Champion A Noble Purpose

One of the major keys to personal success is choosing, finding, discovering or otherwise creating a noble cause or purpose that does not benefit you personally. Service to others is a prerequisite to your personal success. Your genuine concern for others, demonstrated by your giving of your time, talent and resources to a worthy endeavor, becomes a catalyst for moving you toward your own destiny.

As you invest the best of yourself in a noble purpose that has no visible strategic relationship to your personal or business goals, you are planting the seeds of your own business success. However, the motivation for your service to others must be pure: you must serve with no expectation of receiving anything in return—no award, reward, recognition, press coverage or opportunity to network with persons whom you believe could forward your personal agenda—not even your desire to hear a simple “Thank you.”

Your reward for championing a noble purpose is your willingness to serve others from a God mindset. Such a mindset seeks the best for others with no concern to gain a personal benefit. To serve from a God mindset is to choose to consider the welfare and interests of others over your own welfare and interests to such an extent that you can freely and happily give others your time and resources that you could profitably invest in service to your own agenda. Thus, serving from a God mindset is not being patronizing or condescending to others, but putting others on an equal footing with you. The energy you use to benefit others is at the same level of intensity as that which you use to benefit yourself.

You can only provide this free, no-strings-attached service to others when you realize that you are a child of God who has an unlimited supply of resources to bless others without the possibility of exhausting those resources in a manner that could possibly be detrimental to you.

Many people serve others for the wrong motives and, therefore, serve from a position of weakness. To serve others because you are compelled, either by job title, contract or forced, uncompensated servitude is to serve from a position of weakness. To serve others from a God mindset is to serve from a position of strength. Your service is not coerced, purchased or otherwise performed because you’re seeking an advantage, relationship, strategic alliance or other consideration that will inure to your personal benefit later on down the line.

Your God mindset service to others originates in and operates from a position of strength—your knowledge of who you are and Whose you are, as well as the inestimable value that your presence and personal involvement brings to others just because of your divine connectedness.

Because championing a noble purpose is directly related to your own personal destiny, you must choose it carefully. You may not be called to support a popular charity or heart-string-pulling charitable endeavor. It may be your lot to serve a noble cause that is not recognized as such by many. Indeed, the noble purpose you end up supporting may be one in which you have no passionate interest.

  

So, you must consider what your motives are when you choose a noble purpose to embrace and/or support. It is at this point that self-examination, criticism and self-criticism will bring you back to the Law of Iron Will.

You cannot know your true motives for doing a thing or choosing a particular path. But you can challenge yourself to examine your motives and seek guidance from above, as well as from others around you. This is true not only with respect to what motivates you to choose a worthy purpose to champion, but also applies to the choices you make in every other area of your life.

Decide What You Will Give For What You Want

When you decide to go into business for yourself, you decide that you want to actively control how much money you earn. Once you’ve made that decision, you must decide what you are willing to give in exchange for your desire to be your own boss.

There are only two commodities that you have to offer people: goods and services. In either case you must give something in order to receive the money you intend to earn. It should not surprise you that many people in business give the least of themselves in order to gain the most for themselves.

But the secret to success and its companion—wealth—is not giving the least, but giving the most. So, just what does giving the most mean? It means giving everything you have to the business you choose, regardless of the compensation you receive for your work.

This idea is a problem for business people who are not doing well in their chosen field, but it explains what separates the barely surviving from the abundantly thriving business person. The person who gives little only gets little in return, while the one who gives much receives much in return.

It is the Law of Reciprocity—what you give comes back to you in the same measure that you gave it except for one big thing. When you give the least in order to be compensated for the most, then you receive much less than you gave.

On the other hand, when you give more than what you expect to be compensated for, you receive back much more that is pressed down, shaken together and running over in abundance.

As you think about the goods and/or services that you will be offering people in the business you choose to engage in, remember that you must give the best of yourself to that business in order to succeed, grow and prosper.

The days of the mom and pop proprietary business are gone. Today any business you engage in must be pre-programmed to grow larger, develop people who can run it successfully, and provide you the opportunity to hand it off or sell it later at a significant profit. This means that you should choose the business you intend to own wisely, considering the future of its related industry and the potential growth possibilities it offers.

You should also consider what that business brings to the table to make people’s lives better. One of the greatest feelings you can have as a successful business person is to know that while you are making profits, the people you are serving through your business are benefitting from the goods or services that you are providing.

The Law of Concentration

The Law of Concentration makes you use your ability to imagine a situation, circumstance or reality that you have never experienced in the past. It is your gift for seeing the future, as well as your capacity to create what you have seen in your mind into a visible manifestation that others can see. Your endowments of imagination and creativity are proof that you have God’s DNA within you. It is also evidence that the Law of Concentration is immutable—it cannot change or be changed.

The Law of Concentration teaches you to focus the attention of your imagination in order to create your own future. Your destiny is determined by disciplining your thought life. Thus, disciplining your mind to concentrate on the definite goal or object that you wish to achieve is an urgent matter.

