Srey Rath, a confident, attractive Cambodian teenager was 15 when her family ran out of money. She offered to go to Thailand with four friends for two months to work as a dishwasher to help pay bills.

Once in Thailand, the job agent who had promised them a job in a restaurant handed them over to gangsters who drove them to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. There Rath was raped and beaten by her captors and forced to work as a prostitute. Because she still refused to cooperate, they drugged her regularly with a “happy pill”.

The girls worked fifteen hours day, seven days a week and were forbidden from asking customers to use a condom. They were kept naked and under constant guard so they could not run away or keep tips (having been told they had a ‘debt’ to pay off at which time they could go home). When they were not working, a dozen of them were locked in a tenth-floor apartment.

One night a group of them went out onto the balcony and pried loose a long wooden board about five inches wide. They balanced it between their balcony and another one on the next building twelve feet away. It wobbled precariously but four of them escaped while the others watched on too scared to risk falling to their death.

The girls ran to the local police station where they were arrested for illegal immigration. Rath served one year in prison (!) only for the Malaysian policeman escorting her home to sell her to another Thai brothel.

This story is featured in Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the only married couple to have both won Pulitzer Prizes for Journalism. It is a call to action for the millions of females who go missing every YEAR in places where girls have a deeply unequal status such as China, India, Pakistan and parts of Africa. Studies estimate that between 60-107 MILLION females are missing in the world that birth statistics indicate would be alive were they born male.

And it doesn’t make the news partly because it is not a single dramatic event. Remember the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989? Between 400-800 protesters were killed that day. Yet every year some 39,000 baby girls die in China because parents don’t give them the same medical care as boys. The numbers and stories are gruesome and incredibly difficult to comprehend. “Bride burning” in India – where a woman is punished for an inadequate dowry or because her husband wants to remarry – happens once every two hours. In the last nine years, an estimated five thousand women have been doused in kerosene and burned alive by family members for perceived disobedience in parts of Pakistan.

In wealthy countries discrimination means lower pay, underfunded sports teams and unwanted touching. Yet in under-developed countries, being female can be lethal. “More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all genocides of the twentieth century.” Read that again.

In the nineteenth century, slavery was the moral challenge. In the twentieth century it was the fight against totalitarianism. Kristof and WuDunn argue that the struggle for gender equality around the world is the moral battle of this century.

What happened to Srey Rath? Fortunately, she was not guarded as closely second time around. After two months she escaped back to Cambodia. A social worker connected her to the American Assistance to Cambodia program. They gave her $400 to buy a small cart and starter selection of goods to sell as a street peddler. Finally her good looks and outgoing nature worked in her favor and have helped her become an effective saleswoman. Now she is able to support her parents and two younger sisters. She is married with a son. Her cart has become two stalls and she has added a second business – charging people to use her cell phone.

This example of microfinance is one of the solutions endorsed by the authors and is one of many empowering stories of women who conquered mind-numbing abuse. Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has brought incredible recognition to microfinancing through his Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The other solution is education. Both have been endorsed by the UN and the World Bank as crucial in fighting global poverty. Why would half a country’s resources go untapped?

Actor George Clooney comments: “I think it’s impossible to stand by and do nothing after reading Half The Sky. It does what we need most: it bears witness to the sheer cruelty that mankind can do to mankind.” Kristof and WuDunn state that “Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.”

To read more about emancipating girls and fighting world poverty, visit www.womensenews.org. Donations for microfinancing can be made at www.globalgiving.org and www.kiva.org.

Author: Matt Anderson

www.TheReferralAuthority.com

“The overwhelming majority of the most successful people on earth rely on advice, support, encouragement, and forceful nudging from a few trusted people who help them when they stumble, falter, or waver.”

— Keith Ferrazzi, Who’s Got Your Back

Here’s the challenge: We are a culture of do-it-yourselfers. Most people think they can do everything on their own—especially once they think they know more-or-less how. They believe that it is weak to reach out for help and support and that this would make them no longer look good—which is a pretty deep-seated fear of ours!

