Living the Significant Life (2 page)

PRINCIPLE #1

Intensify Your Desire

Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.

—Walter Lippmann

Have you ever reached a point in your life or work when you realized you were not where you wanted to be? Have you ever stopped and noticed that you could be doing more, achieving more, and experiencing more success, happiness, and fulfillment?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to go beyond making incremental gains in your performance or in the quality of your life and work—to rocket past your previous limitations and make a real breakthrough? That’s the possibility of living a significant life. And it’s all yours; all you have to do is develop the desire and play with it.

The fine art of desire and perseverance is beautifully expressed in the popular song by reggae artist Jimmy Cliff, “You Can Get It If You Really Want.”

What’s great about these lyrics is the clarity. We don’t think the song would have been anywhere near as successful if Jimmy had instead written, “You can get it if you sort of want,” or “You can get it if you halfway want,” or “You can get it if you, well, don’t really want, but somebody else said it was a fine idea, and besides, it’s an appropriate thing to want for someone with your income and standing in the community, and what’s more, your mother would approve as well, and . . .”

You get the idea. The only way you get anything is if you
really want.
Don’t want, halfway want, sort of want, and all those other less than, quasi-wants just won’t cut it. If you’re going to “succeed at last,” you’ve got to
want
to.

Wanting to Want

Real wanting unfortunately has a number of impostors to contend with. The cleverest of these false wants is
wanting
to want.

We know so many people who suffer from this. It’s so debilitating and limiting, because it looks for all the world as though it’s the same as really wanting something—but it’s not.

Some people spend their whole lives
wanting to want
to live somewhere else, work at some other career that they’d dearly love, do this, or have that, but it’s all an illusion. It’s just busywork masquerading as productivity.

Wanting to want
is avoiding, holding back, and fearing the unknown. It’s stating goals that sound good, but not really being committed to them. It’s confusing aspirations with wishful thinking. It’s probably fear of failure as much as anything—a form of procrastination that allows the person to look good in the process of doing nothing productive, except going through the motions.

Real wanting is something very different. It’s a powerful, inspiring urge, and as such, there is something divinely inspired about it.

Neither of us puts much stock in spiritual and personal growth practices that maintain that the only way to an “enlightened” life is through ridding oneself of all desire. On the contrary, desire, genuine wanting, is a gift from God, a powerful and compelling tool for accomplishment. Desire is a human birthright and very much directly linked to (indeed, responsible for) all the extraordinary and exciting progress that humans have made throughout the millennia of our existence on this planet. Of course, we’ve taken some wrong turns and made some errors of both judgment and action. But it is our
desire
—especially when it appears collectively—to right those wrongs that inspires the process to a new and better result.

The Creative Force of Desire

Like any other quality we’ll talk about in this book, desire has no color of its own. That’s up to each of us individually. Desire for more than is appropriate, or for greater than you deserve, is greed. And desire for less than you deserve is often an expression of a self-defeating, no-possibility
habitude
(habit combined with attitude), born of low self-worth and low self-esteem.

Clearly, genuine desire is powerful. Developing the ability to harness its strength for good and not for harm is the challenge. Robert Fritz, in
The Path of Least Resistance
, gives practical insights into the accomplishment process. His explanation of how we get what we desire is particularly impressive.

When we have a desire for something, but what we have at present is different from the fulfillment of that desire, there is a natural tension that develops. This condition is subject to the natural law that tension seeks resolution.

Picture a stretched rubber band. The tension in that rubber band acts almost as though it
wants
to relax, to resolve the tension and go back to its resting state. So it is when we desire something we do not have. There is a tension, stretched between our current condition and the desired condition, that seeks to be resolved. The bigger the desire, the greater the tension.

The helpful part is that this tension is not only a natural occurrence, it is also the force we use to get what we want—whether or not we are aware of its presence. As long as we continue to encourage and maintain that tension, it’s there for us, naturally and powerfully bringing our desire into being. Fritz shows that even though people often experience such tension as something stressful, it can be used and experienced as the powerful inspirational force it really is.

Now let’s do something really fascinating with Fritz’s rubber band imagery.

Think of what you have in your life now as the end of the rubber band that’s in your left hand, and think of your desire as the end that’s in your right hand. Now stretch the rubber band out to represent the difference (that is, the distance) between the two.

With your present condition and your desired future being pulled away from each other as you stretch the rubber band, what’s going to happen next? How will you influence in which direction the tension resolves?

Let go of the right side (your desire). The tension relaxes the rubber band over to your left hand. This is like letting go of your desire. That’s one way to resolve the tension: give up your dreams, forget about what you want. When you do, what you end up with is just what you already had: your present condition.

In this case, letting the rubber band’s tension relax means resignation: nothing’s changed, your dreams are futile, you give up and stick with the status quo. Many people accept that condition in order to escape the tension that is naturally produced by having dreams and aspirations unfulfilled.

But what if you do it the other way around? What happens if you let go of the left-hand end of the rubber band? Now what remains is your desire.

