Let’s say you’ve cleared your mind and learned to disarm all the negative thoughts in your life as they arise. Now you’re free to discover who you are. You’re free to realize the best that’s in you. Soon you begin to see what you can really accomplish and bring into the world.
What’s really happened? You have become available to yourself. And in this freedom from all those burdens and baggage you’ve been carrying, you’re able to follow your instincts. Because you listen to your instincts now. You’re not worried about what Susie three cubicles down might have said about you today. You’re available for inner ideas. You’re available for insights. Your mind is quiet and open to new ideas. You’re available for inspiration.
It will feel like you’ve taken down the Great Wall of China. You’ve erased that wall you have built in yourself through a lifetime of criticism, self-judgment, anger, and disappointment—all the thoughts that have blocked your potential from coming through. You no longer grab and hang on to thoughts that say to you, Life isn’t fair, Gee, I’m a victim, I’m not responsible, or This shouldn’t have happened to me.
Now you let those thoughts pass. You give them no life or credibility. You laugh at them now because you know they’re not true.
In fact, you attach your beliefs to none of your thoughts; you just continue to learn to go deeper than thought, and listen.
* * *
The only real valuable thing is intuition.
—Albert Einstein
* * *
Perhaps you’ve heard the admonition “You can’t listen while you’re talking.” That’s even more true for your inner dialogue. So you learn to reverse your patterns so that your mental process is much less about thinking and much more about listening. Soon you grow quieter. You don’t need to share all your ideas with everybody, because you’re no longer trying to fix everybody. You’ve moved on from that. You’ve accepted them for who they are, and you’re accepting without judgment their weaknesses and their problems. In fact, you don’t even label them “problems” anymore. They’re just energy patterns in life as fascinating as anything else.
People don’t have any power over you anymore because a deeper you is in control now. Not the shallow, scared ego.
Now you’re available to receive intuitive insights from deep inside yourself. You’re not going over and over in your head how you wish you would have responded to that criticism. You don’t prepare your defense every time you get a difficult e-mail from your supervisor.
You’re not overloading your mental bandwidth with how you wish you had come back with some coarse remark that would have made someone feel as bad as they “made” you feel. You understand that’s a waste of time. They can’t “make” you feel anything. Only your thoughts can do that. You laugh at the idea of indulging those kind of thoughts now.
You’re only interested in realizing your potential—becoming who you already are! You realize that your potential lies within you; it is not out there in the future. You don’t have to get anywhere to have realized your potential. Your potential is yours to feel inside you, right here and right now. Beating like a heart.
When you’re living the hands-off life, the outside world will begin responding to you differently because you’ll be more open to opportunity. You might be in that quiet place where a person just pops into your mind, and you will go to your computer and send that person a nice note. The next thing you know, that person is calling and saying, “I have some business for you. I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”
That’s allowing success instead of trying to force it to happen.
Steps to hands-off success in your life
Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:
1. Take out a notebook and write down a negative thought you had today about someone at work. Challenge the thought as if you were that person’s defense attorney. Is it really true? Is the negative feeling you get when you think that thought really worth it?
2. Give that person a call and talk for a few minutes in an open and warm way, finding out what life is like for him right now. (If you can do this in person, all the better. Drop by his workstation just to ask how he’s doing and how you can help.)
3. After you’ve met with him, go back to the negative thought you initially wrote down and see if it has any truth or power left. Notice that negative thoughts isolate you from people, while positive thoughts connect you with them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LETTING GO OF JUDGMENT
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
—Mother Teresa
Doug was a top-level salesperson who had just lost a huge deal. He was selling corporate training programs and the company he was selling to was suddenly being purchased by another company. Fortunately for Doug, his manager, Tony, who was a friend of ours, was also a hands-off master mentor.
Tony listened to Doug’s story about what had happened for a while but refused to mirror Doug’s long face and sad voice. When Doug expressed his final frustration about losing the big contract, hands-off Tony just winked at him.