The Law of Concentration teaches that you must focus your mind on whatever your goal or object is until the circumstances that will manifest that goal or object are firmly in place and your goal or object has been realized. This means that you must place your desired goal or object into your unconscious by repeatedly holding the image of your goal or object in your mind, waking and sleeping. In addition, it means moving beyond just thinking about your goal or object and actually feeling what it would feel like to have already obtained your desired goal or object—i.e., you must emotionalize your goal or object to such an extent that you experience enjoying the feeling of having achieved your goal or object in the present moment.

Placing your desired goal or object into your unconscious mind and forming the habit of practicing this thought-life habitually are the two pillars upon which the Law of Concentration stands.

Your subconscious mind stores whatever you repeatedly think and practice. Then it acts silently and relentlessly to bring about the realization, in concrete form, of the object of your imagination. Thus, concentration is the habit of fixing in your mind the thoughts, desires and creations of your imagination and insisting on their reality. You can do this because of the DNA of God that is within you and because of the unchanging nature of the universal Law of Concentration.

You must believe that what you concentrate on will happen for you. This principle of calling things not yet in being as though they now already exist is content-neutral. It doesn’t matter what the object of your concentration is. For example, if you believe and keep concentrating on the idea that you are sick or inept or clumsy, then you will eventually get sick, be inept and become clumsy. If you believe and keep concentrating on the idea that you will fail in business, then you will fail in business. On the other hand, if you believe and concentrate on the idea that you are well, strong and able to succeed in business, then you will ultimately be well, strong, and you will succeed in business.

Regrouping and Relying: the 4th and 5th of 7 Spiritual Pillars

The secret to changing your mindset from accepting the way things are on other people’s terms, to taking full responsibility for your own life on your own terms, requires that you build 7 Spiritual Pillars, the fourth and fifth being the Regrouping Pillar and the Relying Pillar.

You build your Regrouping Pillar by being willing to change direction when circumstances demand it, even if you are close to the destination you started toward. Your Regrouping Pillar can only be built by your paying attention to your gut instincts—your intuition—that alerts you to your need to make a particular change in plans immediately.

Your ability to shift gears, regroup and move in a new direction is a gift from God that not only allows you to be flexible enough to change your plans when needed,  but also allows you to get up and keep going when life knocks you down. The Regrouping Pillar that you build is especially necessary when you suffer from accidents, illnesses, financial losses or the death of a loved one.

But, here’s the caveat: you cannot build your Regrouping Pillar if you have not already built your Renewing Pillar. When you build your Regrouping Pillar, you are acting in faith and demonstrating in practical and observable ways that you constantly renew your mind and daily trust God no matter what you face in life.

The fifth of the 7 Spiritual Pillars is the Relying Pillar. You build your Relying Pillar by persevering under trials and hardships, knowing that you can rely on God to empower you to get through anything.

This does not mean that whenever you are opposed, you will come out on top, but rather, that whatever happens to you, you will have the power to come through it. It is through your worst experiences that you learn to stop depending solely on your own strength, your own abilities, and your own instincts, but to fully rely on God.

So, you must build your Relying Pillar so that when times get tough and you can see no way out of the predicaments that comes to you, you will rely on the grace and mercy of God to empower you to stick it out until God discloses to your mind the path that is the way out for you.

The Renewing Pillar: The Third of 7 Spiritual Pillars

The secret to changing your mindset from accepting the way things are on other people’s terms, to taking full responsibility for your own life on your own terms, requires that you build 7 Spiritual Pillars, the third being the Renewing Pillar.

You build your personal Renewing Pillar by understanding that life moves and you must move with it. Whatever you thought yesterday may not be relevant, useful or otherwise appropriate for the issues that confront you today. You must constantly have a fresh, new mindset that refuses to think in stiff, staid and stupid mind-atrophying stereotypes. Rather, you are to be renewing your mind continually—opening it up to new ideas, new truths that God wants to impart to you, truths and ways of thinking, being and doing that only a daily, committed and vibrant walk with God can afford you.

You have to train your mind to think only of the good, the positive, the true, the beautiful and the beneficial and refuse to think of the negatives that, like weeds, attempt to surround, subdue and strangle your positive thought life.

You must add to your Bible study the reading of great literature that reflects your historic struggle to be free, as well as the cultural creations that your people produced as a result of their life struggles.

In other words, you must fill your free mind time with positive learning and thought material that will help you grow in a well-rounded way so that you can relate to your people by being informed about their positive interests. How better can you make disciples—recruit and train people for Jesus’ counter-hegemonic struggle to bring the kingdom of God to this earth—than by engaging your sisters and brothers in conversation about the issues, concerns, good ideas and mutual areas of interest that matter to them and you.

The Renewing Pillar is the most difficult of the 7 Spiritual Pillars because it requires constant struggle within your own mind to refuse to think about the negative thoughts that come to you. Your mind is constantly being assaulted by all kinds of thoughts—most of which are negative or otherwise of no use in moving you forward toward the goals you have set for yourself. Seek and accept the Holy Spirit’s help to win the battles raging in your mind.