2010: Begin Again - Self Trust and Personal Success

Go for the Gold

Thar’s gold in them thar hills! At least there was back in 1854 in a territory that soon after became the state of Colorado. Stories abound of men who struck it rich and of the many more men who toiled away and earned very little . . . or nothing. Perhaps the best lesson to come out of the gold rush was shared by Napoleon Hill in the classic book Think and Grow Rich.

At the time, R. U. Darby, who lived in Maryland, was contacted by an uncle who’d struck gold in Colorado. The uncle needed financial support to buy equipment necessary to process the vein. With the support of friends and a few neighbours, the money was raised, the equipment purchased and Darby accompanied his uncle out west to work the claim.

The quality of the ore proved top-rate and the men went to town drilling away to dig up the gold. Just when things were looking great, the vein of gold disappeared. The men drilled on to no avail. Finally, giving up the hunt, they took their loses, sold the equipment to a junk man and returned home to the east.

The junkman hired a mining engineer to look at the site. The engineer determined the original owners didn’t know enough about fault lines to realize they needed to shift their operation. Three feet over, the junkman found the main vein and went on to extract millions of dollars worth of gold. And this was in the 1850s when a million really meant something

Three Feet From Gold

Greg Reid and Sharon Lechter recall this story in their book Three Feet from Gold. Consider the book a follow up to Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, supported by The Napoleon Hill Foundation

The lesson commonly taught from this story is that we should never give up on a goal. Persistence can be the key to eventual success.

Yeah, that’s good. And I agree with it. But I think there is more here than learning of the need to stick to it. In fact, the lessons in Three Feet from Gold tie right back to my previous blogs on the Speed of Trust and Developing Self Trust. And that’s what has me excited right now.

When I see a convergence of ideas that build on and support each other, I think I’ve learned a real lesson. That’s what I’m taking away from my experience with The Speed of Trust presentation by Stephen M.R. Covey at Lethbridge College; exercises and teachings in The Quest: A Journey of Spiritual Rediscovery; and the wonderful stories in Three Feet from Gold.

The Reid and Lechter book shares the stories of real men and women who faced huge obstacles with grit and determination and pushed through them to find incredible success on the other side. People from the worlds of business, philanthropy, sports and publishing. People like James Amos, former chair and CEO of Mail Boxes Etc.; Genevieve Bos, who started Pink Magazine for professional women; Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A Inc.; Debbi Fields, of Mrs. Fields Cookies fame; Mark Victor Hansen; Evander Holyfield; and more.

Some names you’d recognize, some you would not. But in most cases you’d be familiar with the outcomes of their tales. Yes, they showed determination, but they also showed a huge degree of self trust.

Each goal they achieved along the way placed another stone of proof in their walls of self trust. They developed a deep-seated belief in who they were, what they were doing and in the knowledge that they could trust themselves to do what was needed.

Catch the Wave

Remember, self trust is the first point in Covey’s Five Waves of Trust. With that firmly in place, the ripples could flow out through the other four waves, Relationship Trust, Organizational Trust, Market Trust and Societal Trust. And those are waves you can ride to whatever success you seek. But it all starts with Self Trust.

Do you really, deep down inside, trust yourself? That trust is the key to your own success. Think about it. If that first wave rolls out to the second, Relationship Trust, you begin to enhance the base from which you can build. With a growing Relationship Trust, you start to see people in your life who can help you move forward.

What if R. U. Darby’s trust had extended out beyond his uncle and family members? Perhaps a stronger Relationship Trust could have led to contact with someone wise enough to help him understand gold mining a bit better and that massive vein could have been found by Darby instead of the junk dealer.

In my life I’m finally, at 53, beginning to develop the self trust that will take me from here to there . . . wherever I decide there to be. Developing it requires taking some baby steps to achieve small goals that confirm within my own consciousness that I can trust myself to get it done.

It also requires, as pointed out in Adventures on the Quest, an awareness of what I’m feeding the brain and a willingness to critically examine what’s going into it. Is it my truth or what someone else wants me to believe?

GIGO

Our perception of the world can be skewed to the negative by what we read and see. We can allow ourselves to absorb the world’s sewage or we can filter out what doesn’t truly feed us. My wife rarely reads or watches the news. Why? Too depressing!

Think about what gets media attention. Do you see a lot of good news and uplifting stories? As I write this blog entry, I’ve quickly skipped over to Yahoo.ca to see the current headlines. Here they are in the exact order as of this moment:

• Toronto high school locked down after shots fired inside
• Gay student secretly taped having sex kills self in N.J.
• T.O. MD faces 26 new charges of molesting sleeping patients
• Father weeps as he admits shooting infant son with shotgun
• Shootout on Toronto streets leaves two people dead
• '100 per cent' sure life exists on new planet: Astronomer
• Virgin offering deep discounts on flights to Toronto
• Stand-up comedian Greg Giraldo dies of overdose at 44
• Several bright UFOs sighted in skies over Montreal
• Paris Hilton and new beau in car accident in Hollywood

That’s 10 headlines. Read the first five again. How does it make you feel? Life seems cheapened, doesn’t it? Death. Suicide. Abuse. Murder. But the sixth headline offers hope: there’s somewhere else that might have life. Maybe we could move there, if Virgin’s deep discounts on flights would include the long haul through space. Of course, the UFOs over Montreal may provide a better deal if they have a seat sale!

GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. If this is all we feed our brains, can you see how our perception of the world could start to become excessively negative? Self trust requires proper care to bloom and grow. This type of raw sewage carries little of nutritional value. Be sure to use a good filtration system when allowing the world to enter.

Consider what is influencing you’re thinking. Through self examination it’s possible to begin enhancing self trust, allowing an individual to see that aspirations may truly be attainable after all. Perhaps the trust waves can carry us further and we won’t stop three feet from gold.

Personal Success Equation

It’s time to wrap up this three-part series on the converging elements that have impacted me during the last two weeks. About a week ago I posted the following on Facebook; Lesson for today: ((P+T) x A x A) + F = ??????

It puzzled some people. It helps summarize my thoughts on the whole self trust and success concept. I promised a solution and here it is from Three Feet From Gold.

((P+T) x A x A) + F = Your Success Equation

((Passion + Talent) x Association x Action) + Faith = Your Success Equation.

Passion and talent are fed by self trust. Multiple this by Association, which comes from the second wave – Relationship Trust – and Action, which also originates with self trust and is influenced by the resulting trust waves. Finally, add Faith. If you trust yourself and you trust individuals and organizations with which you associate, you can have the faith to forge ahead

Believe it and achieve it, my friends!

Next in 2010: Begin Again – On Sept. 12, I spoke at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Lethbridge. My talk was called The Gathering. It’s a call for a more open-minded approach to life, one that moves away from fundamentalism of all stripes, in order to save this planet. Warning: If you are a fundamentalist who believes your way is the only way, you may not like the next posting!