I used to be one of those people. I worked alone, lived alone, and was 4,000 miles from my family. My favorite personal development book was Be Your Own Life Coach, my favorite health book was Treat Your Own Back (see a theme here?!) Even though my favorite business book was The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I somehow managed never to apply habit 6—synergize with others and be interdependent! I continued trying to do everything myself. And it kept me small. My only solution was to read more books and work harder. I love reading, but books are not enough.

What you do is all that matters. And none of us are islands. You must have a support team!

Napoleon Hill wrote about one solution in his 1937 classic, Think and Grow Rich. He devoted an entire chapter to the importance of the mastermind group and declared that nobody can “have great power” without it! Benefit from the experience, intelligence and insights of others. You cannot live long enough to figure everything out yourself. And such a group can help sustain your positive emotions.

In Keith Ferrazzi’s second book, Who’s Got Your Back, he writes about developing “lifeline relationships”—which he defines as a small team of individual advisors who give you feedback, coaching, accountability and support to make certain that you flourish.

These four things are what you need to become accomplished at getting high quality referrals on a consistent basis. This is why top performers (and athletes and performers) hire coaches.

Why would you want such a team of advisors?

1. To go from good to great!

Almost no one gets to the top without coaching. All the best professional athletes and performers work with coaches. You know this and expect it, although you don’t stop to ask why they do and you don’t! The problem is you don’t think you should get the same, partly because you are not on a multi-million dollar contract with a pro team or recording company. You make the assumption somehow that it’s just for “them”—the superstar super humans.

But wait! In 2008, Russ Alan Prince’s book The Middle Class Millionaire revealed that most of the people he studied with a net worth between $2-$15 million did the same thing! These are not well-known people—just people who have learned from the best. It’s time for you to do the same. They are individuals who did not balk at hiring business coaches and consultants to help them in areas that they needed help to go from good to great. These millionaires knew they were not experts at everything, and they realized they did not have the time to be experts at everything. No one does.

They also hired the best legal and accounting help. They hired the top advisors for financial and real estate consulting. Many hired personal trainers—not necessarily because they were out of shape, but for the four coaching benefits highlighted above.

So it’s not just the knowledge! It’s finding people who will hold you accountable and point out your blind spots so that you can live a bigger life and fulfill your potential.

1. Your advisors will help you create your own definition of success and will help you develop a plan to get there.
2. The team will help you figure out what you need to STOP doing to get there.
3. It will provide ongoing support to sustain change (and keep you OUT of your comfort zone).

How do you make these relationships work for you? The four reasons to pursue these relationships are so you end up reaching your goals—whether that’s getting more referrals or something else:

1. 1. Support

You need people cheering you on—especially those who have no ulterior motive but to see you succeed. Nothing can be more detrimental than key people in your life doubting you at every turn. Reach out to others and ask for more help!

To be effectively supported, Ferrazzi believes that “the secret ingredient to establish genuine lifeline relationships is vulnerability.” When you disclose what’s really important and talk about your challenges, people can relate to you better—it is likely they have been there too!

1. 2. A personal trainer for your business life

Even when we are doing well enough, it never hurts to have someone push us further knowing that we are capable of much more. It’s quite funny: there are many trainers at my gym, and most chit chat with their clients and explain exercises and count reps. Then there is one guy who really pushes his clients and gives them a hard time for not giving 100%. He actually gets in their face—although when he steps away has a smile on his face knowing it’s part of the game. If I were to hire another trainer for myself, it would be a simple choice. He would get me to do my best.

1. 3. Feedback and coaching

One of your problems is you have blind spots that you will likely never see. A good “advisor” will point out you these things whether you want to hear them or not. So it is not easy to find such people who will level with you. It’s why you want your team to be people who can direct you where you want to go because they either have expertise in that area or can ask you the right questions and get enough leverage on yourself to take action.

Talking about your fears and obstacles is helpful so you become self-aware enough to do something differently. Committing to future action and to goals is the public declaration that I wrote about in the last chapter. It makes us more obligated to follow through.

Jugular dialogue: it’s a time to talk about what matters most.

Jugular questions: What would do if you knew you couldn’t fail?

1. 4. Accountability

This helps you set higher goals and stretch your ideas of what’s achievable. It’s one reason why coaching works well. Is your non-coach partner tough enough to follow through consistently with this? Many people are not. Often peers get too close and no longer challenge each other. You will want to frequently remind each other that candid feedback is required.

