Strategic Discipline Blog

The weekend of July 4th marked the third anniversary of my discovery I would beat cancer.  I thought I’d share a few thoughts about that miracle and provide its wisdom to business growth.

Meditating each day starting in early March, shortly after my diagnosis of Acute Myeloid Leukemia, contributed greatly part to my miraculous remission.  The practice of Strategic Discipline requires identifying and measuring activities that align and will help you meet your specific priorities.  Joe Dispensa’s book Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One outlined the meditation techniques to put my mind in a place where God’s Spirit transformed and healed my body.

In Joe Dispensa’s book and CD’s he shares research done on people who have achieved spontaneous remission from serious illnesses and cancer.  He found 4 major similarities in the people who had achieved spontaneous remissions.

There were four common things that Dispensa research discovered.

1.     They all believed and accepted that there was some spiritual aspect that lived within them. That there is something that gives us this life and there’s nothing mystical about spirituality. It’s the consciousness; it’s an intelligence that keeps your heart beating. Two gallons of blood per minute, a hundred gallons of blood in an hour, a hundred-thousand times in one day through sixty thousand miles of blood vessels. Something gives us life. There is a mind that is so much greater than our mind that has a will so much greater than our will. And has love for life that’s so much greater than our love for life, our personality-self. And when our will matches its will, when our mind matches its mind and when our love for life matches its love for us or for life, that’s when it begins to respond

God’s love, the Creator, the Universe, whatever it is that is your Divine Power is universally responsible for all healing.  If you are unable to believe in a Higher Power who loves you more than you can imagine than the book and my witness will never provide you with the solution you seek.  Indeed for the purposes of finding healing I firmly believe you cannot find healing without believing in this Supreme Presence that guides us and leads all of us to good!  

This consciousness loves us so much that it allows us our free will. So if we insist on suffering, it gives life to reinforce our suffering. If we insist on joy, it organizes our bodies and our life in ways that match who we are being. So that’s the first thing they had in common.

Translation to Business: The power of One Thing.  If you’re a Christian you know the 10 Commandments and the first commandment:  “You shall have no other gods before me“

The Power of One Thing, one focus is critical to achieving success in business. Verne Harnish noted in Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, “A company with too many priorities has no priorities.” 

Our Gazelles customers all realize the power of the One Thing the very first quarter we begin working with them.  What’s the One Thing that would impact the business the most if you could only get One Thing done?

2.     The second thing they had in common is that they all understood that it was their own mismanagement of their thoughts and reactions that created their disease.

We live in two states of mind: we live in survival or creation. When we live in those states of anger or aggression or hatred or judgment or fear, anxiety or insecurity or pain or suffering or depression, it’s those chemicals that are created from the chemicals of stress or survival that activate those states of mind. It’s the redundancy of those chemicals or the chemicals that push the genetic buttons that begin to cause disease.

You see, every time we have a thought we make a chemical. So if we have a great thought or, if we have an unlimited thought, we make chemicals that make us feel great or feel unlimited. If we have negative thoughts or self- depreciating thoughts, we make chemicals that make us feel negative or unworthy. So this immaterial thing called thought fires a set of circuits in the brain that produces a chemical to signal the body for us to feel exactly the way we’re just thinking.

The moment we feel the way we think, we begin to think the way we feel, which produces more chemicals for us to think (This creates a big loop.) the way we feel. And this loop, the cycle of thinking and feeling, and feeling and thinking creates what I call a state of being and it’s the cycle of thinking and feeling, and feeling and thinking over time that begins to condition the body to memorize that emotional state better than the conscious mind.

Translation to Business: Not dissimilar to the One Thing, however it’s truly the power of discipline.  When the business isn’t disciplined, without focus, it is mismanaging its people and resources.   Strategic Discipline empowers a business to achieve its strategic priorities and grow.

3.     Third, all said this, I have to reinvent myself.  I gotta become somebody else – I can’t be this miserable victim for the rest of my life.  I got to become somebody else.  

The moment they did that started to asks themselves some very important questions. Questions most people don’t have time to think about.  Like:

•               What would it be like to be a happy person?
•               Who do I know in my life that’s happy?
•               What would I change about my life to live in Joy?
•               Who in history do I admire that was great?
•               At what point did I lose it?  And believe that this was who I am?

The moment we ask these questions, the frontal lobe turns on. 

These people made this every single day the most important thing: Gave up social engagements, TV, deciding instead that they were going to mentally rehearse the Greatest Ideal of themselves every day.  And as long as they kept doing it every day, what happens?  It lights up that part of the brain and it becomes more sustainable, providing a platform for who they are going to become in the future.

Translation to Business: Pat Lencioni (from The Five Dysfunctions of a Team), “Success is not a matter of mastering subtle, sophisticated theory, but rather of embracing common sense with uncommon levels of discipline and persistence.”  Creating a One Page Strategic Plan immediately asks the important questions and answers to compel your business to reinvention.  To follow a successful path that virtually guarantees success.  

4.     The last thing, while rehearsing who they are going to be, they had long moments where they lost track of time and space.  They became so involved in what they were doing, when lifted up their eyes, open eyes, turn the light on in the room, it was two hours later, and it only seemed like it had been 5 minutes. 

They got so involved in what they were doing lost feedback from the body, lost feedback from the environment, and time.  The moment that happens 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. 

Translation to Business: This is all about Purpose.  When you engage in an endeavor that provides your people to lose them self in love of what they are doing each day, you allow them to lose track of space and time.  You possibly seen Simon Sinek’s Start with Why, or read Jim Stengel, Grow - How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies.  The intention of building a business that is more than just profit focused embraces this quote from Lee J. Colan, "Without a compelling cause, our employees are just putting in time. Their minds might be engaged, but their hearts are not. Meaning precedes motivation."

These steps are how I achieved a spontaneous remission from cancer.  Some would say that Doug your cancer was removed through your clinical trial chemotherapy. Yet I knew it would be removed 3-4 weeks before the test results proved it was gone.  I had a miraculous revelation in my hospital room weeks before, a message from God that said, “Cancer Cured” on my computer. 

The practice of meditation works, especially when coupled with Strategic Discipline.  Choose what your One Thing is and then following a regular practice of the right activities, you will achieve success.

The concept of One Thing is a critical piece of our Rockefeller Habits Scaling Up best practices.  We’ll explore this, the fundamental ideas that support it’s prominence in history and why you need to be practicing it every year and quarter in your business.