What you have now, what Fritz calls “current reality,” will do one thing you can always count on: it will change; everything always does. So if you hold onto your desire, if you make it strong through the principles we’ll be talking about later—belief in yourself, an upbeat habitude, focus, letting go of your fears—you can direct and even accelerate the changes in your current circumstances, moving from what you have now to what you genuinely desire!

Think about it for just a moment. What you have now will change—that’s a given. It’s changing right now even as you read this. If you hold onto and make powerful the desire for what you want, the tension will most likely resolve naturally in favor of your desires.

There are two keys to this: telling the truth about what you have now, and telling the truth about what you desire. Affirmations and positive thinking can be powerful tools, but lying to yourself is dangerous. So be honest with yourself about what it is you really want. Then keep the tension alive so that its natural power is working for you to accomplish your desire.

Isn’t that fantastic?

Once you have the intense desire to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve, and inspiration itself is your ally, you are unstoppable. If your desire is truly intense—what we call
burning desire
—and you are single-mindedly aiming toward your goals, no one and nothing can sidetrack you. The key is to know exactly what you are seeking and what you really, really want.

Building Rapport

Once you’ve cultivated an intense and burning desire, you can communicate this desire to others, and when you do that, you supercharge the entire accomplishment process. The more people you enroll in your desire, the more inspirational power you have to accomplish your dreams.

You transfer your beliefs to others through the following three ways:

These three forms of communication combine to form the skill we call
building rapport.

When you learn the skill of establishing rapport with unlimited numbers of people, you will develop an infinite variety of avenues for the experience and expression of joy, happiness, and success in your life and your work—and perhaps most important, in theirs. In essence, building rapport simply means establishing the most commonality and comfort possible in a relationship.

Most human beings have a fascinating behavioral quality: we like people who like us. Abraham Lincoln said, “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his friend.”

We spend time with and feel comfortable with those people who share our interests and passions. Even people who have difficulty talking to strangers will do so easily if there is an obvious commonality between them, such as the fact that they are both riding mountain bikes or that they’re both wearing jazz dance shoes or baseball caps from the same team.

Most people establish rapport with words, by asking questions to reveal areas of common interest or personal similarities. But this is a far more limited basis for rapport- building than it might seem because of the often overlooked fact that words mean different things to different people. We all have our own definitions for words and unique interpretations for the same set of facts. If five people view the same event, you’ll have five different descriptions of what happened.

However, when you use rapport-building skills, you can guarantee making a connection with others. Can you see any value for you in being able to establish rapport instantly in a variety of personal and professional encounters? It really is powerful. Let’s take a brief look at some rapport-building skills you can use easily and immediately.

Mirroring and Matching

It’s important to realize how little our communication is composed of words. In fact, some widely respected research conducted years ago by the Pacific Institute in Seattle found that our communication is actually 93 percent nonverbal. That is, words themselves compose only 7 percent—about one-fourteenth!—of our total communication.

If words represent such a small part of our communication, where does the other thirteen-fourteenths come from? More than in any other way, people judge you and make decisions about how they think and feel about you based on your voice inflection and body language.

When you mirror and match the inflection and body language of the person you’re talking with, you develop instant rapport—no matter what is being said. People are most open and comfortable with other people who are like them. Mirroring and matching is a practice in which you observe and adopt some of the dominant characteristics of the person with whom you’re speaking.

You might think that this technique is too obvious or seems phony, that you will come off as strange or even be perceived as mocking the other person, but that’s not the case. What we’re doing here is actually quite subtle, and it communicates almost entirely on a subconscious level.

The truth is that we mirror and match each other all the time. When people around us start to yawn or laugh, we often start to yawn or laugh. It’s something you already do naturally and automatically, at least to some extent. Our purpose here is simply to have you recognize that fact and focus on it—to bring it out of the realm of the subconscious so you can begin to use mirroring and matching with awareness and discipline to achieve the results you’re after.

Let’s start with your voice.

Your Voice

Your voice inflection composes 38 percent of your communication with others. There are four aspects of your voice that can be looked at separately: tone, tempo, volume, and vocabulary.

Tone
is a quality apart from how fast or slow and how quietly or loudly you talk. Here are some examples of different tones: excited, dry, laid-back, thoughtful, hurried, enthusiastic. What you call the tone of a person’s voice is subjective and unimportant. What matters is to observe the tone being used and to emulate the same tone in your conversation with that person.

Tempo
is the speed at which a person is talking. Your goal is simply to match the pace and pattern of the other person’s speech.

Volume
, like tempo, is self-explanatory. Speak softly with soft-spoken men and women, louder with those whose volume is greater.

Vocabulary
is your choice of words. Notice the key words the other person uses and use them in your conversation as well. Especially important are words or phrases that give you the person’s predominant thinking orientation, such as when he or she says, “I think,” “I feel,” “I see,” or “I hear what you’re saying.” Although you may be a thinker, when you’re with someone whose orientation is that of a feeler, match that in your conversation by shifting what you normally say from “I think” to “I feel.”