There are advantages to hiring a coach because they’ve worked with many others in the same situation—that’s their expertise. It’s what they do every day. When it comes to referrals, if I am your coach, I know which direction to go.

There are advantages to having a peer-to-peer advisor: powerful emotional encouragement because your relationship has more depth.

Or have both! Have a coach for one area and a peer for another. Your team can help you put leverage on yourself to behave your way to what you want.

Who makes a good team advisor?

Besides a coach with a proven track record, think about those people you know who already read business books or invest in attending seminars. This means they already recognize the value of personal and professional development. Perhaps they are regulars in your trade or professional association. In your company it could be your manager or a top performer. Either way they are people who clearly want more from life and are willing to do something about it.

Your biggest challenge.

How you see the world is what determines the actions you take in every area of your life. Any self-respecting personal development book will tell you this. Stephen Covey calls them paradigms. Zaffron and Logan’s first law of performance is: “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.” Wayne Dyer explains that when you change the way you look at the world, the world you look at changes.

In other words, If you believe that getting referrals will always be tough for you, guess what—it will be! On the other hand, if you believe getting referrals is something you can do effectively from now on, you get results from this book.

Warning! Finding the right people for your advisor team is not easy! But, as you already know, neither is getting more referrals and reaching your dreams. Pretty much everyone can be bigger in life by finding the courage, guidance, support, and accountability that’s often missing. Seek these people out and reap the rewards. I would be happy to be the referral coach for you.

Thank you for reading this.

Please forward it to others.

Matt Anderson

www.TheReferralAuthority.com

Here’s some wisdom from The New Psycho-Cybernetics program by Maxwell Maltz and Dan Kennedy.

Before you say to yourself, ‘I don’t have time to do all this!’ think again. That is no different than owning a car and not refueling, changing the oil, and rotating the tires. You need to take care of yourself too. It’s like cutting down trees non-stop and saying you are too busy ever to sharpen the saw. Or an actress saying she doesn’t have time to learn lines because she needs to perform.

You will be more effective because you renewed yourself:

1. Mental movies: spend 10-15 minutes visualizing what you most want to have happen in your life. The more precise the detail and senses are, the better. Make sure you feel good during this time. Ideally do this at the same time each day. Before bed and first thing in the morning are the best times because apparently this is when our brain is closer to a dream like state and is more susceptible to being rewired.

Our subconscious brain and self-image cannot tell the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined one. Read this again!!

What I love about visualizing is that over time your brain will not allow you to be the way you were. The old you will be so incongruent with where you are going, that your brain will not let you take no action.

You have total control over what you can imagine. Watch yourself achieve on this big screen. It’s fun!

2. Mental rehearsal: take time each day to rehearse important meetings and conversations so that when you do have them, it feels like you have already experienced the positive outcome.

3. Review your goals. Why would you not want these top of mind?

4. Positive affirmations and visual cues. I most like the empowering beliefs suggested in John Assaraf’s The Answer. I find the best time to do this is as you are coming out of your meditative state when you visualize. Your brain is still in that positive receptive mode.

5. Goal directed actions. Prioritizing your actions based on the great question: How does doing this move me toward my goal?

6. Corrective actions. You are going to make mistakes. It is better to be prolific than to be perfect. Fear of making a mistake and fear of being criticized holds many people back – more so than we realize. It’s hard for most adults to be seen to do something badly first. We must accept that if we’re not making mistakes, we are not growing and learning and moving toward more success.

7. Assertive communication. Deal proactively with problems you have and stand up for yourself. What is emotionally weighing on you? List out the things you are procrastinating on and start checking them off your list. Brian Tracy wrote a time management book called Eat That Frog where the frog is the thing you need to get off your plate first so you can focus best on your day – and if you don’t, it will preoccupy your thoughts all day.

8. Relaxation. Funnily, this is the one that most people IGNORE and brush off as peripheral. BIG MISTAKE. Achieving PEAK performance means being physically and mentally up for the task. If you are fatigued, your motivation drops quickly.

TAKE BREAKS! Stretch. Laugh. Let your mind wander.

9. Recognition. Take the time to acknowledge yourself. Many people will not pat you on the back. You must be your number one fan. This might include an end of the day ritual where you list five things to be grateful for, three people who did something nice for you and three positive things you did that moved you towards your goals.

