-10 on proficiency) even on the 6^th Step I didn’t feel I was forcing my outcome or trying to predict it.

The only step I felt I was failing miserably at was step 5. I’d score myself at a 2 on a scale of 0-10.

I dove back into Dispensa’s book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. I did everything I could to feel myself in the place (Hawaii) where I could emotionally be someone new, healed, happy, with my family around me, especially Michelle.

I was determined to feel an elevated emotion. My deep love for Michelle ignited emotions I never realized could be so powerful.

Call to Action

Challenge your team, your business, yourself. Contact Positioning Systems to schedule a free exploratory meeting to challenge, inspire, and ignite purpose and passion in your business!  

Create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

When you think of POWER, what’s your first thought? Powerful people, emotions, places, things? What is the source of Power? Who or what is most powerful? We’ll explore this next blog as we continue Cancer Cured – Chapter V - The Most Powerful Force in the Universe

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact on the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $500M+) businesses Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG – CANCER CURED CHAPTER V - The Most Powerful Force in the Universe