10. Organize the day ahead. One of the best time management strategies is to identify the top six things you want to prioritize (in all areas of your life) and make sure they get the lion’s share of your time. Doing it the night before can give your brain more clarity.

Thanks for reading this. Please share it with others. Who wouldn’t want to implement these?

How to Change Your Beliefs

What is your main obstacle to the success you desire?

What gets in your way is a belief that you have about an important area of your life. Subconsciously you don’t really think you can accomplish it. You may even have a great goal set around this area yet you continue to fall far short.

Your mind is your biggest obstacle to getting what you want. Thanks to an excellent new book by John Assaraf and Murray Smith called The Answer, there is now a clear path that shows us how to get over this enormous hurdle. It even explains why our brain works the way it does. You no longer need to feel badly because you have fallen into the same traps almost everyone else has.

Energy and the power of your thoughts.

Thoughts create the physical world – your world. Everything starts as an idea (ex. everything you see out of the window was once nothing more than someone’s idea for a building, road, landscape, business, or school)

“Everything in the physical world is made out of atoms.

Atoms are made out of energy.

And energy is made out of consciousness.”

In his book, The Biology of Belief, former University of Wisconsin cell biologist Bruce Lipton notes that each of us is “a bustling community of more than fifty trillion cells” that is profoundly impacted by our beliefs. “When we truly recognize that our beliefs are that powerful, we hold the key to freedom…it is not our genes but our beliefs that control our lives.” Lipton explains that the universe is made out of energy. The more atoms are studied, the more they seem to disappear from sight and become small packets of energy.

Your thoughts create not only matter; they create whatever level of business you have right now. This is the world of quantum physics. It is the unseen world that is far more powerful than the world that we see and that hits our senses every day. What happens in your business STARTS in the unseen world – with the ideas and thoughts in your nonconscious mind.

Those thoughts, founded in how positively you feel and ‘vibrate’ around them, allow them to magnetize into your life more of what you want. You start to become the person you’ve always wanted to be. But you have to do it deliberately otherwise your brain will default back to what it has always done for you – which is bring to you what you have right now.

The Three Laws

1. Be clear about what you want – the Law of Attraction cannot be a magnet for you if you are vague about WHERE you are going.

Here’s the exciting news according to Assaraf and Smith: “Once you have seen that vision in your imagination, you have all the faculties you need to bring that vision into physical reality, using the very same processes that turn an acorn into an oak tree.” This explains why you don’t spend time as a tone-deaf adult fantasizing about being an opera singer! Your mind knows this is not POSSIBLE.

Deciding what you really want is not easy – especially in an age where there is so much choice. But think about it this way. If your brain is an archer pointing a bow and the target is fuzzy and hard to see, it is likely that the harder it strains, the more targets seem to appear. Under these circumstances, what kind of results can you expect?

I think one of the challenges most people face is that they do not like to think hard and think deeply – especially about a topic that forces us to concede and confront pain. It takes work and requires self-discipline – and time! It is easy to put off. Yet who are we fooling to assume the solution is a quick fix?

Also, what we want is clouded sometimes by not having made peace with our past – with pain and rejection that we have attached to past experiences. When negative emotions are stirred up by associations of the past, it is hard to gain clarity about the future and believe great things are possible. We are more likely to repeat past mistakes.

1. Be patient – the Law of Gestation means that you can’t keep digging up the roots every five minutes to see if the flowers in your new garden of empowering beliefs are taking bloom. Nature has a season for everything. Yours will come.

1. Be in action – the Law of Action requires that you do as much as necessary to fulfill your dreams. You can’t sit around all day ‘hoping’ your thoughts will magically cause everything to fall on your lap.

The message of this book isn’t so spiritual that it ignores that we are responsible for creating our lives and that involves DOING something.

Why Your Beliefs Are Your #1 Obstacle:

Meet Your Remarkable Brain

98% of what we now know about the brain has been learned in the last DECADE! Your brain has about 100,000 miles of blood vessels and 100 billion neurons with the capacity to perform some ten quadrillion operations per second. Writing out all the possible neural connections your brain is capable of would take you seventy-five YEARS.

In other words, your potential is unlimited.

It has two basic divisions: the conscious brain and the nonconscious brain.

The bad news: we think our conscious brain controls what we do and that if we have an idea, we act on it. Regrettably, this is rare. Our conscious brain impacts between 2 and 4 percent of what we do. The average person loses focus every six to ten seconds! Mostly we live on automatic pilot (if you’re not sure what I mean, think about driving a car. You only think consciously about this when you first learn. After that, you drive, talk on the phone, listen to audio, chat with passengers, eat food, drink coffee etc and pay little attention to consciously driving!)

The good news: your nonconscious brain can track everything nonstop and it never loses focus. This is what needs to be impacted and where the beliefs must be changed.

Why Most People Do Not Reach Their Goals

A desire in your conscious brain – simply wanting something – is not enough. Why? Because if habitual thought does not believe that you deserve it, that habitual thought is 1,000 times stronger than a desire! 1,000 times! Those habits are the repeated thoughts that have created unhelpful neural pathways in your brain. According to the authors, the average seventeen year-old has heard “no, you can’t” thirty times more often in their life than “yes, you can.” “That makes for a powerful belief of “I can’t”.”

This is why so many people set big financial goals and get frustrated so quickly. Their brain has been conditioned to believe something unhelpful (such as: rich people are corrupt; it is more honorable to be poor; there’s only just enough money to cover expenses – beyond that it’s greedy) and will not let it happen.

The fruit matches the seed and the seed is the unhelpful belief.

96-98% of your behaviors are automatic because the nonconscious mind dominates your thinking. This explains why we usually do NOT act on the ideas we have. The seed needs watering and our nonconscious, unhelpful beliefs will come in unbeknownst to us and starve it.

What are beliefs?

Sure – they are opinions and attitudes but really they are “nothing more than the specific neural patterns in your brain, thoughts that are so ingrained they have become automatic. They are not there because they are ‘the truth’.”

For example, when it comes to asking for referrals, many people ‘believe’ that they are being pushy by asking or that it makes them look needy if they are asking. Provided your client recognizes that you have brought value and you ask in way that is about your client helping others (rather than about you growing your business which they don’t care about), I think this belief is completely ridiculous. If you bring value, why would you starve the world of your contribution? That’s your nonconscious brain being unhelpful.

Your beliefs create your reality – that’s great if you have what you want, but it is rotten if your beliefs are not doing that for you. And, unfortunately, most of your thoughts are unconscious ones – habitual thoughts that are mostly negative and unhelpful.

However, high achievers think differently and have mostly empowering thoughts that encourage them towards what they want.

How do you figure out your current beliefs?

It’s much easier than you may think: look around you! Look at your current situation! How is your health? Your relationships with loved ones? Your financial situation? Where you live? That is what you have attracted and what you presently believe you deserve. This may well be a tough pill to swallow. I know the first time I heard this idea, I was outraged at its stupidity! That was 12 years ago. And this is why I am so excited about this book – it finally presents some solutions that are practical and fully explained.

What else but your ways of thinking could have gotten you to exactly where you are right now?

What are your choices at this point? You can either blame, justify or complain about your results OR you can take full responsibility and create the life you want. It’s not easy. And it starts with planting new seeds of thought in your head and watering them.

How do you change your beliefs so you get what you really want?

There are three components:

1. Fulfill the “Five Musts”
2. Consciously choose the thoughts you want as beliefs (so know exactly what you want)
3. Systematically impress them on your nonconscious brain (The 6 Steps of Neural Reconditioning)

You must rewire your brain and train it to think the same thoughts as those people you aspire to be like and the person you intend to become. You can’t just do what they do; you need to think as they do too. Why? Because your nonconscious brain determines almost all of your thoughts and thoughts determine your feelings. It is your feelings that determine your actions and only your actions can determine your results!

Good news! “No matter what your age, your brain is perfectly capable of creating entirely new neural pathways.”

“The Five Musts:

a)    You must find something that stirs your soul

b)    You must become excellent at it

c)    You must recondition your mind to believe you can have it and achieve it

d)    You must understand how to make money at it

e)    You must take daily action”

The 6 Steps of Neural Reconditioning

Step 1: Create a New Vision

You must be crystal clear about what you want from your life. Your nonconscious brain cannot tell the difference between real and imagined events. How strongly you imprint these pictures is the key so repetition and impact matter most. The emotional power you put into your thoughts makes all the difference. It is why you remember where you were on September 11, 2001 and not on September 11, 2005.

Step 2: Create Powerful Affirmations

These state how you want to live in your ideal life. Often they are in stark contrast to what your current beliefs are or they may focus on areas you are some distance from achieving. Examples might include:

I am a brilliant and savvy business professional.

I have absolute certainty in my ability to generate any amount of income I choose.

I live each day with passion and purpose.

(Note: Some people have criticized the value of affirmations as something your brain does not buy into. This is why there are six steps and not one! Please put your cynicism aside. The results are worth any feelings of awkwardness.)

Step 3: Create Emotional Anchors for Neural Linking

Identify a powerfully positive emotional event from your past. Perhaps it was the time you were most confident in your life. Or one where you accomplished something exciting that filled you with tremendous pride. When was it? It’s a fun one to think through.

Write down all the feelings that experience evokes. While focusing hard on how supreme you felt at that time, start feeding in one of your affirmations. This process is what helps to bind the neural pathway you need. Because it is a strong emotion, “protein is released along with neurotransmitters as the neurons fire across the synaptic gap.” Every time you do it, more proteins are released. This is how you develop new empowering beliefs.

Step 4: Prepare Your Neural Imprinting Material

This means writing out your affirmations, creating a vision board of what you want, recording your voice reading the statements and using subliminal media. These hit the sense in various ways and speed up the time in which you can achieve what you want.

Step 5: Your Neural Reconditioning Routine

Assaraf and Smith recommend doing these at the same times each day – preferably three times each day. Apparently our nonconscious is most easily accessed when we first awake and before we go to sleep.

There are three parts to this:

a)    Meditation: doing this first helps your brain to focus on what you want. While it has many widely-researched benefits (I was surprised how many), the authors focus on how meditation trains us to use more productive brain waves. This matters because it means we can reach our goals more easily.

b)    Visualization: fill your mind with visual images of what you want. Picture the same images each time and if possible embellish them with the senses. The bottom line is to enhance your pictures with feelings because your feelings determine your actions. Do this for a few minutes after your meditation.

c)    Affirmation: Then read through your new beliefs – aloud if you want and in the mirror for greater effect. This will probably feel uncomfortable at first. Persist.

Step 6: Using Neurotechnology

You can now play subliminal audio recordings of your own voice and listen to them any time reading your affirmations. It all helps reinforce your nonconscious brain.

Warning: Be ready for your brain to resist change. Your unhelpful beliefs are not going to be substituted without a fight. Remember your habitual thoughts are 1,000 times stronger at first. Even when your status quo is mediocrity and mild depression, your brain will still fight to keep you in this so-called comfort zone.

ABOVE ALL: DO THESE STEPS DAILY. “It is not a huge task; in fact, it is almost ridiculously easy to do. It’s just that most people don’t do it. But you will – and that will make all the difference.”

Think BIG

Lastly, Assaraf and Smith advise that you do not set easy-to-reach goals. On the contrary, they argue that “all truly successful businesspeople have a certain special ingredient in common” and that is THINKING BIG.

See the BIG picture, be driven by passion, stay focused and take action.

Also, big thinkers reach out for help – the kind they don’t know they need!

Read that again. Almost all business owners know they need some help: to delegate, to market effectively, with IT and accounting etc. But the research in Russ Alan Prince’s The Middle Class Millionaire shows that only the highest achievers also get other help: they have mentors or work with coaches or are in mastermind groups. WHY?

It reduces your learning curve.

They provide resources you don’t know about.

They see things about you that you can’t see yourself.

They provide unbiased and unconditional support.

They can push you harder than you might push yourself.

The best thing you can do first is buy this book so you can fully understand the impact of making these changes and instill a daily habit of rewiring your brain. The power of changing your beliefs has been written about for decades. Now the scientific proof is overwhelming. Now it is your turn. What are you waiting for? As the authors conclude in the book: “How will you spend your life?”

Matt Anderson

Matt@TheReferralAuthority.com